Journal of the History of Philosophy

31o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL 199o gence, the highest form of which is intuition. These formulations may not have contributed much to the desired synthesis of science and mysticism. But they did generate considerable excitement among the believers in the occult, and heightened the controversies of the day among intellectuals and theologians. The last three chapters of Grogin's book (chaps. 5, 6, 7) go into many details of these issues, and are well supplied with footnotes. Many of these footnotes are of bibliographical interest only, but a few make points of philosophical substance which contribute to the argument. In view of the generosity of the supporting material, which in addition to footnotes includes an extensive bibliography, it may seem ungrateful to complain that the book lacks an index. But one reader, at least, was often made aware of its absence. THOMAS A. GOUDGE University of Toronto Robert John Ackermann. Wittgenstein's City. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 267. Cloth, $~5.oo. Paper, $1a.95. The title of this book is taken from the Investigations. "Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. "t Ackermann exploits this metaphor not only for language, but also for Wittgenstein's entire written corpus. In the last chapter, "Philosophy," we are told, correctly, that Wittgenstein does not build the city of language nor does he discover it. Rather, he "reveals the City in which we already live" (2o8). It is not clear, however, that on his visit to Wittgenstein's city (the city now that is made up of Wittgenstein's work, which Wittgenstein obviously did not reveal but did indeed build) Ackermann actually sees the city of language that Wittgenstein reveals. Ackermann's "hypothesis" is that Wittgenstein's development is unified, that there is no rupture in his development. The strategy he uses to establish this is "to summarize the large-scale features of Wittgenstein's City" (36). One problem in Ackermann's strategy is that the argument for a developmental unity consists largely of interpreting quotations from different periods "against one another within the same general hermeneutical framework" (3 a). He claims, for example , that Wittgenstein holds there to be an internal relationship between language and the world both in the Tractatus and in the Investigations. "Language games assume such a shared structure as had the analysis of assertion in the Tractatus" (49)- There are, however, important differences in the explanation of what "internal" means, differences that go deeper than that "sentences are analyzed in more complicated ways in the Investigations, and not always as concatenations of names" (49). In the Tractatus the internal relation of propositions to facts is isomorphic and mediated by logical pictures, ' PhilosophicalInvestigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscomlm (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1968), 1.18. BOOK REVIEWS 311 or possible situations. 2 This relation, an essential and metaphysical correspondence, is ineffable. In Wittgenstem's Lectures, Cambridge, i93o-~932 he has realized that there is no "tertium quid besides the expectation and the fact fulfilling it.''~ In the Philosophical Grammar internal relations or the harmony between the world and language are said to be a product of linguistic conventions, or grammar. 4 In the Investigations Wittgenstein clarifies internal relations between a rule and its application. This is not merely, as Ackermann claims, a more complicated way of analyzing sentences, but a different and nonmetaphysical explanation. The "feelers," as he puts it, that rupture the internal relation between the world and language in the Tractatus have no role in Wittgenstein's explanation of meaning after 193o. Thus there is a certain obscuring effect in Ackermann's strategy of bringing out what is similar but neglecting what is dissimilar. His claim that an insight such as the one discussed above is "constant in Wittgenstein" is in need of a more closely documented argument for his claim to be convincing. The following is an example where one wishes that Ackermann had exercised more care. It...