A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, J. C. Nyiri, Eva Picardi, Joachim Schulte Roger Scruton, Barry Smith and Johan Wrede.

It is known that Wittgenstein enjoyed reading Plato; but the significance the philosopher had for him is quite underrated, and has never been properly understood. Utilizing insights by Ortega and E. Havelock, the paper argues that while the background of Plato's philosophy was the emergence of literacy, the genesis and the direction of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, by contrast, is not independent of the emergence of post-literacy (or "secondary orality", to use Walter J. Ong's term). A post-literal phenomenon clearly having specifc (...) impact on Wittgenstein was the film: it is striking that he regularly used the film metaphor to illustrate philosophical points. Analyzing these metaphors the paper reaches the conclusion that according to Wittgenstein the carrier of uncorrupted meaning is, actually, spoken language; if we leave the rein to written language, philosophical problems will arise. (shrink)

For any given society, its particular technology of communication has far-reaching consequences, not merely as regards social organization, but on the epistemic level as well. Plato's name-theory of meaning represents the transition from the age of primary orality to that of literacy; Wittgenstein's use-theory of meaning stands for the transition from the age of literacy to that of a second orality (audiovisual communication, electronic information processing). On the basis of a use-theory of meaning the problem of machine consciousness, to which (...) the later Wittgenstein again and again returned, is capable of a non-essentialist solution: appropriate changes in our form of life might well entail a radically different psychological language-game. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz schildert den platonisierenden Antipsychologismus welchen Bolzano, der junge Brentano, Twardowski, Meinong, der Husserl der Logischen Untersuchungen, Frege, der Russell der Jahrhundertwende und der junge Wittgenstein philosophisch vertraten, und versucht eine soziologische und ideologiekritische Interpretation sowohl dieser Einstellung als auch derjenigen des traditionellen Psychologismus des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. Der Platonismus des neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts wird als ein Ausdruck fiir ? oder vielmehr als eine Reaktion gegen ? den Verfall der klassischen burgerlichen Werte aufgefaBt. In Wittgensteins Tractatus spielen Elemente sowohl (...) eines platonisierenden Antipsychologismus wie auch eines relativistischen, verhaltensphanomenologisch orientierten Antipsychologismus eine Rolle: dieses Werk wird also als eine grelle Manifestation des Uberganges von der klassischen zur spatbiirgerlichen Weltanschauung, als ein Obergang vom Glauben an ewige Wahrheiten zur Hinnahme einer Gebrauchs?Theorie der Bedeutung und deren Konsequenzen interpretiert. (shrink)

Austria, by the end of the nineteenth century, clearly lagged behind its more developed Western neighbours in matters of intellect and science. The Empire had witnessed a relatively late process of urbanization, bringing also a late development of those liberal habits and values which would seem to be a presupposition of the modern, scientific attitude. It therefore lacked institutions of scientific research of the sort that had been founded in Germany since the time of von Humboldt. On the other hand, (...) as more liberal ways began to be established in Austria - effectively in the second half of the nineteenth century - the desire to enjoy the trappings of a modern enlightened culture made itself felt. The Austrians were not of course in a position to summon forth the means to create reputable institutions and traditions of science in the narrow sense, and this created a vacuum which the theory of a practice so attractively pursued elsewhere could then fill. (shrink)

Der ungarische Philosoph Melchior (Menyhert) Palägyi hatte niemals eine unmittelbare Kritik der Meinongschen Philosophie verfaßt; 1902 erwog er sogar die Möglichkeit, sich bei Meinong zu habilitieren. Dennoch ist die Gegenstandstheorie Meinongs durch die von Palägyi aufgebaute, sprachphilosophisch begründete Widerlegung des logischen Objektivismus eines Bolzano oder Husseri an sich zweifellos ebenfalls berührt. Palägyis Kritik an dem modernen Piatonismus, durch Herder, Max Müller und vermutlich Nietzsche beeinflußt, die bezüglichen Argumente des späteren Wittgenstein und von Eric Havelock in gar mancher Hinsicht vorwegnehmend, ist (...) weitgehend unbekannt und unbeachtet geblieben. Indem der Aufsatz die Prinzipien dieser Kritik nun eben auf die Gegenstandstheorie anwendet, sollen gewisse grundsätzliche Züge der Meinongschen Begriffsbildung in einer geschichtlich angemessenen Weise kritisch beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

