An analysis of the sources of Wittgenstein’s picture theory — which include not only his moment of insight on reading a magazine story about the use of models in a traffic court, but also the work of Russell, Hertz, and Boltzmann — provides the basis for an exploration of Wittgenstein’s articulation of a pictorial conception of representation in his wartime notebooks and its crystallization in the Tractatus. A discussion of Wittgenstein’s later criticism of the picture theory and his notion of (...) a “philosophical picture” illustrates the fundamental reversal in his transition to his later conception of philosophy: instead of taking literal pictures as a guide to the nature of meaning, he came to regard philosophical theories as akin to expressing an aesthetic preference for a certain style of representation. Wittgenstein’s treatment of factual language in the picture theory is related to his Tractarian approach to logical form, and the role of the show/say distinction in his early conception of logic and language. Particular attention is given to the difficulties generated by the idea that the conditions for the possibility of a given domain of discourse cannot be described in language, but must be shown by the form of words in question. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the ontology of the Tractatus is best understood as the consequence of Wittgenstein’s conception of logic and representation in general, and the postulate of the determinacy of sense in particular. Once it is recognized that Wittgenstein arrived at the idea of simple objects based on an abstract argument about the nature of complexes and analysis without providing any specific examples of such analyses, it is easy to see the need for caution in attributing any characteristics to (...) the objects over and above those demanded by Wittgenstein’s logicolinguistic commitments. Commentators have taken the Tractatus to be setting out a bewildering variety of highly specific views about the nature of objects. But the truth is that the book is so programmatic that its ontology can be elaborated in any number of ways. The final section of this chapter analyzes Wittgenstein’s treatment of the self in the Tractatus and his writing from the 1930s as a central example of the extreme tensions between the positivisistic doctrines stated in the Tractatus and the antipositivistic subtext it aims to convey or “show”: if the exoteric doctrine of the Tractatus is that there is no such thing as the subject of experience, the esoteric doctrine is that there is. This leads to a close reading of his proposal in the early 1930s that is considered a “subjectless” language as a way of clarifying the nature of experience, and his subsequent critique of the notions of the “metaphysical self” and the “visual world”. He had transmuted the difference between the first person and third person modes of speech into differences between two worlds and then had tried to put them back together again. (shrink)

In 1929, Wittgenstein made use of river imagery to convey the supposedly inexpressible thesis that all is in flux. However, he rejects this extreme thesis in manuscripts from the early 1930s and drafts of the Philosophical Investigations, affirming that one can step twice into the same river. His later discussion of the “stream of life” involves a return, in certain respects, to the river analogy, albeit in a very different key. Examining Wittgenstein’s changing use of this image casts light on (...) the continuities and discontinuities in the development of his philosophy. Wittgenstein’s argument that a private definition is impossible because ostension always depends on a “technique of use”, and his rejection of a positive theory of mind is clarified by examining some unusually explicit notes for a public lecture on private language. This material shows how the treatment of training and practice in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations is the basis for the subsequent discussion of both rule-following and privacy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Practice Theory? What is a Practice? Being‐in‐the‐World and Practical Holism Two Philosophers and an Antiphilosophy: Kripkenstein, Winchgenstein, and Therapeutic Quietism Winchgensteinian Practice Theory From Winchgenstein to Frankenstein Investigating Practices Note.

Wittgenstein's principal works, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, are each written in such strikingly unconventional ways that it takes considerable effort to translate them into conventional philosophical writing. The most important aspect of Wittgenstein's style for an understanding of his philosophy is his use of multiple voices, and the way he forces his reader to engage with those voices in order to understand him. This chapter provides an outline of the leading macro‐level answers to the question which of Wittgenstein's (...) writings set out his philosophy, and which set out views he rejected. Wittgenstein's method of composition, revision, and rearrangement, leads from the remarks written down in his wartime notebooks, to a manuscript containing several stages of construction of the Prototractatus, and from there to the polished typescript of the Tractatus. The chapter illustrates how to interpret Wittgenstein's remarks without taking a position on questions about texts and style, voice and authorship. (shrink)

