Gary Levvis

This is a critique of the principal claims made within Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It traces the development of his thought from the time he dictated the pre-Tractarian "Notes on Logic" to Russell up until about 1932 when he began work on the Philosophical Grammar. The influence exercised upon him by Frege, Russell and Moore are considered at length. ;It is maintained that the central thesis of the Tractatus is correct, viz., that no purely truth-functional semantic theory for ordinary language is possible. This does not mean that ordinary language is logically degenerate, as Tarski and others have maintained. Rather, it means that any truth-functional semantics must acknowledge a distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. Because a doctrine of showing is unavoidable, even a truth-functional semantics must be committed to the thesis that linguistic tokens are the locus of meaning and sense. This fact undermines semantic Platonism. ;It is argued that the Tractatus incorporates an inadequate account of necessity and necessary truth, and that this is that work's central most flaw. This flaw undermines, among other things, the Tractarian account of the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions

This paper pertains to the alleged euthanising of a 3-month-old infant at Sweden's Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital in September 2008 and the subsequent effects upon the doctor who was charged with, but eventually acquitted of, violating Sweden's anti-euthanasia law. Lynøe and Leijonhufvud1 contend that particular modifications should be made to the existing Swedish regulatory regime in order to secure what they refer to as ‘physician safety’—that is, protection against unnecessary lawsuits that may well endanger a doctor's reputation and career. Undoubtedly, many things went wrong at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital. As the authors acknowledge, there occurred the initial botched delivery, the overdose of sodium chloride as well as the unrecorded administration of a toxic level of thiopental to the patient either by the defendant or by another doctor. The only thing the authors regard as unproblematic within this series of events is the determination by the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare that the doctor-defendant's behaviour ‘accords with good clinical practice’ that serves as the principal assumption upon which they contend that the system, rather than the doctors’ behaviour, is to be faulted.It would be easier to sympathise with the authors’ position had they explained more fully the basis of the Swedish Board's determination. …

Drawing deeply from Wittgenstein's later works, Thomas Morawetz has articulated a vision of legal decision making according to which it is not a defect, but inherent in the very nature of law, for there to be disagreement among judges regarding their legal decision‐making strategies. Central to Morawetz's account is the notion of a legal grammatical proposition. This essay argues that because legal grammatical remarks lack any truth‐value, they cannot play a justificatory role. This would imply that the rule of law is no more justifiable than the violent alternatives used by anarchists and religious fanatics.