Showing papers in "Philosophical Investigations in 2005"
TL;DR: The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, 158 pp. No price as discussed by the authors, no ISBN, no price, No ISBN, No price.
Abstract: Books reviewed:
Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, 158 pp. No price. Reviewed by Colin Lyas, University of Lancaster Furness College Bailrigg Lancaster LA1 4YG
27 citations
TL;DR: The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle as discussed by the authors, a collection of the Vienna Circle of the authors of Theodorakopoulos and Waismann, was published by Routledge, London and New York 2003.
Abstract: Book reviewed:
The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle– Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann (Transcribed, Edited and with an Introduction by Gordon Baker; Translated by Gordon Baker, Michael Mackett, John Connolly and Vasilis Politis); Routledge; London and New York, 2003 (Pp xlviii + 558. German and English Texts on Facing Pages.)
17 citations
TL;DR: This paper identified in Wittgenstein's and in Kant's philosophies a common line of argument that provides a genuinely transcendental argument for (not from) mental content externalism, which has not been previously recognized in either thinker's work.
Abstract: Wittgenstein sought to uphold ‘realism without empiricism’. This paper identifies in Wittgestein's and in Kant's philosophies a common line of argument that provides a genuinely transcendental argument for (not from) mental content externalism. This line of argument has not been previously recognized in either thinker's work. The common thesis defended by both Wittgenstein and Kant alike is that, if we human beings did not inhabit a natural world structured by a recognizable degree of similarity and variety among the objects or events we perceive, we could not so much as think, so we could not so much as be self-conscious. (This line of argument is independent of Kant's idealism, and ultimately shows that Kant's transcendental idealism is false and unsupportable.)
17 citations
TL;DR: McGinn and Hamlyn as discussed by the authors, Consciousness and its Objects, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, 256 pp, reviewed by D. W. Hamlyn, Birkbeck College, University of London 38 Smithy Knoll Road Calver Hope Valley Derbyshire S32 3XW
Abstract: Books reviewed:
Colin McGinn, Consciousness and its Objects, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, 256 pp. Reviewed by D. W. Hamlyn, Birkbeck College, University of London 38 Smithy Knoll Road Calver Hope Valley Derbyshire S32 3XW
15 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a comparison between Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell is made, and it is shown that there is a genuine affinity between these two.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell. The paper's positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory is vulnerable to a complaint of idealism that the Tractatus can deflect.
14 citations
TL;DR: Wittgenstein this paper discusses the question "what does Wittgenstein mean by not having theses in philosophy?" and argues that although already the Tractatus aims at a philosophy devoid of theses, it involves a relapse back to such theses.
Abstract: The paper discusses the question ‘what does Wittgenstein mean by not having theses in philosophy?’ His conception of philosophy without theses, as this is articulated in his later work, is understood as a response to the problem of dogmatism in philosophy and a non-metaphysical form of philosophy. I argue that although already the Tractatus aims at a philosophy devoid of theses, it involves a relapse back to such theses. Its conception of philosophical clarification involves a particular conception of the essence of propositions. This way the form of the activity of clarification is determined by a philosophical/metaphysical thesis. In his later philosophy Wittgenstein, however, manages to solve this problem. His solution, explained with the help of the metaphor of ‘turning our whole investigation around’, consists of a change in the comprehension of the status of philosophical statements. For instance rules (e.g. definitions) and examples are understood as what he calls ‘objects of comparison’. Such objects of comparison are something that cases of language use (to be investigated with the purpose of clarification) are to be compared with, but the philosopher is not to make the claim that such objects of comparison show what the cases of language use under examination must be. The modality (expressed by ‘must’) is a characteristic of the philosopher's mode of presentation. It should not be claimed to be a feature of his object of investigation (the uses of language to be clarified).
12 citations
TL;DR: Wittgenstein's short-lived verificationism (c.1929-30) differed from that of his contacts in the Vienna Circle in not being a reductionist view as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I argue that Wittgenstein's short-lived verificationism (c.1929–30) differed from that of his contacts in the Vienna Circle in not being a reductionist view. It lay the groundwork for his later views that the meaning of a word is determined by its use and that certain “propositions of the form of empirical propositions” (On Certainty, §§96, 401, 402) act as “norm[s] of description” (On Certainty, §§167, 321). He gave it up once he realized that it contradicted his rejection of logical atomism, and that he ever held such a view at all says something about his respect for the leader of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick.
8 citations
TL;DR: O'Connor, Peg, Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 151 pp., ISBN 0-271-02202-7.
Abstract: Book reviewed:
O’Connor, Peg, Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 151 pp., ISBN 0-271-02202-7.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors defend Williams's account against three powerful criticisms by Michael Smith, John McDowell and Tim Scanlon, and draw certain implications from Williams's work about the nature and the role of the personal in ethics.
