"Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is one of the most important philosophical works of the Twentieth Century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. (...) And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hänsel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary"--. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein on Non-Mediative CausalityJames C. KlaggeIn the late autumn of 1947 Wittgenstein dictated a selection of manuscript material to a typist1 that contains some remarks so striking that they merit extensive quotation:903. No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes. I mean this: (...) if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the following—certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced—but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes from it; so that it is impossible to infer the properties or structure of the plant from those of the seed that it comes out of—this can only be done from the history of the seed. So an organism might come into being even out of something quite amorphous, as it were causelessly; and there is no reason why this should not really hold for our thoughts, and hence for our talking and writing. (Zettel 608)904. It is thus perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. (Z 609)905. I saw this man years ago; now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored-up there in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality, then it is high time they were upset. (Z 610) [End Page 653]906. The prejudice in favor of psycho-physical parallelism is also a fruit of the primitive conception of grammar. For when one admits a causality between psychological phenomena, which is not mediated physiologically, one fancies that in doing so one is making an admission of the existence of a soul alongside the body, a ghostly soul-nature. (cf. Z 611)909. Why should not the initial and terminal states of a system be connected by a natural law, which does not cover the intermediary state? (Only don’t think of efficacy/influence [Wirkung]!) (Z 613)918. …Well—but now that the structure of the eye is known—how does it come about that we act, react, in this way? But must there be a physiological explanation here? Why don’t we just leave explaining alone?—But you would never talk like that, if you were examining the behavior of a machine!—Well, who says that a living creature, an animal body, is a machine in this sense?— (Z 614)Lest you think, or hope, these ideas were just a passing fancy of Wittgenstein’s, it is worth noting that these passages were among the ones that he cut from this typescript to save in a box and rearrange and perhaps revise for future use. They were published posthumously as Zettel.2What are we to make of these striking ideas? Do they hint at “mystical vitalism”? Is there an intellectual trajectory along which they can be located and appreciated, even if perhaps ultimately rejected? Or is he simply making a “natural” objection to reductionism about memory?3In an earlier publication I briefly offered a motivation for these views,4 but I now have more to say and wish to try again. Earlier I saw these passages primarily in relation to Wittgenstein’s other views about mental phenomena, but I now think something can be gained by seeing them in relation to his views about causality. Unfortunately causality is not a topic about which Wittgenstein had... (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein's exile (...) was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

This collection of essays deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and his philosophy. The first two essays reflect on general problems inherent in philosophical biography itself. The essays that follow draw on recently published letters as well as recently published diaries from the 1930s to explore Wittgenstein's background as an engineer and its relation to the Tractatus, the impact of his schizoid personality on his approach to philosophy, his role as a diarist, letter-writer and polemicist, and finally the complex (...) issue of Wittgenstein as a Jew. Written by a first-rate team of Wittgenstein scholars including two published biographers of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, this collection will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In this supplementary volume, a number of renowned scholars of Plato reflect upon their interpretive methods. Topics covered include the use of ancient authorities in interpreting Plato's dialogues, Plato's literary and rhetorical style, his arguments and characters, and his use of the dialogue form. The collection is not intended as a comprehensive survey of methodological approaches; rather it offers a number of different perspectives and clearly articulated interpretations by leading scholars in the field.

This collection of essays deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and his philosophy. The first two essays reflect on general problems inherent in philosophical biography itself. The essays that follow draw on recently published letters as well as recently published diaries from the 1930s to explore Wittgenstein's background as an engineer and its relation to the Tractatus, the impact of his schizoid personality on his approach to philosophy, his role as a diarist, letter-writer and polemicist, and finally the complex (...) issue of Wittgenstein as a Jew. Written by a first-rate team of Wittgenstein scholars including two published biographers of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, this collection will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Collection of articles concerning methods of inerpreting Plato's works.

