Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical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 It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...)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)

This chapter examines the developments that led from Wittgenstein’s early logical atomist view that all meaningful discourse can be analyzed into logically independent elementary propositions to his later philosophy. In 1929, Wittgenstein rejected logical atomism for a “logical holist” conception of language as composed of calculi, formal systems characterized by their constitutive rules. By the mid-1930s, he had rejected the model of a calculus, emphasizing that language is action within a social and natural context — more like a game than (...) a calculus — and that rule-governed behavior is dependent on a background of practices which cannot themselves be explicitly formulated as rules. The discussion of these central developments for the emergence of his later “practical holism” focuses on changes in his conception of the nature of measurement and the role of mind and mental processes in linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Unlike most books on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language begins from the initial articulation of his thoughts in his first drafts, conversations, and lectures, and attends closely to the process of revision that led to the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. This introductory chapter provides information about the nature of the Wittgenstein papers, summarizes the rationale for reading his work in this way, and outlines the reading of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that this approach yields. This discussion on the (...) development of Wittgenstein’s thought emphasizes the role of his changing conception of the nature of experience and its relationship to the world, the closely related problem of the relationship between ordinary language and its analysis, his later conception of the role of analogies in generating — and dissolving — philosophical problems, the parallels with psychoanalysis, and the variety of philosophical methods employed in his later philosophical writing. There is also an overview of a central theme of the book as a whole: the contrast Wittgenstein drew between “ordinary” and “philosophical” ways of looking at things when he wrote the Tractatus, and how that contrast was transformed in his subsequent writing, focusing on his contrast between “primary” and “secondary” worlds and his notion of a “phenomenological language”. (shrink)

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)

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 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)

Otto Weininger was one of the most controversial and widely read authors of fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was both condemned for his misogyny, self-hatred, anti-semitism and homophobia, as well as praised for his uncompromising and outspoken approach to gender and morality. For Wittgenstein Weininger was a 'remarkable genius'. He repeatedly recommended Weininger's Sex and Character to friends and students and included the author on a short list of figures who had influenced him. The purpose of this new collection of essays is (...) to explore the various ways in which Wittgenstein absorbed and responded to Weininger's ideas. Written by an international team of experts on Wittgenstein and Weininger, the volume is especially timely in the light of recent translations of Weininger's work and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of 20th century philosophy, and the literary and cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna. (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)

Semiotic objections to markets urge us not to place a good on the market because of the message that doing so would send. Brennan and Jaworski reject them on the grounds that either the contingent semiotics of a market can be changed or the weakness of semiotic reasons allows them to be ignored. The scope of their argument neglects the impure semiotic objections that claim that the message a market sends causes, constitutes, or involves a nonsemiotic wrong. These are the (...) most compelling class of semiotic objections and are the kind actually advanced in the literature. Rather than focusing on the necessity or contingency of a market's semiotics, we should instead attend to a semiotic objection's most important feature: its purity or impurity. (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)

Philosophical analysis of ecological theories has lagged behind the study of evolutionary theory. The semantic conception of scientific theories, which has been employed successfully in the analysis of evolutionary theory, is adopted here to analyse ecological theory. Two general problems in ecology are discussed. One arises from the continued use of covering law models in ecology, and the other concerns the applicability of ecological theory in conservation biology. The semantic conception of ecological theories is used to resolve these problems.

There are some things money literally cannot buy. Invariably transformable goods are such things because when they are exchanged for money, they become something else. These goods are destroyed rather than transferred in monetary exchanges. They mark out an impassable limit beyond which money and the market cannot reach. They cannot be for sale, in the strongest and most literal sense. Variably transformable goods are similar. They can be destroyed when offered or exchanged for money, but they differ in their (...) ability to sometimes emerge from financial transactions intact. -/- Analyzing transformable goods reveals informative and surprising results. Like other goods and commodities, they are agent relative, defined by the way particular agents value them. Inside the same transaction, a good could be transformable for one agent and not another, depending on how and what these agents value in the transaction. Applying this conceptual framework can reveal otherwise obscure facets of existing and future debates about the ethics and limits of markets. To demonstrate this, the framework is here applied to Richard Titmuss’s arguments about markets in blood, clarifying and illuminating some of his most confusing claims. Applying this framework to other debates may reveal even more striking results. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Understanding biological systems in terms of scientific materialism has arguably reached a frontier, leaving fundamental questions about their complexity unanswered. In 1998, Friedrich Cramer proposed a general resonance theory as a way forward. His theory builds on the extension of the quantum physical duality of matter and wave to the macroscopic world. According to Cramer’ theory, agents constituting biological systems oscillate, akin to musical soundwaves, at specific eigenfrequencies. Biological system dynamics can be described as “Symphonies of Life” emerging from the (...) resonance (and dissonance) of eigenfrequencies within the interacting collective. His theory has potential for studying biological problems of increasing complexity in a fast‐changing Anthropocene from a new and transdisciplinary angle. Despite data becoming increasingly available for analyses, Cramer's theory remains ignored and therefore untested a quarter century after its publication. This paper discusses how the theory can move to quantitative assessments and application. Cramer's general resonance theory deserves revival. (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)

Although the importance of spirituality is increasingly recognized in clinical medicine, spirituality is rarely mentioned in the practice, literature, or training programs of global health. To understand the role of spirituality in global health practice and identify factors that influence and limit its expression, I initiated conversations and informal interviews with more than 300 global health leaders, students, and practitioners during 2010-2014. Four spiritual themes or challenges emerged: compassion at a distance; dichotomous thinking; conspiracy of silence; and compulsion to save (...) the world. Practitioners expressed strong interest in bringing spirituality more fully into global health discourse, which could help the field realize its potential. (shrink)

The Late Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria has been neglected in studies of theories of mind and language in Post-Aristotelian Philosophy. Philo's dualism distinguishes immateriality and materiality in our language (logos). His arguments about the nature of mind and his explanations of the relation of speech to the mind, divine or human, draw heavily from Stoics and Platonists. Philo appears to present contemporary Platonist, anti-Stoic arguments that mind is of a different nature than body. Also, Philo deserves credit as (...) our first detailed, surviving expositor of the view that meanings are thoughts, presented to the world in speech. (shrink)

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)

Locke’s property rights are now usually understood to be both fundamental and strictly negative. Fundamental because they are thought to be basic constraints on what we may do, unconstrained by anything deeper. Negative because they are thought to only protect a property holder against the claims of others. Here, I argue that this widespread interpretation is mistaken. For Locke, property rights are constrained by the deeper ‘fundamental law of nature,’ which involves positive obligations to those in need and confines the (...) right to excess property within circumstances where it is not needed to preserve human life. (shrink)

Preaching should be a speaking of Scripture and not about Scripture.