Michael Potter

Wittgenstein's philosophical career began in 1911 when he went to Cambridge to work with Russell. He compiled the Notes on Logic two years later as a kind of summary of the work he had done so far. Russell thought that they were ‘as good as anything that has ever been done in logic’, but he had Wittgenstein himself to explain them to him. Without the benefit of Wittgenstein's explanations, most later scholars have preferred to treat the Notes solely as an interpretative aid in understanding the Tractatus (which draws on them for material), rather than as a philosophical work in their own right. This book demonstrates the philosophical and historical importance of the Notes. By teasing out the meaning of key passages, it shows how many of the most important insights in the Tractatus they contain. It discusses in detail how Wittgenstein arrived at these insights by thinking through ideas he obtained from Russell and Frege. And it uses a blend of biography and philosophy to illuminate the methods Wittgenstein used in his work. The book features the complete text of the Notes in a critical edition, with a detailed discussion of the circumstances in which they were compiled.

This book is a critical examination of the astonishing progress made in the philosophical study of the properties of the natural numbers from the 1880s to the 1930s. It reassesses the brilliant innovations of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others, which transformed philosophy as well as the understanding of mathematics. The book argues that through the problem of arithmetic participates in the larger puzzle of the relationship between thought, language, experience, and the world, we can distinguish accounts that look to each of these to supply the content we require: those that involve the structure of our experience of the world; those that explicitly involve our grasp of a ‘third realm’ of abstract objects distinct from the concrete objects of the empirical world and the ideas of the author's private Gedankenwelt; those that appeal to something non-physical that is nevertheless an aspect of reality in harmony with which the physical aspect of the world is configured; and finally those that involve only our grasp of language.

On the face of it the structure of the Tractatus has realism baked in. The book starts out from a world of facts, and then proceeds to argue in stages so as to arrive at a single form that any proposition representing how things stand in the world must have. It is only when we examine the details of this argument that this straightforwardly deductive argumentative structure begins to fall apart. When correctly understood, I suggest, Wittgenstein's stance is much more nuanced and less easy to categorize.

In this book, Michael Potter offers a fresh and compelling portrait of the birth and first several decades of analytic philosophy, one of the most important periods in philosophy’s long history. He focuses on the period between the publication of Gottlob Frege’s _Begriffsschrift _in 1879 and Frank Ramsey’s death in 1930. Potter--one of the most influential writers on late 19 th and early 20 th century philosophy--presents a deep but accessible account of the break with Absolute Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, specifically, and more generally with many of the metaphysical preoccupations of philosophy’s preceding history. Potter’s focus is on philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics, but he also relies heavily on important issues in metaphysics and meta-ethics to complete his story. The book provides an essential starting point for any student or philosopher attempting to understand Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey as well as their interactions and their intellectual milieux. It will also be of interest to a great many philosophers today who want to illuminate the problems they work on by better knowing their origins. KEY FEATURES: 1. Discusses the interconnections of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein—founding thinkers in the history of analytic philosophy—and also brings the neglected Frank Ramsey into this conversation, providing a unique focus and depth to an introductory text 2. Increases the general awareness of the importance of the history of analytic philosophy for today’s non-historical debates, giving the book appeal in all areas of analytic philosophy 3. Written by one of the most influential philosophers of logic and writers in the history of analytic philosophy 4. Written for upper-level undergraduates, guaranteeing widespread accessibility 5. Includes coverage of topics and issues neglected in competing publications, including Russell’s _Principles_, solipsism in the _Tractatus_, and the contributions of Frank Ramsey 6. Emphasizes the chronological development of authors’ views so as to provide a better understanding of their motivation.

[Michael Potter] If arithmetic is not analytic in Kant's sense, what is its subject matter? Answers to this question can be classified into four sorts according as they posit logic, experience, thought or the world as the source, but in each case we need to appeal to some further process if we are to generate a structure rich enough to represent arithmetic as standardly practised. I speculate that this further process is our reflection on the subject matter already obtained. This suggestion seems problematic, however, since it seems to rest on a confusion between the empirical and the metaphysical self. /// [Bob Hale] Michael Potter considers several versions of the view that the truths of arithmetic are analytic and finds difficulties with all of them. There is, I think, no gainsaying his claim that arithmetic cannot be analytic in Kant's sense. However, his pessimistic assessment of the view that what is now widely called Hume's principle can serve as an analytic foundation for arithmetic seems to me unjustified. I consider and offer some answers to the objections he brings against it.

In Begriffsschrift Frege proposed to ignore the part of content that is irrelevant to logic; what remains he called “conceptual content”. In “On Sense and Reference” he renamed this “sense” but failed to stress that it is a notion belonging to the philosophy of logic, not of language. Russell seems to have seen the importance of the notion only briefly. Wittgenstein did not make use of the notion until he was in Norway, and only introduced the terminology of “sign” and “symbol” to mark the distinction while composing the Tractatus. Ramsey proposed to treat sign and symbol as merely two different ways of typing token inscriptions, but this unduly brushes over the difficulties the notion of a symbol involves. The most striking feature of Wittgenstein’s thinking on this is the way that he generalized Frege’s argument for the notion of sense so as to bypass his incorrect particularization to the case of identity.

The early draft of the _Tractatus_ known as the _Prototractatus_ resides in a large hardback notebook which Brian McGuinness, in his discussion of its genesis, has dubbed _Bodleianus_. Its publication in 1971 enabled us to examine much more closely the process by which Wittgenstein composed the _Tractatus._ But when did he write it? This chapter reassesses the available evidence in an attempt to narrow down the possibilities as far as possible. In particular, the chapter discusses work of Geschkowski, Bazzocchi, and Kang that questions some of McGuinness's conclusions about the timing of the composition of the _Prototractatus_. Conjectures are offered about Wittgenstein's working methods, and it is suggested that these were more orderly and steadily paced than has previously been thought.