Abstract: Williams's classic 1980 article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ has attracted much criticism, but, in my view, has never been properly refuted. I wish to describe and defend Williams's account against three powerful criticisms by Michael Smith, John McDowell and Tim Scanlon. In addition, I draw certain implications from Williams's account – implications with which Williams would not necessarily agree – about the nature and the role of the personal in ethics. Williams's insight, that a reason (including a moral reason) must find purchase in an agent's ‘subjective motivational set’ if it is to function as a reason at all, undermines a central assumption of many moral philosophers, realists and non-cognitivists alike: that there exists a singular objective realm of moral facts and moral reasons supervening on the situation before the agent. According to this assumption, if two people facing that situation disagree about whether one of them has reason to Φ, then at least one of them must be mistaken. I reject this assumption and defend Williams's account, while pointing at ways in which the account might be developed. While the internalism-externalism debate itself is well-worn, there is still something new and important that can be gleaned from it.
5 citations
TL;DR: Martin, Michael as mentioned in this paper, Atheism, Morality and Meaning, 2002, Prometheus Books, 330pp, price £21.00 pb, ISBN 978-0-1
Abstract: Book reviewed:
Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning, 2002, Prometheus Books, 330pp, price £21.00 pb.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that in the kind of situation Winch envisages where we properly return a different moral judgement to another agent it may be that we accept their judgement is right for them because we recognise that it is determined by values that, simply because of the particular people we are, we could never know or understand in just the same way.
Abstract: It may seem to follow from Peter Winch's claim in ‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgements’ that a certain class of first-person moral judgments are not universalizable that such judgments cannot be given a cognitivist interpretation. But Winch's argument does not involve the denial of moral cognitivism and in this paper I show how such judgements may be cognitively determined yet not universalizable. Drawing on an example from James Joyce's The Dead, I suggest that in the kind of situation Winch envisages where we properly return a different moral judgement to another agent it may be that we accept their judgement is right for them because we recognise that it is determined by values that, simply because of the particular people we are, we could never know or understand in just the same way.
TL;DR: Formal series are associated with ascriptions of numbers and are ordered by formal operations that, unlike negation and disjunction, are not truth-operations, but are required to build propositions involving generic reference to numbers, and are essential to the Tractarian version of the logicist project as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Formal series are associated with ascriptions of numbers. They are ordered by formal operations that, unlike negation and disjunction, are not truth-operations. In spite of this, they are required to build propositions involving generic reference to numbers, and are essential to the Tractarian version of the logicist project.
TL;DR: In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: "Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked".
Abstract: In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: “Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.” In this paper I show how Wittgenstein developed this insight in On Certainty. My principal aim is to show that this is a logical insight, that it is bound up with the distinction between saying and showing, and that one misses the point of On Certainty if one reads it, as some commentators have, in epistemological terms. Throughout all of this I pay special attention to why Wittgenstein thought that skepticism is nonsensical, and what it might mean to say that philosophy is a logical investigation.
TL;DR: This article explored a neglected aspect of Peter Winch's work: his writings on political authority, focusing mainly on his tendency to be insufficiently attentive to the distinction between being in authority and being an authority, and the implications this has for the distinctiveness of political authority.
Abstract: This article explores a neglected aspect of Peter Winch's work: his writings on political authority. It seeks to show that this neglect is undeserved. Three themes are interweaved in the discussion. First, the major developments in Winch's thinking between his first published article on political authority (in a symposium with Richard Peters) and his later writings on the subject are identified and assessed. Criticism is focused mainly on his tendency to be insufficiently attentive to the distinction between being in authority and being an authority, and the implications this has for the distinctiveness of political authority. Secondly, particular attention is given to some of the key strands in Winch's analysis. These include his distinction between the nature and the grounds of political authority, how the role of consent is to be understood in the light of this distinction, how an adequate understanding political authority does not undermine our ideas of autonomy, and what it might mean to reject the whole idea of political authority. Finally, the article concludes by briefly defending the value of Winch's approach to political philosophy. Earlier it is shown that Winch's analysis does not foreclose on a range of political responses to authority, and this point is generalised to argue for a philosophical approach (like Winch’s) that aims at understanding, rather than at advancing any particular set of moral or political principles.
TL;DR: A broad consensus among commentators is that the later Wittgenstein subscribes to a redundancy conception of truth as mentioned in this paper. But once even mildly plausible versions of that view are isolated a review of the relevant texts shows that the evidence for that interpretation collapses.
