Nuno Venturinha

Este artigo aborda a reação de Frege a Kant e questiona uma influente interpretação, defendida por Jim Conant, de acordo com a qual Frege subscreve os princípios essenciais da filosofia de Kant, nomeadamente a sua conceção antipsicologista avant la lettre da lógica pura. Eu defendo que existem diferenças profundas de ponto de vista entre eles, as quais alimentam o seu bem conhecido desacordo acerca da natureza da aritmética, e que a rejeição de Frege de algumas das premissas fundamentais da epistemologia kantiana levou-o a uma forma bastante distinta de antipsicologismo. No centro da disputa Frege-Kant está um entendimento completamente diferente da objetividade, a qual aos olhos de Frege não pode ser concebida como uma expressão do nosso considerar algo verdadeiro, como resulta do enquadramento de Kant.

In this note I address two issues in Susan Edwards-McKie’s recent paper “The Cosmic Fragment: Härte des Logischen Zwangs und Unendliche Möglichkeit. Nachlass discoveries and Wittgenstein’s conception of generality and the infinite”. The first has to do with a “von Wright error” that Edwards- McKie found and that I show to have been ultimately corrected by von Wright. The second has to do with her interpretation of Wittgenstein’s reaction to Heraclitus’ idea that “everything flows”, one I interpret as purely grammatical and not as a substantial position in favour or against Heracliteanism, nor even as a third stance between this and Parmenideanism, as Edwards-McKie interestingly suggests.

In this paper, I first introduce the main motivations for the internalism/externalism dichotomy in epistemology and explore different accounts of epistemic justification, mostly externalist, arising from Dretske’s relevant alternatives theory of knowledge, namely the reliabilism of Goldman and Nozick, the contextualism of Cohen and DeRose, which is governed by fallibilist standards, and Lewis’ version of contextualism, to which infallibilist standards apply. I then argue that Wittgenstein critically anticipates many of these strategies and tries to avoid such a dichotomy by assuming a form of infallibilism which is neither internal nor external. After introducing the idea of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology and how it responds to the problem of epistemic justification and to the particular challenge posed by radical scepticism, I defend the view that infallibility is logically unavoidable when we realize that we are always trapped in one language-game or another, even if we constantly switch between language-games.

This paper explores central themes of Duncan Pritchard’s epistemology intimately related to the Wittgensteinian idea of a “hinge epistemology”. The first section calls attention to the eminently empirical character of our “hinges”. The second section focuses on Pritchard’s notion of “arational hinge commitments”, more specifically his distinction between the pair “über hinge commitments”/“über hinge propositions” and the pair “personal hinge commitments”/“personal hinge propositions”. The third section brings to the discussion Timothy Williamson’s view of “inexact knowledge” and examines another pair of notions introduced by Pritchard, namely “antiskeptical hinge commitments”/“antiskeptical hinge propositions”. I conclude with a reevaluation of the diagnosis made by Pritchard that, confronted with a sceptical scenario, our “epistemic angst” can be surpassed if we follow Wittgenstein’s teaching in On Certainty about the “structure of rational evaluation”, but that an “epistemic vertigo” can never be ultimately dispelled. My argument is that in a moral scenario there is no room for vertigo.

In this paper I begin by scrutinizing classic approaches to the question of agrammaticality, with a particular focus on Frege and the early Wittgenstein, and try to show that a further step is needed in order to adequately address this topic. I then focus on the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of nonsense-poems and claim that the failure of the Philosophical Investigations as a book is actually connected with Wittgenstein’s recognition that philosophy should be written under the form of poetry. The therapeutic consequences of this view are discussed in connection with Deleuze’s comments on Melville and with Read’s comments on Sass, which offer very different views of agrammaticality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein é unanimemente reconhecido como um dos pensadores mais marcantes do século xx, tendo influenciado decisivamente o debate filosófico da contemporaneidade. Apoiando-se não nas edições clássicas mas no espólio do autor, problematizando a formalidade sui generis característica daquele, esta obra propõe-se acompanhar o evoluir do pensamento wittgensteiniano, nos seus diferentes planos, determinando a metodologia que o vai definir, enquanto possibilidade concreta de compreensão da visão filosófica que lhe subjaz. Ao indagar toda a trajectória reflexiva que se estabelece entre o anúncio inaugural do Tractatus e o do livro que no princípio dos anos 30 é projectado em contraposição àquele mas que nunca será concluído, Lógica, Ética, Gramática assume, na verdade, um carácter propedêutico, pretendendo lançar as bases para uma nova leitura da «segunda» filosofia wittgensteiniana, crítico-geneticamente definida em relação à «primeira». Este livro interessará, assim, a estudantes e investigadores de várias disciplinas filosóficas, nomeadamente Epistemologia, Ética, Filosofia da Linguagem, Lógica e Metodologia Filosófica, onde os apuramentos de Wittgenstein são incontornáveis, bem como a todos aqueles que trabalham em Filologia ou Teoria da Literatura.

To what extent is the form of our life fixed, i.e. is there a form of life or forms of life? How does this bear on the nature of experience? These are two Wittgensteinian questions in need of clarification. Wittgenstein on Forms of Life and the Nature of Experience sheds light on a much exploited but rarely analysed topic in Wittgenstein scholarship while addressing central themes of contemporary philosophy. Bringing together essays from some of the leading scholars in the field, the book concentrates on Wittgenstein’s concept of Lebensform(en), and more specifically its evolution in the author’s thought until his death in 1951.