This chapter begins by helping the reader to grasp the comprehensive nature of Nathaniel Berman's work, and the subtle perspective that he brings to the legal world when it is confronted by the passions to which nationalism and colonialism give rise. In his work, cultural Modernism interacts with the international law of Danzig; the fantasies surrounding Jerusalem with the concrete political and legal projects for that city; internationalist dreams with the institutional programs for Bosnia and Palestine; and the most industrious international bureaucracy with the most creative and audacious legal imagination. Berman makes use of all of the notions in the course of his work on "imperial ambivalences". His goal is to show that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation - rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it. Keywords:colonialism; cultural Modernism; imperial ambivalences; international law; Nathaniel Berman; nationalism

A Critical Introduction

Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy

Wittgenstein's enigmatic conception of sentences as pictures and his attempt to recast logic in essentially truth-functional terms have long fascinated readers of the Tractatus. I hope in this essay to clarify the content and motivation of Wittgenstein's view of sentences as pictures and to relate this conception to his views on logic. At the beginning of the foreword to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein tells his readers that the Tractatus is not a textbook, that perhaps only someone who has had the thoughts it expresses will understand it. The foreword also suggests that the Tractatus is in large measure a response to and critique of Frege's and Russell's views. My strategy then is to examine how aspects of the Tractatus emerge against the backdrop of problems that Frege's and Russell's views posed for Wittgenstein. THE OLD LOGIC Wittgenstein rejected Frege's and Russell's universalist conception of logic - what he disparaged as the old logic - while retaining their inchoate but guiding assumptions first that logic frames all thought, and second that it is possible to give a clear, completely explicit, and unambiguous expression to the contents judged true or false. To begin with, let us survey some of the leading features of the old logic and then consider briefly some of Wittgenstein's dissatisfactions with it.

Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

How does Wittgenstein's later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this chapter be concerned with Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics . She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgenstein's work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an anti-realist. Elsewhere I have argued against anti-realist readings. One aim of this present chapter is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein – its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words. At the heart of Sabina Lovibond's account of ethics is a contrast between two philosophical approaches to language. Here is a summary of the approach she rejects, which she refers to as the empiricist view. Language, on that view, is an “ instrument for the communication of thought,” thought being logically prior (RIE, p. 17); the language used in description is conceived of as like a calculus, and descriptive propositions are thought of as “readable” from the facts via determinate rules (RIE, pp. 18–19, 21). The meaning of descriptive terms (and thus the truth-conditions of propositions capable of truth and falsity) is tied to sense experience (RIE, p. 19). Reality is the reality described by the natural sciences; only entities admitted by science are real entities (RIE, p. 20). The “empiricist” view allows for two sorts of judgment, judgments of fact and judgments of value, corresponding to activities of recognition of facts (on the basis ultimately of sense experience) and affective responses to facts. There is thus also, on this view, a distinction between two sorts of meaning: descriptive or cognitive meaning and evaluative or emotive meaning (RIE, p. 21).

J. C. Nyíri

Papers

Tradition and Individuality