Daniel Simons

In this paper, I order the thinking of Friedrich Waismann, Gordon Baker, and Rupert Read into what I call the Freedom View (FV). I justify this labelling by demonstrating their inter-influence and evolving articulation of a shared framework that conceives the problems, aims, and method of (Wittgenstein’s) philosophy to be defined by freedom. The Freedom View is one of the most consequential, yet frequently misunderstood, explications of the therapeutic aspects of Wittgenstein’s later work. This interpretative labour enables an informed assessment of the merit of such a view. While the FV offers a coherent and provocative reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, I argue, drawing on Heidegger’s criticisms of Kant’s conception of orientation, that it ultimately fails to capture the sense of ordinary orientation invoked by Wittgenstein in §123: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’”. As such, the FV is partial and incomplete, unable to recognise a significant dimension to Wittgenstein’s thought.

Paul Ricœur describes two ‘ruinous alternatives’ often reached interpreting translation philosophically: either translation is taken as a mechanical process, and there is a theoretical search for a logically universal language in which all words can be at home, or the diversity of languages and natural limits of translation motivate scepticism regarding the possibility of translation. This paper shows how these alternatives, as represented by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Quine’s ‘radical translation’, tend to collapse into and “translate each other” (Derrida 57) due to a shared intellectual standpoint which theorises our human limits (the finitude of translation) as limitations (fatal or sceptical flaws). I demonstrate how Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and its vision of language respond to these philosophical theorisations of translation by accepting the human limits to translation and reclaiming and returning us to our ordinary practice of translation.

This article grows out of the conviction that (some) films can philosophise. It looks to juxtapose the film Dogtooth and Wittgenstein's builders' example, such that they are seen as philosophising in similar ways over similar issues. Both strike me as probing the possibility—or denial—of a future with language. Using Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees' responses to Wittgenstein's builders, I register the significance and meaning of themes from the film and Wittgenstein's work in a mutually enlightening way: language, games and breaking free. This results in two different pictures of our hope of a future in and with language.

This paper investigates the nature of, and distinctions between, ‘ordinary’ and ‘sceptical’ doubts regarding our knowledge of the external world, and their relationship to such doubts regarding our knowledge of other minds. It introduces a framework for distinguishing these doubts within the context of external world scepticism and evaluates its applicability, often just assumed, to the problem of other minds. This evaluation is achieved by contrasting the views of Marie McGinn and Stanley Cavell, and their interpretations of Wittgenstein's notion of an attitude, which are shown to hinge on this question. It concludes, via a distinction in the staging of each scepticism, that we can't straightforwardly import the framework of doubts from external world scepticism to the problem of other minds. This undermines McGinn's response to the problem and explains some commonly misunderstood insights of Cavell's work.