Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein (Cover, TOC and Intro; pre-proof) (original) (raw)

This is a book collecting the contributions of authors attempting, each in their own way, to engage in an ethical inquiry in the wake of Wittgenstein's philosophy. There are, however, many distinctive ways in which Wittgenstein has been inspiring and important for many people working in moral philosophy, and for some who aim at developing a moral theory. One such way is by trying to explore in some detail the ethical outlook of Wittgenstein's works, with the same earnestness with which Kant's or Aristotle's ethics are still being studied and (re)interpreted. Admittedly, Wittgenstein does not offer much for his interpreters to chew on-the literally occasional "Lecture on Ethics", a few scattered passages from his war notebooks, some hints dropped towards the end of the Tractatus. His later works are even more elusive in this respect. An ethical dimension seems an integral part of the way in which he comments on the topics of religion, culture or history (in Culture and Value, Lectures and Conversations about Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief or the "philosophy of psychology" focus of some of his postwar work). Yet with the possible exception of the 1941 "A Lecture on Freedom of the Will"-again, occasional-he mostly avoids a direct engagement with ethical issues. That ethical issues were of great importance to him can be seen in the overview and recollection given by Rush Rhees in "Some Developments in Wittgenstein's Views on Ethics" (1965; cf. also Wittgenstein, Rhees and Citron 2015). Yet in Wittgenstein's notebooks, which form the basis of the posthumously edited publications of his work, he wrote down hardly anything of the observations recorded by Rhees. Some texts, such as those assembled in Crary and Read (2000), Gleeson (2002), Crary (2007) or Adam-Segal and Dain (2017), aim at reconstructing Wittgenstein's ethics, not simply out of historical curiosity but as a corrective that can be illuminating for current endeavours in moral theory. The focus, however, is chiefly retrospective/interpretive (on Wittgenstein). The light shed by Wittgenstein's thinking can be fruitfully used for a dialogue on ethical questions with a disparate range of other thinkers; the contributions assembled in De Mesel and Thompson (2015) thus engage, alongside Wittgenstein, philosophers including Aristotle, Bourdieu, Diamond, Hobbes, Hooker, Kant, Lévinas, Løgstrup, McDowell and Nietzsche. More often, though, Wittgenstein's philosophy is characterised as analytical or languageoriented philosophy, and, in this capacity, he has sometimes been taken as its representative for entering into a dialogue-with (mostly) his continental counterparts-concerning philosophy, or philosophical method in general (for example, Gier 1984; Rentsch 2003; Thompson 2008). This kind of focus, stressing internal cohesion and taking language as the gateway, has parallels of different kinds in the attempts to frame Wittgenstein as an ethically relevant thinker, too. Thus, for instance, Iczkovits (2012) argues that Wittgenstein's ethical view is integrated with his philosophy of language, or, perhaps, the lesson from his reading is that any attempt at tackling moral questions in a Wittgensteinian manner cannot but proceed within the confines of investigating questions of meaning. Somewhat analogously, Backström (2011) and Nykänen (2019) suggest that moral understanding lies at the heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and is a "submerged" theme throughout his writings, particularly in his later work.