Der ungarische Philosoph Melchior (Menyhert) Palägyi hatte niemals eine unmittelbare Kritik der Meinongschen Philosophie verfaßt; 1902 erwog er sogar die Möglichkeit, sich bei Meinong zu habilitieren. Dennoch ist die Gegenstandstheorie Meinongs durch die von Palägyi aufgebaute, sprachphilosophisch begründete Widerlegung des logischen Objektivismus eines Bolzano oder Husseri an sich zweifellos ebenfalls berührt. Palägyis Kritik an dem modernen Piatonismus, durch Herder, Max Müller und vermutlich Nietzsche beeinflußt, die bezüglichen Argumente des späteren Wittgenstein und von Eric Havelock in gar mancher Hinsicht vorwegnehmend, ist (...) weitgehend unbekannt und unbeachtet geblieben. Indem der Aufsatz die Prinzipien dieser Kritik nun eben auf die Gegenstandstheorie anwendet, sollen gewisse grundsätzliche Züge der Meinongschen Begriffsbildung in einer geschichtlich angemessenen Weise kritisch beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

In his book The Austrian Mind (1972) W. M. Johnston observes that between 1861 and 1938 a striking number of Austrian intellectuals committed uicide. He also remarks that prior to 1920 suicide was relatively rare among Hungarian intellectuals, and as a possible explanation he refers to their more intensive political activity. The present paper investigates relations between a society's intellectual life and its general suicidal tendencies. In so doing it takes up a central theme of T. G. Masaryk's Suicide as (...) a Social Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization, published in Vienna in 1881. (shrink)

We know a lot more about the epistemology of the net at the time the present summary is being written than we did two years ago when the topic of this collaboration was decided upon. In part, this increase in knowledge is a consequence of the tremendous development of the net itself; in part, however, it is a consequence of our own series of exchanges. I would like, therefore, to say that the project had a positive outcome; but to say (...) this would be misleading. (shrink)

The emergence and development of the humanities were initially bound up with the spread of alphabetic writing, and subsequently with the development of printing; the original task of the nascent humanities disciplines was a thoroughly practical one: that of building up our knowledge about the characteristics of the new media with the aim of exploiting this knowledge in everyday life—for the sake of economic, educational, or political benefits. In particular, the beginnings of philosophy lead us back to the times of (...) the first emergence of alphabetic writing. There is no philosophy in a purely oral culture; Western philosophy is in the first instance, and remains down to the twentieth century, reflection on conceptual relations generated by written language. Today, the printed word is losing its position as the dominant vehicle of communication. Philosophy faces a new educational challenge: that of articulating the logic of multimedia information storage and exchange. (shrink)

_Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy_ is presented for the 60th birthday of professor Christoph Nyíri. The essays presented here for the first time are focused on Austrian intellectual history, and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy – the two main areas of Professor Nyíri’s interests. Typically, the contributors are outstanding scholars of the field, including among others David Bloor, Lee Congdon, Newton Garver, Wilhelm Lütterfields, Joachim Schulte, Barry Smith. The volume is of primary interest for Wittgenstein scholars and those studying (...) the 19th and 20th century Austrian intellectual history. As the volume is presented for Professor Nyíri, the papers collected here reflect his interests in Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy. Beginning with an introductory chapter on Nyiri’s achievements in this field of scholarship, the volume is in four parts. The first part contains essays on Austrian philosophy broadly understood, more precisely on its socio-historical context (Barry Smith and Wolfgang Grassl), on the relation between Marxism and Arnold Hauser’s philosophy and sociology of art (Lee Congdon), and Neurath’s connection to naturalistic epistemologies (Thomas Uebel). The second part presents Wittgenstein's philosophy in context. Jaakko Hintikka’s paper argues that Wittgenstein’s probable dyslexia can be seen as an external influence on and a source of his philosophy. David Bloor discusses Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the context of Edmund Burke’s conservatism, which can be read as a background of Nyiri’s influential interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative philosopher. Newton Garver also touches on the problem of conservatism while discussing passages of _On Certainty_ in the context of Kant, Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Klaus Puhl’s essay connects Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following to Freud’s concept of retroactivity, and argues that rules emerging from empirical regularities can be seen as retroactive constructions. The papers in the third part of the volume offer close readings of Wittgenstein’s works. Rudolf Lüthe offers two readings of Wittgenstein’s criticism of philosophy in the _Tractatus_ can be read in two ways with different consequences, among them is the appearance of philosophy inspired by art rather than the sciences. Joachim Schulte offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of ’natural history’ that can accommodate all of his remarks containing this concept. Herbert Hrachovec discusses the relation of pictorial and linguistic representations in Wittgenstein’s _Nachlass, _arguing that there is no pronounced opposition between the two. The forth part of the book, containing three papers in German, continues the close inspection of Wittgenstein’s later works. Wilhelm Lütterfelds reconstructs Wittgenstein’s philosophy of time as pointing out memory being the very source of time. Katalin Neumer inspects Wittgenstein’s frequent references to photographs in the context of aspect-seeing and compares them with other remarks on theatre, painting, and music. She concludes that there are no philosophically important structural differences between them. Peter Keicher’s paper offers a comprehensive view on Wittgenstein’s prefaces in the context of his various book-projects. The volume ends with a select bibliography of Professor Nyiri’s works. (shrink)

