The Voices Of Wittgenstein

This brings for the first time over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. It is an invaluable introduction to Wittgenstein's 'later philosophy'.

"The Voices of Wittgenstein brings together for the first time in both the original German and English translation over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind of historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930s. It is the only substantial corpus of Wittgenstein's work that has remained relatively unknown and unavailable until now. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932-1935, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann. The volume also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann closely based on the dictations." --Book Jacket.

Wittgenstein and the Practice of Philosophy introduces Wittgenstein’s philosophy to senior undergraduates and graduate students. Its pedagogical premise is that the best way to understand Wittgenstein’s thought is to take seriously his methodological remarks. Its interpretive premise is that those methodological remarks are the natural result of Wittgenstein’s rejection of his early view of the ground of value, including semantic value or meaning, as something that must lie “outside the world.” This metaphysical view of meaning is replaced in his transitional writings with a kind of conventionalism, according to which meaning is made possible by the existence of grammatical conventions that are implicit in our linguistic practices. The implicit nature of these conventions makes us vulnerable to a special kind of confusion that results from lacking a clear view of the norms that underlie our linguistic practices. This special confusion is characteristic of philosophical problems, and the task of philosophy is the therapeutic one of alleviating confusion by helping us to see our grammatical norms clearly. This development of this therapeutic view of philosophy is traced from Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus through his transitional writings and lectures to his great masterwork, Philosophical Investigations, and his final reflections on knowledge and scepticism in On Certainty. Wittgenstein’s discussions of naming, family resemblances, rule-following and private language in Philosophical Investigations are all examined as instances of this sort of method, as is his discussion of knowledge in On Certainty. The book concludes by considering some objections to the viability of Wittgenstein’s method and speculating on how it might be extended to a discussion of moral value to which Wittgenstein never explicitly returns.

In the essays collected here, philosophers from inside and outside of Wittgensteinian circles discuss the significance of Wittgenstein's work for the philosophy of mind and psychology.

The essays in this volume address central themes in Wittgenstein's writings on the philosophy of mind, language, logic, and mathematics.

Updated edition of this important book, charting the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy of the mind, language, logic, and mathematics.

This volume sheds a new light on Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s master opus, by taking a new approach to its first stretch (sections §§1-88), with special emphasis on its atypical opening. The methodological conviction that subtends the volume is that the highly unconventional form assumed by the book is internal to its content and crucial to its reconception of the relation between logic and language. This disconcerting form is dictated by the new modes of criticism deployed by Wittgenstein as he engages the philosophical tradition in the new terms afforded by the revolutionary “method of language-games”. In the essays collected here, seven authors, including some of the most influential figures in the field, offer close and often unorthodox readings of pivotal passages from the beginning of the book. These readings are also shaped by the conviction that the Philosophical Investigations are hardly intelligible apart from an appreciation of the concerns that they inherit from Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The authors contend that we need to consider the continuities between the early and the later works if we are to disclose the true discontinuities between them.