Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 1973"
TL;DR: In the Michaelmas Term 1968 I gave a course of lectures on the Philosophical Investigations as discussed by the authors, which was the first lecture on the Tractatus of Spinoza at the University of Cambridge.
Abstract: In the Michaelmas Term 1968 I gave a course of lectures on the Philosophical Investigations. Until then nobody had lectured at Cambridge specifically on that book, though it had been in print for fifteen years and must by that time have been lectured on in nearly every other philosophy department in the English-speaking world. One reason why we were so slow is suggested by a remark that John Wisdom made after hearing Max Black give a lecture on the Tractatus in the early fifties. As we came out of the lecture room he said to me ‘That was a strange experience. I have a clear memory of all that from my early years in Cambridge. And yet in some ways it was like hearing a lecture on Spinoza.’
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TL;DR: Wittgenstein was unreliable as an historian of philosophy as mentioned in this paper, and on the rare occasions on which he quoted verbatim he did not always do justice to the authors quoted.
Abstract: Wittgenstein was unreliable as an historian of philosophy. When he criticised other philosophers he rarely gave chapter and verse for his criticism, and on the rare occasions on which he quoted verbatim he did not always do justice to the authors quoted. I will illustrate this first in the comparatively unimportant case of Augustine and then in the more serious case of Frege.
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TL;DR: The last part of Wittgenstein's Blue Book consists of a discussion of Solipsism as mentioned in this paper, and there are several remarks (extending over about a page-and-a-half) which are explicitly concerned with the concept of a person and with the criteria of personal identity.
Abstract: The last part of Wittgenstein’s Blue Book1 consists of a discussion of Solipsism. In the course of that discussion there occur several remarks (extending over about a page-and-a-half) which are explicitly concerned with the concept of a person and with the criteria of personal identity. This section is replaced in the Philosophical Investigations by half a sentence which reads: ‘… there is a great variety of criteria for personal “identity” ’.2 Wittgenstein has italicised the word ‘identity’, and has placed it in inverted commas: I don’t quite know why he does this, but it might be a hint to the effect that there is something slightly suspect about the notion of personal identity.
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TL;DR: Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel, in the course of a rather remarkable passage as discussed by the authors. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a 'primitive interpretation of our concepts', an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena.
Abstract: Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel, in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein’s rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a physiological process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’.1 Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event (cf. Z, 610). If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena.
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TL;DR: The logical atomism of the Tractatus as mentioned in this paper is a theory of the relation between language and reality which appears both to be impossible to work out in detail in a way which is completely satisfactory, and to be bizarre and incredible.
Abstract: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contains a wide range of profound insights into the nature of logic and language — insights which will survive the particular theories of the Tractatus and seem to me to mark definitive and unassailable landmarks in our understanding of some of the deepest questions of philosophy. And yet alongside these insights there is a theory of the nature of the relation between language and reality which appears both to be impossible to work out in detail in a way which is completely satisfactory, and to be bizarre and incredible. I am referring to the so-called logical atomism of the Tractatus. The main outlines of this theory at least are clear and familiar: there are elementary propositions which gain their sense from being models of possible states of affairs; such propositions are configurations of names of simple objects, signifying that those simples are analogously configured; every proposition has its sense through being analysable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions, thus deriving its sense from the sense of the elementary propositions when this view is taken in conjunction with the idea that the sense of a proposition is completely specified by specifying its truth-conditions.
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TL;DR: In the early years of this century, the debate as to the nature of judgment was a central issue dividing British philosophers as discussed by the authors, and what a philosopher said about judgment was not independent of what he said about perception.
Abstract: In the early years of this century the debate as to the nature of judgment was a central issue dividing British philosophers. What a philosopher said about judgment was not independent of what he said about perception, the distinction between the a priori and empirical, the distinction between external and internal relations, the nature of inference, truth, universals, language, the reality of the self and so on.1
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TL;DR: In this article, a fundamental notion of the Tractatus is that of the repetition of an operation, and the operation specially mentioned is the simultaneous negation represented by the Sheffer stroke.
Abstract: A fundamental notion of the Tractatus is that of the repetition of an operation. The operation specially mentioned is the simultaneous negation represented by the Sheffer stroke. ‘If an operation is applied repeatedly to its own results, I speak of successive applications of it … In a similar sense I speak of successive applications of more than one operation to a number of propositions’ (5.2521).
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