Abstract: A broad, though not unanimous, consensus among commentators is that the later Wittgenstein subscribes to a redundancy conception of truth. I reject that interpretation. No doubt much depends on what is meant by a redundancy theory. But once even mildly plausible versions of that view are isolated a review of the relevant texts shows that the evidence for that interpretation collapses. Moreover, the redundancy interpretation is at odds with guiding prescriptions in the post-1932 corpus. Wittgenstein doesn’t hold that truth can be defined or characterized thinly, as redundancy theorists propose, but that it isn’t susceptible to any such generic treatment.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Wittgenstein can be understood as accepting both theses and that this shows that he can accept talk not only of descriptive but also dynamic unconscious states, contrary to the interpretations of Jacques Bouveresse and Donald Levy.
Abstract: I argue for two theses: 1) An unconscious belief that p is not the same attitude as a conscious belief that p (here I am disagreeing with David Finkelstein and Richard Moran). 2) An unconscious belief that p is the attitude it is on account of its rational connection with the conscious belief that p (taking issue with Georges Rey). I defend parallel theses for emotions. I then argue that Wittgenstein can be understood as accepting both theses and that this shows – contrary to the interpretations of Jacques Bouveresse and Donald Levy – that Wittgenstein can accept talk not only of descriptive but also dynamic unconscious states (in Freud's terminology).
TL;DR: In this article, it is shown that the connectionist model anticipated by Turing may provide the best approach for the AI project, but it is also the one that cannot share in what can be generally referred to as the collective engagements of human solidarity.
Abstract: Ask most any cognitive scientist working today if a digital computational system could develop aesthetic sensibility and you will likely receive the optimistic reply that this remains an open empirical question. However, I attempt to show, while drawing upon the later Wittgenstein, that the correct answer is in fact available. And it is a negative a priori. It would seem, for example, that recent computational successes in textual attribution, most notably those of Donald Foster (famed finder of Ted Kazinski a.k.a. “the Unibomber”) speak favorably of the digital model's capacity to overcome the “aspect blindness” handicap in this domain. I argue however that such results are only achievable when rigid input-to-output parameters are given, and that this element is precisely what is absent in standard examples of aesthetic judgment. I thus conclude that while the connectionist model anticipated by Turing may provide the best approach for the AI project, its capacity for meeting its own sufficiency requirements is necessarily crippled by its inability to share in what can be generally referred to as the collective engagements of human solidarity.
TL;DR: The Literary Wittgenstein edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huerner, Routledge, London, 2004 (pp. xi + 356). Philosophy and Literature: A Book of Essays, M. H. Rowe, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004 as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Books reviewed:
The Literary Wittgenstein edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huerner, Routledge, London, 2004 (pp. xi + 356). Philosophy and Literature: A Book of Essays, M. W. Rowe, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004 (pp xii + 238). Reviewed by M. H. Weston, University of Essex University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester CO4 3SQ
TL;DR: This article argued that the skeptic makes a Rylean category mistake, when he applies the concept of warrant to epistemologically basic beliefs, such as the belief in the external world or in the continued and distinct existence of bodies.
Abstract: This essay is intended as a companion-piece to my article, “Reality in Common Sense: Reflections on Realism and Anti-Realism from a ‘Common Sense Naturalist’ Perspective.” (Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2002). It explores the epistemological dimension of the Common Sense Naturalism that I developed in that earlier, predominantly metaphysical essay; a position that combines the views of David Hume, Thomas Reid, and the Wittgenstein of On Certainty. My ultimate aim is to produce a comprehensive philosophy of common sense, one that with future installments, will come to include an ethical and social-political philosophy as well.
“Between Reason and Common Sense” offers a common sense naturalist reply to the skeptic. My basic argument is that the skeptic makes a Rylean category mistake, when he applies the concept of warrant to epistemologically basic beliefs, such as the belief in the external world or in the continued and distinct existence of bodies. He misidentifies these beliefs as being ordinary, when they are really a part of the framework that make the practices of believing and justifying possible. As a result, they are not themselves open to confirmation or disconfirmation. I also try to characterize the nature of the necessity carried by framework beliefs, in a way that avoids the charge that the common sense naturalist is simply a closet foundationalist.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the Tractatus classifies names into constant names and variable names, and argue that a variable name, via the application of the existential quantifier against the background of picturing, picks out and denotes an unspecified object from the range of objects of the form shown by the relevant variable.
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the Tractatus classifies names into constant names and variable names. A variable name, via the application of the existential quantifier against the background of picturing, picks out and denotes an unspecified object from the range of objects of the form shown by the relevant variable. A constant name labels an object picked out from a scope of the existential quantifier. I also refute two types of attempts to argue that the Tractarian relation between a name and its meaning is not realist, and to explain why it is more reasonable to hold that it is.