The New Wittgenstein

Last updated
The New Wittgenstein
The New Wittgenstein.jpg
Editors
LanguageEnglish
Published2000
Publisher Blackwell
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
ISBN 978-0-415-17319-3

The New Wittgenstein (2000) is a book containing a family of interpretations of the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, those associated with this interpretation, such as Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and James F. Conant, understand Wittgenstein to have avoided putting forth a "positive" metaphysical program, and understand him to be advocating philosophy as a form of "therapy." Under this interpretation, Wittgenstein's program is dominated by the idea that philosophical problems are symptoms of illusions or "bewitchments by language," and that attempts at a "narrow" solution to philosophical problems, that do not take into account larger questions of how the questioner conducts her life, interacts with other people, and uses language generally, are doomed to failure.

Contents

Overview

According to the introduction to the anthology The New Wittgenstein ( ISBN   0-415-17319-1):

Wittgenstein's primary aim in philosophy is – to use a word he himself employs in characterizing his later philosophical procedures – a therapeutic one. These papers have in common an understanding of Wittgenstein as aspiring, not to advance metaphysical theories, but rather to help us work ourselves out of confusions we become entangled in when philosophizing. [1]

While many philosophers have suggested variants of such ideas in readings of the work of later Wittgenstein, namely the author of Philosophical Investigations , a notable aspect of the New Wittgenstein interpretation is a view that the work of early Wittgenstein, exemplified by the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , and the Investigations, are actually more deeply connected, and in less opposition, to each other than usually understood. This view is in direct conflict with the long-standing, if somewhat old-fashioned, interpretation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus advocated by the logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle.

The therapeutic approach of the New Wittgenstein scholars is not without critics: Hans-Johann Glock argues that the "plain nonsense" reading of the Tractatus "is at odds with the external evidence, writings and conversations in which Wittgenstein states that the Tractatus is committed to the idea of ineffable insight". [2]

There is no unitary "New Wittgenstein" interpretation, and proponents differ deeply among themselves. Philosophers often associated with the interpretation include some who are influential, mostly associated with (although sometimes antagonistic to) the traditions of analytic philosophy, including Stanley Cavell, James F. Conant, John McDowell, Matthew B. Ostrow, Thomas Ricketts, Warren Goldfarb, Hilary Putnam, Stephen Mulhall, Alice Crary, and Cora Diamond. Explicit critics of the "New Wittgenstein" interpretation include P. M. S. Hacker, Ian Proops and Genia Schönbaumsfeld.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ludwig Wittgenstein</span> Austrian philosopher and logician (1889–1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

<i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> 1921 philosophical work by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).

Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy, especially anglophone philosophy, focused on analysis. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a clarity of prose; rigor in arguments; and making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It is further characterized by an interest in language and meaning known as the linguistic turn. It has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.

Ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting how words are ordinarily used to convey meaning in non-philosophical contexts. "Such 'philosophical' uses of language, on this view, create the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve."

Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. It holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" that cannot be broken down any further, each of which can be understood independently of other facts.

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.

Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Winch</span> British philosopher

Peter Guy Winch was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. His early book The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) was an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.

James Ferguson Conant is an American philosopher at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on topics in philosophy of language, ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is perhaps best known for his writings on Wittgenstein, and his association with the New Wittgenstein school of Wittgenstein interpretation initiated by Cora Diamond.

In the philosophy of language, the context principle is a form of semantic holism holding that a philosopher should "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Hacker</span> British philosopher (born 1939)


Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.

This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language

This is a list of articles in analytic philosophy.

Ideal language philosophy is contrasted with ordinary language philosophy. From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of natural language that, in their opinion, often made for philosophical error. During this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language by using formal logic to formalize the way in which philosophical statements are made. Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He thereby argued that the universe is the totality of facts and not things: actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus a picture of the universe can be construed by means of expressing atomic facts in the form of atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators.

In philosophy, Wittgenstein's ladder is a metaphor set out by Ludwig Wittgenstein about learning. In what may be a deliberate reference to Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus reads:

6.54

 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them.

 He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Crary</span> American philosopher

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..

Brian McGuinness was a Wittgenstein scholar best known for his translation, with David Pears, of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, and for his biography of the first half of Wittgenstein's life.

The therapeutic approach to philosophy sees philosophical problems as misconceptions that are to be therapeutically dissolved. The approach stems from Ludwig Wittgenstein.

There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.

Hidé Ishiguro is a Japanese analytic philosopher and emeritus professor at Keio University, Tokyo. She is considered an expert on the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on whom she has published many papers. She is also a Wittgenstein scholar.

References

  1. Alice Crary, "Introduction", The New Wittgenstein, Routledge, 2000, p. 1
  2. Glock, Hans-Johann (2007). Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker. Blackwell. pp. 37–65. ISBN   9781405129220.

Further reading