I formulate and defend a realist theory of the truth of moral judgements according to which moral properties are synthetically but necessarily determined by natural properties of people, actions, or states of affairs. This view can be found in Moore's later ethical writings. The view reconciles two apparently conflicting intuitions: Moral properties supervene upon natural properties, but judgements about moral properties are generally not entailed by any judgements about natural properties. The view is realist in the sense that moral judgements (...) possess a truth-value independently of our means of knowing it. They are true or false in virture of a reality existing independently of us. ;One promising way of understanding this synthetic, necessary connection between moral and natural properties is in terms of the Kripke-Putnam account of natural kinds: Moral properties are type-identical with configurations of natural properties. But this turns out to be unsatisfactory. Another promising way of understanding this connection is on analogy with the connection between the mental and physical. I reject a token-identity theory of the moral and natural, but the analogy itself is helpful in understanding the relationship between the moral and natural. It offers a model for that relationship. ;I distinguish two senses in which supervenience could be understood in morality--ascriptive and descriptive--and argue that ascriptive supervenience depends on descriptive. A realist must defend descriptive supervenience. Moral properties decriptively supervene upon natural properties because moral differences must be explicable and justifiable in terms of natural differences. ;I construct an epistemology for moral properties in which natural properties are criteria, in Wittgenstein's sense, of moral properties. This conforms with the metaphysics of moral properties, and can be reconciled with the phenomenon of moral conflict. Finally, a careful formulation of moral realism is defended against Dummett's objections to realism generally. The moral realist cannot be forced to hold that there are moral truths that humans could not, even in principle, come to know. Yet this is what seems objectionable about realism in other realms. We can know all moral truths in principle, though perhaps not in practice. (shrink)

An essential resource for students of Wittgenstein, this collection contains faithful, in some cases expanded and corrected, versions of many important pieces never before available in a single volume, including Notes for the 'Philosophical Lecture', published here for the first time. Fifteen selections, with bi-lingual versions of those originally written in German, span the development of Wittgenstein's thought, his range of interests, and his methods of philosophical investigation. Short introductions, an index, and an updated version of Georg Henrik von Wright's (...) The Wittgenstein Papers situate the selections within the broader context of the Wittgenstein corpus and the history of its publication. (shrink)

Original interpretation of Wittgenstein's life and work. Argues that W's military experience in WWI subtly influenced his conception of how philosophy should be understood and practiced.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing’s having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT’s consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical system can be conscious while a physical duplicate of it is not conscious. Thus, by a common and reasonable conception of intrinsicality, IIT’s consciousness (...) is not intrinsic. It is then argued that to avoid the implication that consciousness is not intrinsic, IIT must abandon its Exclusion Postulate, which prohibits overlapping conscious systems. Indeed, theories of consciousness that attribute consciousness to physical systems, should embrace the view that some conscious systems overlap. A discussion of the admittedly counterintuitive nature of this solution, along with some medical and neuroscientific realities that would seem to support it, is included. (shrink)

A timely and accessible synthesis of the strengths, weaknesses and reality of science through the eyes of a practicing scientist.

Posterior parietal cortex has traditionally been considered to be a sensory association area in which higher-order processing and intermodal integration of incoming sensory information occurs. In this paper, evidence from clinical reports and from lesion and behavioral-electrophysiological experiments using monkeys is reviewed and discussed in relation to the overall functional organization of posterior parietal association cortex, and particularly with respect to a proposed posterior parietal mechanism concerned with the initiation and control of certain classes of eye and limb movements. Preliminary (...) data from studies of the effects of posterior parietal lesions on oculomotor control in monkeys are reported.The behavioral effects of lesions of posterior parietal cortex in monkeys have been found to be similar to those which follow analogous damage of the minor hemisphere in humans, while behavioral-electrophysiological experiments have disclosed classes of neurons in this area which have functional properties closely related to the behavioral acts that are disrupted by lesions of the area. On the basis of current data from these areas of study, it is proposed that the sensory association model of posterior parietal function is inadequate to account for the complexities of the present evidence. Instead, it now appears that many diverse neural mechanisms are locatedin partin parietal cortex, that some of these mechanisms are involved in sensory processing and perceptual functions, but that others participate in motor control, and that still others are involved in attentional, motivational, or emotional processes. It is further proposed that the elementary units of these various neural mechanisms are distributed within posterior parietal cortex according to the columnar hypothesis of Mountcastle. (shrink)

In this book, he also demonstrates a skill shared by the greatest radical thinkers: to reveal positions we've been taught to think of as extremism to be emanations of simple human decency and common sense.

