Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 115, Issue 2, 2023

Reading the Tractatus. And appreciating it

The reception history of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus displays an impressive and persistent diversity. This paper explores possible sources of that diversity and locates them in different takes on the text and its context of origin, and in different perspectives of the readers. This hermeneutics is illustrated by a comparison of two views on the importance of ethics for an understanding of the Tractatus: that of Cora Diamond and the one developed by the authors in previous work.

How the Author Disappeared from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

In this essay, I investigate the status of the written word in the (early, mostly) work of Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tends to imagine language as written rather than spoken. This focus on writing goes together with a sense that the author is absent from the text. I argue that the problem is not with writing in general but specifically with books, and more specifically with the fantasy of a book of everything, the importance of which to Wittgenstein’s early work was brought out by Eli Friedlander. On my account, such a book, by pretending to contain the whole world, leaves no place for an author. Since the early Wittgenstein imagines subjectivity in the form of a book of everything, he is unable to place subjectivity – subjects: you and I – in the world. I end by briefly suggesting that in his later work, Wittgenstein gives up on the fantasy of a book of everything and is in a better position to address the problem of finding subjectivity in the world.

On formal anticipation: the object in Kant and Wittgenstein

This article discusses the affinity between Kant’s notion of objectivity and Wittgenstein’s view on the limitations of language by addressing both philosophers’ relation to the constitutive space at work in a transcendental logic. For both, the system and conceptual room hosting the activity of subjective conditionality is dynamically connected to what can be seen as an object in response to the heterogeneity between concepts and sensibility. In his work On the Genealogy of Universals. The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (2018) Fraser MacBride makes a plea for the importance of Kant in the history of the origin of analytical philosophy, more specifically, the philosophies of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. He nevertheless does so in an inadequate way, because he understands Kant from a realist perspective striving to see ‘objects’ as an awaiting reality ‘out there’ to be made our own. Contrary to that, we make the case that a transcendental dynamics of a ‘lost’ primordial captivity is at work in the process of the constitution of objects. We look into Wittgenstein’s notion of substance and the problematic subreptitious exchange between the notions of substance and attribute on the one hand and the relation between the particular and the universal according to MacBride on the other. We propose that both Kant and Wittgenstein sharpen the awareness for the transcendental anticipatory activity of a presupposition, to be seen as a crucial moment within pure formalization and logical strictness, built on a minimal ontology of openness to what is determinable within the action of determination, opposite to a realism of what is simply determined as ‘what is the case’ without taking into account the constituting subject-pole.

Wittgenstein & logical empiricism

Rudolf Carnap and Ludwig Wittgenstein share many philosophical interests: an admiration of Frege’s formal logic, an anti-metaphysical stance and a modernist aesthetic aimed at removing superficial elements from discourse or thought. Despite their shared interests, Carnap and Wittgenstein ended their interaction in a plagiarism dispute. In this essay, I discuss which metaphilosophical reasons lie behind their dispute. I argue that Wittgenstein’s overarching philosophical project stood in direct conflict with Carnap’s. First, Wittgenstein never accepted that there are meaningful sentences about the language of science. Thus, there could be no meaningful reflection on science, and this nullified Carnap’s Logic of Science project. Second, Wittgenstein had an overall disdain for Carnap’s desire, as displayed in the Manifesto and the Aufbau, to reform philosophical activity as a part of science itself in tandem with a general reform of the place science in society.

The complex story of mathematics in the Tractatus

In this paper some thoughts are presented about the treatment of mathematics in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After introducing a metaphor for the mathematical ‘building’, we look at the scattered ideas about mathematics in the Tractatus itself. Although the general consensus is that Wittgenstein rejects the entire ‘building’, there are recent insights that suggest that a more coherent view of ‘Tractarian’ mathematics can be presented, if we are willing to leave behind a foundational form of thinking. What this means will be outlined in some detail. The concluding general assessment is that the final word on the status of mathematics in the Tractatus is still pending.

‘A possible sign must also be able to signify’: Hacker on nonsense and misuse in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

This paper critically discusses Hacker’s reading of nonsense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in terms of his notion of misuse, which is taken to consist in the violation of rules of logical syntax. I argue that Hacker’s reading relies on an equivocation between sign and symbol: what is ‘misused’ is a mere sign, but the verdict of nonsensicality relies on seeing it as a symbol. Although Hacker seeks to distance himself from resolute readings – according to which nonsense always consists in nothing but a failure to assign meaning to one’s sentences – I argue that his own verdicts of nonsensicality have their ultimate grounds in exactly the same sort of assessment, i.e. whether meaning has been assigned to a sentence. The rules of logical syntax, contrary to his own intentions, do no real work in determining whether a sentence is nonsensical or not.