The alliance of discursivity with neurosis on the one hand, and an exploration of new conditions of discourse on the other, conditions now self consciously denoted as 'West', gives notice of a certain disillusionment I feel with my culturally received, monotheistic valourization of the power of 'word-ing', and my sense that the problem is not discourse per se, but the way my understanding of it is, or has been, too stuck within its own cultural self enclosure, within the compound of (...) its own cultural grammar, one might say. In taking up these issues within the context of a conference convened to consider "Fragmentation and the Desire for Order/Unity" play off each other relationally, or symbiotically but how so inevitably and incidentally in the West that play-off has a neurotic tail-chasing character that is inspired precisely by Desire. My remarks, therefore, about the possibilities of new conditions of discourse for the West, turn most profoundly on a problematizing of Desire itself. (shrink)

One of the great contributions of postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to the human sciences generally, in which Education is situated, has been the concept of "discourse." To call a particular way of thinking and acting a discourse is to reference the way meaning is achieved amongst actors by a mutual agreement, direct or tacit, about key terms and actions. A discourse is a kind of self-enclosed semantic and practical universe within which people operate "as if" everyone (...) knew what everyone else is talking about. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the _Tractatus_ and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the _Prototractatus_, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called__ __ The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his _Tractatus_. One map displays the structure of the published _Tractatus_; the (...) other lays out the structure of the _Prototractatus_. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations.__ __While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”. (shrink)

A key philosophical feature of Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is its use of fantasy to inspire a “recovery” of the actual or, in other words, a reawakening to the beauty of nature and the many possible ways of living in healthier ecological relation to the world. Though none of these ways is perfectly achieved, this pluralistic view is demonstrated in the various lifeways of Hobbits, Elves, Men, and Ents. All of the positive (...) relationships embodied in the films—to trees, mountains, horses, and vegetable gardens—involve loving care and attention, receiving nourishment and livelihood without instrumentalization, or reducing nature to mere resource. The films also vividly display a variety of ugly and destructive ways of using the land to accrue power and wealth. These noxious ways, specifically because they actively destroy the lands that they use, always need more. They will thus eventually annihilate the beautiful ways of being if they are not actively resisted. Some of those who would rather be tending their own trees, gardens, or horses or even wandering in the wild forests must therefore turn their attention to struggle and resistance instead. This is a struggle full of grief, and at times even verging on despair, but it is marked by the refusal to give up hope. Indeed, what Jackson and Tolkien have to say about hope is as important in responding to the ecological crisis as anything they have to say about nature, inasmuch as they help to remind us that even in our own times, “there is still hope.”. (shrink)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...) better evidence of the development of his ideas than can be found in his published writing. In doing so, the book traces the development of a number of central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, including his conception of philosophical method, the picture theory of meaning, the limits of language, the application of language to experience, his treatment of private language, and what he called the "flow of life." Arguing that Wittgenstein's views are often much more simple (and more radical) than we have been led to believe, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy and brings to light aspects of his philosophy that have been almost universally neglected. (shrink)

The essay begins by briefly reviewing the complex history of the collaborative long-distance editing work that led to the publication of Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2016). It then turns to a discussion of the rationale for the innovative editorial policies we ultimately developed and implemented, and some of the broader methodological issues that they raise.

The first section of this chapter presents a close reading of Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Logical Form”, focusing on the conception of the relationship between language and experience, and the nature of the analysis of immediate experience that are set out there. Section two sets out an interpretation of what Wittgenstein meant when he said that he had rejected “phenomenological language” or “primary language” as his goal. Distinguishing between a weak and a strong sense of these terms shows how he could (...) have given up the goal of formulating a language that would amount to a complete analysis of immediate experience, yet retain the goal of finding ways of clarifying what we say about experience. Section three discusses Wittgenstein’s use of the analogy of the pictures on a roll of film in a movie projector and the pictures on a cinema screen for the relationship between world and experience. The final section analyzes how and why the analogy leads Wittgenstein to a paradoxical conception of immediate experience as a separate realm, “timeless” and “neighborless”, a conception of the “world as idea” that is supposedly inexpressible. (shrink)

