Thought, Language, and Expression in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Philosophy, 2007
This book is a piece of philosophical work of extremely high intellectual quality. Its purpose is to defend in detail a ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus. It succeeds in this aim. It thus accomplishes something that has not yet been accomplished even by Conant or Diamond. It is therefore a major contribution to ‘Wittgenstein studies’, to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophical history of recent philosophy. (It has significant implications, for instance, for the work of Freudians, Sartreans, Griceans, Davidsonians.)
Limits of Linguistic Representation: Wittgenstein and the Unrepresentable that shows forth
The paper seeks reexamination of the received critical heritage about Wittgenstein that treats him as a positivist or unquestionably derives inspiration for positivism from him or sees him as a philosopher of language instead of the translinguistic unrepresentable transcendence. It also questions the influential reading of Wittgenstein scholars who argue that he supports only foundationless view of religion and language game is best metaphor for characterizing his religious views. I argue for the centrality of the mystical or transcendence in understanding the whole corpus of Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus and his ethics. Questioning the approach that writes off a few scattered mystical utterances here and there in Wittgenstein the paper, building on Russell Neili’s arguments, argues for shift in the paradigm of approaching Wittgenstein by keeping subservient the “positivist” in him and foreground the broader head of mystic in him. A proper understanding of mysticism is all that we need to have in order to appreciate the mystic Wittgenstein’s transcendence of logic and language in both life and thought and foreground him as a philosopher of transcendence and not merely a philosopher of language. Mysticism is the key to Wittgenstein though most Wittgenstein scholars have failed to put in proper perspective the primacy of the mystical and ignored this vital element that alone explains certain ambiguities and difficulties in traditional Wittgenstein exegeses. Far from being antimetaphysical positivist Wittgenstein is to be read as a mystic in the tradition of great mystical thinkers and can be compared with Simone Weil and other significant mystical thinkers of the recent past. His dialectic of transcendence has significant resemblances with transtheistic mystical philosophies such as that of Buddhism and Taoism. Arguing for continuity of his religious views from Tractatus onwards, the paper seeks to rectify problems resulting from emphasizing later Wittgenstein for deriving a philosophy of religion that has been perpetuating noncognitivist, fideist interpretations of him while failing to properly place ethical and aesthetic in his fundamentally mystical approach to religion and culture.
Language and Logic in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
The Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2013
This paper investigates Wittgenstein’s account of the relation between elementary and molecular propositions (and thus, also, the propositions of logic) in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I start by sketching a natural reading of that relation – which I call the “bipartite reading” – holding that the Tractatus gives an account of elementary propositions, based on the so-called picture theory, and a different account of molecular ones, based on the principle of truth- functionality. I then show that such a reading cannot be attributed to Wittgenstein, because he holds the view that an explanation of logical complexity is already given by a correct account of the (pictorial) nature of elementary propositions;; this is implied in his claim that “an elementary proposition contains all logical constants/operations in itself”. After clarifying Wittgenstein’s notion of an operation from the Notes on Logic to the Tractatus, I finally explain why Wittgenstein claims that an elementary proposition contains all logical operations in itself, and hence why he can be said to provide a unified (and thus not bipartite) account of language and logic.
2002
Soran Reader has been an outstanding Ph.D. supervisor. She deserves my sincere thanks for her hard work, her good judgement and her 'tough love'. I greatly value her friendship. All my teachers and colleagues at the University of Durham have helped me to develop as an undergraduate, postgraduate and as a teacher. I am grateful for feedback I received at the Department Research Seminar and from Andy Hamilton, who commented on a draft chapter. I also very much appreciate the feedback and guidance I received from Adrian Moore on numerous occasions. At Durham, I enjoyed the company of energetic and dedicated philosophy peers including Martin Connor, Stuart Hanscomb, Geraldine Coggins, James Clarke, Elaine Horner and many others who contributed to Eidos postgraduate seminars and the Wittgenstein reading group. I owe special thanks to Bill Pollard, for reminding me that what can be said at all can be said clearly; and to Simon James, for reminding me that what can be shown cannot be said.
Picturing the World from Within: Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Limits of Sense
2017
This thesis explores central themes in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and engages with exegetical discussions of Wittgenstein's early philosophy. Metaphysical, therapeutic, and elucidatory interpretations are presented and discussed. The division between showing and saying, which is a key distinction in the Tractatus, is found to be more complicated than the exegetical discourse sometimes suggests. This is argued to count in favour of an elucidatory reading of the Tractatus' seemingly paradoxical closing remarks. Moreover, Wittgenstein's account of picturing is shown to have a fundamental role, around which the distinctions between showing and saying and internal and external relations revolve. Even the doctrine of simple objects and atomic facts is rooted in the pictorial view of language. The thesis furthermore defends a dynamic interpretation of internal relations, upon which internal relations are shown through the application of operations, a view that is linked to Wittgenstein's philosophy of the subject. The result is a view on which, although the limits of language mean the limits of the world, the limits are not drawn once and for all. VI Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Bjørn Ramberg, for his illuminating comments and proactive engagement. His feedback has given me the motivation to keep writing and thinking through the difficult material at hand. I would also like to thank everyone who has joined me in discussions of philosophy in general, and Wittgenstein's thought in particular, over the years. These discussions initially sparked my interest in the relationship between language, thought, and action, and they have since given me the inspiration to study the subject at greater depth. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my family for their constant and invaluable support, without which this thesis could not have been written.
The Contemporary Significance of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy
2014
In his post-Tractatus work on natural language use, Wittgenstein defended the notion of what he dubbed the autonomy of grammar. According to this thought, grammar – or semantics, in a more recent idiom – is essentially autonomous from metaphysical considerations, and is not answerable to the nature of things. The argument has several related incarnations in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus writings, and has given rise to a number of important insights, both critical and constructive. In this paper I will argue for a potential connection between Wittgenstein’s autonomy argument and some more recent internalist arguments for the autonomy of semantics. My main motivation for establishing this connection comes from the fact that the later Wittgenstein’s comments on grammar and meaning stand in opposition to some of the core assumptions of semantic externalism.