Analytical commentary -- Fruits upon one tree -- The continuation of the early draft into philosophy of mathematics -- Hidden isomorphism -- A common methodology -- The flatness of philosophical grammar -- Following a rule 185-242 -- Introduction to the exegesis -- Rules and grammar -- The tractatus and rules of logical syntax -- From logical syntax to philosophical grammar -- Rules and rule-formulations -- Philosophy and grammar -- The scope of grammar -- Some morals -- Exegesis 185-8 -- Accord (...) with a rule -- Initial compass bearings -- Accord and the harmony between language and reality -- Rules of inference and logical machinery -- Formulations and explanations of rules by examples -- Interpretations, fitting and grammar -- Further misunderstandings -- Exegesis 189-202 -- Following rules, mastery of techniques and practices -- Following a rule -- Practices and techniques -- Doing the right thing and doing the same thing -- Privacy and the community view -- On not digging below bedrock -- Private linguists and private linguists : Robinson Crusoe sails again -- Is a language necessarily shared with a community of speakers? -- Innate knowledge of a language -- Robinson Crusoe sails again -- Solitary cavemen and monolinguists -- Private languages and private languages -- Exegesis 203-37 -- Agreement in definitions, judgements, and form of life -- The scaffolding of facts -- The role of our nature -- Forms of life -- Agreement : consensus of human beings and their actions -- Exegesis 238-42 -- Grammar and necessity -- Setting the stage -- Leitmotifs -- External guidelines -- Necessary propositions and norms of representation -- Concerning the truth and falsehood of necessary propositions -- What necessary truths are about illusions of correspondence : ideal objects, kinds of reality, and ultra-physics -- The psychology of the A priori -- Knowledge -- Belief -- Certainty -- Surprise -- Discoveries and conjectures -- Compulsion -- Propositions of logic and laws of thought -- Alternative forms of representation -- The arbitrariness of grammar -- A kinship to the non-arbitrary -- Proof in mathematics -- Conventionalism. (shrink)
Waismann's Wittgenstein-influenced ‘How I see Philosophy’ presents a radical vision of philosophy. But its two most general themes—its stress on freedom and vision, and its emphasis on describing the grammar of our language—seem hard to reconcile. This paper elaborates four interrelated themes: 1) Waismann offers his conception of philosophy, not a delineation of the nature of philosophy. 2) His method is radically therapeutic. 3) He offers a diagnosis of the source of philosophical problems: unconscious analogies or conceptions. 4) He advocates (...) a particular form of therapy: offering alternative analogies or conceptions to individuals. Against this background the apparent paradox can be dissolved. (shrink)
Arguing against the prevailing view that Cartesian dualism is fundamental to understanding Descartes' philosophy, Gordon Baker and Katherine Morris present a controversial examination of Descartes' philosophy. As the first full-length study of Descartes' conception of the person, Baker and Morris depart radically from traditional representations of Descartes'argument about the persona, the cogito, and the alleged "mind/body" dualism. Contesting the nearly institutionalized view that Cartesian duality is central to understanding Descartes, Baker and Morris illuminate how this "reading" has been ascribed mistakenly (...) and erroneously to Descartes. Controversially, they show how this interpretation has led to abuse both within philosophy and beyond it. Refusing to draw a distinction between the mind and the body in traditional ways, Baker and Morris open up interesting ways of conceptualizing both ourselves and philosophy itself. (shrink)
Wittgenstein remarked 'What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use' (PI §116). On this basis, his 'later philosophy' is generally regarded as a version of 'ordinary language philosophy'. He is taken to criticize philosophers for making ('metaphysical') statements which deviate in different ways from the everyday use of some of their component expressions. I marshal textual evidence for another reading of this remark, and show that he used 'metaphysical' in a traditional way, namely, (...) to describe philosophical attempts to delineate the essence of things by establishing necessities and impossibilities. On his conception, 'everyday' simply means 'non-metaphysical' (in this precise sense). Comparisons of philosophical utterances with non-philosophical uses of words are meant to call attention to this crucial distinction. (shrink)
To clarify Wittgenstein's status as an analytic philosopher, we must study his use of the expressions 'language', 'grammar', etc. We tend to take 'language' as an abstract mass-noun and to generalize quite specific remarks. We overlook the possibility of taking 'our grammar' to refer to our particular description of the use of words rather than to what we describe. Preserving the ambiguity of 'Sprache' between language and speech calls for a neutral translation, e.g. 'what we say'. Wittgenstein's 'descriptions of the (...) grammar of our language' are more varied and purpose-specific than usually recognized. (shrink)