In this new introduction to a classic philosophical text, David Stern examines Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He gives particular attention to both the arguments of the Investigations and the way in which the work is written, and especially to the role of dialogue in the book. While he concentrates on helping the reader to arrive at his or her own interpretation of the primary text, he also provides guidance to the unusually wide range of existing interpretations, and to the reasons (...) why the Investigations have inspired such a diversity of readings. Following closely the text of the Investigations and meant to be read alongside it, this survey is accessible to readers with no previous background in philosophy. It is well-suited to university-level courses on Wittgenstein, but can also be read with profit by students in other disciplines. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...) to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

This edition of G. E. Moore's notes taken at Wittgenstein's seminal Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s provides, for the first time, an almost verbatim record of those classes. The presentation of the notes is both accessible and faithful to their original manuscripts, and a comprehensive introduction and synoptic table of contents provide the reader with essential contextual information and summaries of the topics in each lecture. The lectures form an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein's middle-period thought, covering a broad range (...) of philosophical topics, ranging from core questions in the philosophy of language, mind, logic, and mathematics, to illuminating discussions of subjects on which Wittgenstein says very little elsewhere, including ethics, religion, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume also includes a 1932 essay by Moore critiquing Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, together with Wittgenstein's response. A companion website offers access to images of the entire set of source manuscripts. (shrink)

Ruth Macklin argued that dignity is nothing more than respect for persons or their autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, difficult decisions are being made about the allocation of scarce resources. Respect for autonomy cannot justify rationing decisions. Justice can be invoked to justify rationing. However, this leaves an uncomfortable tension between the principles. Dignity is not a useless concept because it is able to account for why we respect autonomy and for why it can be legitimate to override autonomy in (...) times of critical care resource shortages. Dignity affirms the worth of the human individual as a meaning-making embodied subject, who is always in relationship to others, the world, time, and transcendence, and who realizes their dignity through their moral behaviour. Such an understanding means people should be helped to make morally right decisions about their own treatment, which may include forgoing potentially beneficial treatment for the good of others. Respect for dignity does not require fulfilling the morally wrong choices of one who insists on treatment at the expense of others. Dignity also protects the discretion of clinicians to make decisions appropriate to their competence by prohibiting the application of broad-based criteria such as age. (shrink)

Originally conceived as a forty-page conclusion to Hacker’s twenty years of work on the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, this book “rapidly assumed a life of its own”. A major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, this substantial volume delivers even more than the title promises. The eight chapters are best approached as a six-chapter book, itself some 220 pages long, on Wittgenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, followed by a two-chapter, 120-page epilogue about how and why (...) his influence has waned. The first six chapters provide an encyclopedic summary of the fruits of Hacker’s research on Wittgenstein’s writing, an immensely learned account of British philosophy from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s reception by Oxford, Cambridge, and the Vienna Circle. The book’s closing chapters, “Post-positivism in the United States and Quine’s Apostasy” and “The Decline of Analytic Philosophy,” polemically argue that Quine’s philosophy, and the post-Quinean naturalism prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy today, amount to such a decisive break with the analytic tradition, as Hacker conceives of it, that they should not be counted as “analytic.”. (shrink)

Discussion of Alexander Bogdanov as a Marxist revisionist has largely centred on his philosophy of being and cognition and on Plekhanov’s and Lenin’s accusation that Bogdanov was an idealist renegade from Marxism. However, the real issue of revisionism at the time was not materialism but determinism: the question of whether socialism would appear by the working of the objective laws of nature or the subjective will of human beings. Bogdanov did indeed revise Marxism, but he did so in order to (...) defend it as a natural science. He conceived of society as a form of life subject to biological laws of nature: the need to assimilate energy from the environment and the need to adapt to the environment in the struggle to survive. He reinterpreted the key elements of scientific socialism – the idea that existence determines consciousness and the labour theory of value – in terms of this worldview. (shrink)

The current coronavirus pandemic presents the greatest healthcare crisis in living memory. Hospitals across the world have faced unprecedented pressure. In the face of this tidal wave of demand for limited healthcare resources, how are clinicians to identify patients most likely to benefit? Should age or frailty be discriminators? This paper seeks to analyse the current evidence-base, seeking a nuanced approach to pandemic decision-making, such as admission to critical care.