J.C. Nyíri’s work is well-known for his interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative thinker. Nevertheless, his reading of Wittgenstein is only one strand, even if presumably the most influential one, in his general interpretation of Austro-Hungarian philosophy. Therefore his reading of Wittgenstein is best understood if viewed as part of a complex, sociologically inspired picture of Austrian philosophy. In this introductory essay I present Nyíri’s work as an exercise in the sociology of philosophical knowledge, broadly understood, and provide (...) a unified view on his attempt by exploring its various strands. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

There is the tension between, on the one hand, Wittgenstein’s not giving theoretical weight to metaphor, and on the other, his exuberant use of it. On a more fundamental level, there is a straightforward contradiction between Wittgenstein’s claim of the primordial literalness of everyday language, and his stress on the multiplicity and flexibility of language-games. Wittgenstein’s problem was that he did not succeed in making his ideas on metaphor, and indeed his ideas on metaphor and images, converge with the main (...) drift of TS 227 (the so-called ‘Part I’ of the so-called ‘Philosophical Investigations’). It was this divergence, I believe, that prevented him from rounding out his later philosophy. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

In this article we discuss a version of the Robinson property studied recently by Gyenis in, and we present a solution to one of his open problems. We say that a first‐order structure satisfies the Robinson property whenever the union of two non‐trivial partial n‐types over different finite sets is realizable if and only if they are not explicitly contradictory. In his article, Gyenis showed that a universal, homogeneous structure over a language that consists of at most binary relation symbols (...) satisfies the Robinson property if and only if its age has a generalized amalgamation property (the so called prescribed amalgamation property, PAP). We go further and define a series of new kinds of amalgamation properties, APn for any natural number n. Using these properties we can characterize all universal and homogeneous structures that satisfy the Robinson property independently from the arities of relation symbols of the language. (shrink)

Whether understood as an adherence to the given, as an appeal to observe traditions, or as the wish to return to some bygone age, conservatism is bedevilled by paradoxes. The present essay attempts to overcome these paradoxes by putting forward a new conception of conservatism, identifying it as a worldview bent on the preservation of the totality of human knowledge with the aim of enhancing the survival chances of future generations. Conservatism thus understood targets the achievement of real knowledge. Hence (...) by necessity it must associate itself with a realist epistemology and ontology. I argue that any realism worthy of the name is common-sense realism, and that common-sense realism takes into account not merely the verbal level of cognition but also its visual and motor dimensions. The paper devotes special attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work has been intensively discussed in recent decades in the context both of conservatism and realism. (shrink)

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing (...) achievement. (shrink)

The received translation and interpretation of many of the technical terms current in the textile industry of the Roman Empire are inaccurate, because lexicographers have either fought shy of being precise, or have thought that they recognized in the ancient world technical processes which originated at a much later date. The evidence is often equivocal or insufficient, but may still yield details that have been overlooked. The textile expression scutulatus, to take an example, deserves more attention than Blümner has devoted (...) to it. When it refers to the appearance of a garment, Lewis and Short, s.v. scutulatus, translate ‘diamond or lozenge-shaped, checkered’. It seems worth while to attempt a more precise translation, and, if possible, to estimate the significance in context of the goods so designated. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Wolność to idea, w imię której toczy się dzisiaj proces wyzwalania się Europy Wschodniej. Jest to potężna idea, która jednak w obecnych warunkach kryje w sobie również pewne niebezpieczeństwo, ponieważ podczas wyzwalania się spod dyktatury, uniezależniania się od wpływów Rosji i przebijania się ku klasycznym wartościom wolnosci obywatelskiej, można łatwo osiągnąć pozorne zwycięstwo; bezużyteczne zwycięstwo na peryferiach historii. Trzeba sobie obecnie zdac sprawę z tego, że Europa Wschodnia nie jest wcale widownią wydarzeń, mających zasadnicze znaczenie dla świata jako całości. Trzeba (...) uświadomić sobie, że dzisiaj inna, nowa rewolucja odciska swe piętno na historii swiata. Jest to rewolucja technologiczna, która rozgrywa się na calkiem innej płaszczyźnie; rewolucja, która przemienia nowoczesne przemysłowe społeczeństwo w post-nowoczesne społeczenstwo informacji. Przekształca się ono w społeczenstwo, w którym źródłem bogactwa nie jest już surowiec i kapitał, lecz wiedza - dostęp do informacji i umiejętność obchodzenia się z nią. „Nowa cywilizacja wkracza w nasze życie" - tak brzmią znane słowa Alvina Tofflera. (shrink)