Nana Last

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.

This thesis explores the deep spatio-linguistic relationship between the Austrian born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's practices of philosophy and of architecture. Wittgenstein's philosophy of language is notable for its sharply distinguished early and late work: with the early work most strongly associated with his Tractatus Logko-Philosophicus and the later frequently designated by his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations . Following the completion of the early work Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy for a period of ten years, spending the years from 1926 to 1929 engaged in the design and construction of a house in Vienna for his sister Margarethe Stonborough. The thesis considers the ways in which the intervening practice of architecture infiltrated, altered, influenced and manifested itself in the later philosophy by focusing on the spatial, temporal, conceptual and cognitive gaps in the philosophy. ;The importance and the prevalence of the practice of architecture for Wittgenstein's later philosophy are exhibited in a variety of ways that together broaden, reconceive and resituate the functioning of language and philosophy. The thesis considers these developments in the philosophy as they are revealed in the visual and spatial language, thinking and construction of the philosophical texts. This analysis reveals a shift from the removed, idealized and flattened picture theory of the Tractatus to the production of the spatially complex and ambiguous images of entanglement in the Investigations . The Stonborough house, itself, is analyzed through its production of cognitive and spatial practices and problematics. Wittgenstein's practice of architecture is shown to utilize, develop, challenge and reveal related spatial concepts found in the philosophy. These include the ideas of limits, boundaries, inner/outer dichotomies, the relationship between showing and saying, the idea of correspondence and the practices of representation, assembly, resemblance, construction, building and rearrangement