ABSTRACT Objectives There is little research on moral uncertainties and distress of palliative and hospice care providers (PHCPs) working in jurisdictions anticipating legalising voluntary assisted dying (VAD). This study examines the perception and anticipated concerns of PHCPs in providing VAD in the State of Queensland, Australia prior to legalisation of the practice in 2021. The findings help inform strategies to facilitate training and support the health and well-being of healthcare workers involved in VAD. Design The study used a qualitative approach (...) to examine and analyse the perception and anticipated concerns of PHCPs regarding challenges of providing assisted dying in Queensland. Fourteen PHCPs were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy to obtain a broad representation of perspectives including work roles, geographical locations and workplace characteristics. Data were collected via one in-depth interview per participant. The transcripts were coded for patterns and themes using an inductive analysis approach following the tradition of Grounded Theory. Setting The study was conducted in hospital, hospice, community and residential aged care settings in Queensland, Australia. These included public and private facilities, secular and faith-based facilities, and regional/rural and urban facilities. Participants Interviews were conducted with fourteen PHCPs: 10 nurses and 4 physicians; 11 female and 3 male. The median number of years of palliative care practice was 17, ranging from 2 to 36 years. For inclusion, participants had to be practising palliative and hospice care providers. Results PHCPs are divided on whether VAD should be considered part of palliative care. Expectations of moral distress and uncertainty about practising VAD were identified in five areas: handling requests, assessing patient capacity, arranging patient transfers and logistical issues, managing unsuccessful attempts, and dealing with team conflicts and stigma. Conclusions The possibility of having to practise VAD causes moral distress and uncertainty for some PHCPs. Procedural clarity can address some uncertainties; moral and psychological distress, however, remains a source of tension that needs support to ensure ongoing care of both patients and PHCPs. The introduction of VAD post-legalisation may present an occasion for further moral education and development of PHCPs. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 96-98.

Jerome Wakefield has argued that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. This paper develops how Wakefield should construe harmful in his harmful dysfunction analysis. Recently, Neil Feit has argued that classic puzzles involved in analyzing harm render Wakefield’s HDA better off without harm as a necessary condition. Whether or not one conceives of harm as comparative or non-comparative, the concern is that the HDA forces people to classify as mere dysfunction what they know to be a disorder. For instance, one (...) can conceive of cases where simultaneous disorders prevent each other from being, in any traditional sense, actually harmful; in such cases, according to the HDA, neither would be a disorder. I argue that the sense of harm that Wakefield should employ in the HDA is dispositional, similar to the sense of harm used when describing a vile of poison: “Be careful! That’s poison. It’s harmful.” I call this harm in the damage sense. Using this sense of harm enables the HDA to avoid Feit’s arguments, and thus it should be preferred to other senses when analyzing harmful dysfunction. (shrink)

This paper uses a semiotic, performative theory of language and post-colonial theory to argue that nursing's representations of ‘multiculturalism’ need to be grounded in a theory of whiteness, an historicized understanding of how ethnic/cultural differences come to be represented in the ways they are and informed by Foucault's notions of power/knowledge. Using nursing education and ‘cultural compentency’ as examples, the paper draws on a range of literatures to suggest more critical and politically productive ways of approaching difference from within nursing's (...) largely white interpretive framework. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that segmentation underlies the patterning of the vertebrate hindbrain and its neural crest derivatives. Several genes have been identified with segment‐restricted expression, and evidence is now emerging regarding their function and regulatory relationships. The expression patterns of Hox genes and the phenotype of null mutants indicate roles in specifying segment identity. A zinc finger gene Krox‐20 is a segment‐specific regulator of Hox expression, and it seems probable that retinoic acid receptors also regulate Hox genes in the (...) hindbrain. The receptor tyrosine kinase gene Sek may mediate cell‐cell interactions that lead to segmentation. These studies provide a starting point for understanding the molecular basis of segmental patterning in the hindbrain. (shrink)

Well-known social psychologist David G. Myers addresses why Americans can have so many social problems--reflecting a deep spiritual poverty--at a time when material wealth is at record levels. 32 illustrations.