Victor and Cullen (1988) identified several dimensions of ethical climate that exist in organizations and organizational subunits. We tested the relationship between these dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior at different levels of analysis. Using Within and Between Analysis (WABA) (cf. Dansereau, Alutto and Yammarino, 1984), partial support was found for a relationship between dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior.

In the process of challenging epistemological assumptions that preclude relationships between knowers and the objects of knowing, feminist epistemologists Lorraine Code and Donna Haraway also can be interpreted as troubling forms of argumentation predicated on positivist-derived logic. Against the latter, Christopher Tindale promotes a rhetorical model of argument that appears able to better engage epistemologies of situated knowledges. I detail key features of the latter from Code, especially, and compare and contrast them with relevant parts of Tindale’s discussion of context (...) on the rhetorical model, and I suggest ways that his work could be expanded to accommodate rhetorical implications of situated knowledges. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the ethical climate dimensions identified by Victor and Cullen (1987, 1988) could be replicated in the subunits of a multi-unit organization and if so, were the dimensions associated with particular types of operating units. We identified three of the dimensions of ethical climate found by Victor and Cullen and also found a new dimension of ethical climate related to service. Partial support was found for Victor and Cullen's hypothesis that certain ethical (...) climate dimensions are associated with particular forms of organizational governance and control. (shrink)

One of the fundamental principles of good corporate governance is transparency, i.e., the disclosure of private information to external stakeholders, so that they may make judgments and decisions relating to the corporation. Equally important, but less discussed, is the competing value that corporations need to protect legitimate secrets. Corporations thus need a communication strategy for dealing with external stakeholders which addresses the conflict between disclosure and secrecy. This article focuses on an important element of that communication strategy in the context (...) of financial reporting: the possibility that corporate insiders may consider it in their interest, or in the interest of specific stakeholders, to alter or manipulate the financial information that it discloses publicly. Using concepts from the corporate governance and financial reporting literatures, it addresses the ethical question of who (management or the board of directors) should be responsible for making the fundamental strategic choices whether and (if so) how the corporation alters or manipulates the financial information. This article argues that the board of directors is responsible for formulating (and monitoring) the corporation's communication strategy, and that management is responsible for carrying it out. (shrink)

The paper examines how supervisory influence and cognitive moral development influence subordinates' ethical decision-making and ethical behavior. The proposed interactive effect these major variables have on subordinates' ethical considerations are examined with respect to: (1) before an ethical dilemma occurs, (2) when faced with an ethical dilemma, (3) during the decision process, and (4) after ethical or unethical behavior has been executed. Propositions are presented and implications for research and practice are discussed.

The few extant arguments concerning the autonomy of science in the rational acceptance of hypotheses are examined. It is concluded that science is not morally autonomous, and that the attendant notion of rationality in science decisionmaking is inadequate. A more comprehensive notion of scientific rationality, which encompasses the old one, is proposed as a replacement. The general idea is that scientists qua scientist ought, in their acceptance decisions, to take into account the ethical consequences of acceptance as well as the (...) consequences with regard to the attainment of "purely scientific" or "epistemic" objectives. The result constitutes an argument for a (presumably cooperative) game theoretic treatment of inductive logic. (shrink)

This article reviews models of the cerebellum and motor learning, from the landmark papers by Marr and Albus through those of the present time. The unique architecture of the cerebellar cortex is ideally suited for pattern recognition, but how is pattern recognition incorporated into motor control and learning systems? The present analysis begins with a discussion of exactly what the cerebellar cortex needs to regulate through its anatomically defined projections to premotor networks. Next, we examine various models showing how the (...) microcircuitry in the cerebellar cortex could be used to achieve its regulatory functions. Having thus defined what it is that Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex must learn, we then evaluate theories of motor learning. We examine current models of synaptic plasticity, credit assignment, and the generation of training information, indicating how they could function cooperatively to guide the processes of motor learning. (shrink)