Abstract

This dissertation is an exposition and defense of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In it, I take Wittgenstein to be posing in his later philosophy a paradox of guidance. That is, I understand him to be questioning the possibility that rules' training give directions for their application. A result of reading Wittgenstein this way is a reconciliation of two opposing views of Wittgenstein's problem: the view that he sought the fact to the matter of guidance and the view that he sought the fact to the matter of intentionality. For those who hold the latter view take it that to have an intention is to have directions for doing something. ;Wittgenstein's solution to this problem, I argue, is the community disposition theory of guidance: the idea that one is being guided by his training just in case one is going on from it as anyone who took it would. What is the fact that lends credence to claims of rule-following? According to Wittgenstein, it is the fact that people would agree regarding the way one should go on from the training in question. Pressed to justify his application of a rule one should say, on this view, that one is following its training as anyone would. ;Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics is taken in this dissertation to be an extension of this theory to foundational questions in mathematics. To justify one's way of doing arithmetic one should appeal to the fact that people agree regarding how to follow arithmetical training. One's being in line with this uniform practice shows that one's arithmetic has a standard, i.e., is a justified way of doing arithmetic. ;In this connection, Wittgenstein is seen as taking the necessity of our mathematical practices as coming from the fact that we must practice in the way we do or abdicate the doing of mathematics. Mathematics is constituted by necessary rules, not necessary truths. It is not the correspondence between necessary facts and our practices that makes them necessary. Rather, it is our inability to work with other rules. ;The final two chapters are devoted to comparing Wittgenstein's later philosophy with the work of Kant and Plato. I take Plato to be trying to solve the same skeptical paradox as that which Wittgenstein posed. Plato's essentialism is seen as an inadequate solution to it. Kant, on the other hand, is viewed as anticipating Wittgenstein's views and giving in his refutation of idealism the kernel of Wittgenstein's private language argument