Andrew Peach

Laughing cattle, people who feel pain in other people's bodies, and tribes of men who do not dream: this is the world of Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, as prominent as such scenarios are in Wittgenstein's philosophy, surprisingly little has been written about their purpose or their development over the course of his career. This dissertation attempts to remedy this deficiency. ;Though such scenarios appear as early as his Notebooks 1914--1916 , they do not rise to prominence until his Philosophical Remarks, completed in 1930. In the latter work, their purpose is to isolate what is essential to a problematic concept; imaginative scenarios place that concept in a novel environment, one that allows the philosopher to strip away or sift out what is inessential to it. ;However, at least by the time of The Blue Book, dictated in 1933--4, Wittgenstein's imaginative scenarios took on a much more negative function, one that they would serve throughout the remainder of his career, viz. to act as an "antidote" to sicknesses of the understanding. ;Imaginative scenarios provide relief from philosophical ailments in the following ways, all of which are examined in this dissertation. They supply a context for problematic expressions that are often used without a context; break the spell that one particular use of a word may have over a philosopher; heighten our sense of the queerness of a philosophical expression; differentiate experiential propositions from grammatical rules ; act as counterexamples to philosophical claims; isolate the "scaffolding of facts" that underlie a given language-game but have been forgotten or overlooked; undermine foundationalist tendencies; and reveal the anthropocentric and self-contained character of our language-games. ;The dissertation concludes with some reflections on the question whether Wittgenstein's use of these devices depends upon any ontological presuppositions. It is argued that, throughout his writing, Wittgenstein tried to maintain what he believed to be the most ontologically neutral position possible in regard to them. Such scenarios make sense---they are legitimate moves within our language-games---and that is all that is necessary for them to be part of his philosophical therapy

The imaginary scenarios that appear in nearly every work of the later Wittgenstein – ones involving laughing cattle, disembodied eyes that see, and the like – are decidedly absent from the Tractatus. What necessitated this change in methodology? A comparison of the Tractatus with the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein's first major work after his return to philosophy, reveals that these devices are the product of something old and something new. The rationale for these devices is already present in the notion of a “propositional variable,” but Wittgenstein had little use for them until he rejected the phenomenological language and laconic style of the Tractatus

In his A Defense of Abortion David Boonin largely misreads one of the oldest and most defensible arguments against abortion, the argument based on the fetus’s rational nature. In this paper it will be shown that Boonin’s characterization of this argument isinaccurate, that his criticisms of it are therefore ineffective, and that his own criterion—the possession of a “present, dispositional, ideal desire for a future like ours”—is insufficient to ground a human being’s right to life. Boonin’s misread of this classic argument is largelythe result of his focus upon the “properties,” as opposed to the nature, of a fetus and his failure to consider the notion of a rational nature as ordered to rational activities. In addition, his argument for abortion rights fails on its own terms because it ultimately licensesinfanticide. Infants have desires and they possess a future like ours, but they do not have any desire for a future like ours.

In contrast to recent trends that depict the later Wittgenstein’s work as wholly therapeutic in nature, this essay argues that the famous wood sellers scenario of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is evidence of the later Wittgenstein’s linguistic naturalism and relativism. This scenario, like many others, is intended to show the naturalistic and arbitrary character of our own concepts, as well as the possibility of different forms of life with different concepts. David R. Cerbone’s more therapeutic take on these passages, that the purpose of the wood sellers is to demonstrate the impossibility of logically alien practices, is then addressed. It is shown that such a read is incompatible with numerous passages in Wittgenstein’s writings, overlooks the nexus of remarks within which this scenario appears, and ignores much of what Wittgenstein actually states about the wood sellers.

Recently, a number of commentators on the early Wittgenstein have tried to make the Tractatus more palatable than it actually is; they have blurred the lines between exegesis and philosophical defense. As a corrective to this tendency, this paper attempts to retrieve the early Wittgenstein's true understanding of the ontology of possibility. Focusing upon the two kinds of metaphors he uses in the Tractatus, object-based and space ones, the first part of this paper emphasizes the philosophical problems that motivated his ontology of possibility, especially the "Parmenidean" question of how false propositions make contact with reality. The second part addresses two novel interpretations of the early Wittgenstein's views of ontology and possibility—the non-ontological reading of McGuinness, Ishiguro and the "New" Wittgensteinians, and Raymond Bradley's "third degree possibilist" reading—and shows why they are exegetically unsound