This is a daring and unusual book. It presents a selection of Wittgenstein’s texts without engaging in commentary or criticism, and yet it openly interprets. Guided by the conviction that Wittgenstein is a phenomenologist of the life-world, Brand intersperses textual citations with close paraphrase. While managing to preserve the resolutely unsystematic and evocative style of Wittgenstein’s texts, the paraphrases give a phenomenological tone to many familiar passages and gradually succeed in unfolding a tacit inner unity to his work. The book’s (...) organization is thematic rather than chronological: texts from different periods complement and confront one another in a succession of chapters which focus on such core themes as certainty, world, temporality, meaning, rule, understanding, and givenness. Brand does not attempt to dissipate the tensions between earlier and later works, although he does not include those earlier conceptions that Wittgenstein unequivocally rejected. However, the interpretative paraphrases do tend to soften the conflicts by suggesting the different perspectives from which apparently contradictory statements have been made. Brand attributes the "destructive" and therapeutic style of much of the late work to the phenomenological insight, that authentic comprehension lies hidden beneath the distortions generated by inappropriate theories and by the confusion of language games. (shrink)

A study of the influences which helped to shape the language and the logic of Charles Darwin from 1837 to 1844, the period in which he composed the first drafts of the theory of natural selection. The textual basis of this book is provided by two sets of notebooks which deal with the "transmutation of species" and "metaphysics... morals and speculations on expression." That Darwin preferred metaphors borrowed from ordinary language to the technical idiom of other scientific theories Manier attributes (...) to the influence of both Dugald Stewart’s philosophy of natural language and William Wordsworth’s conviction that nature is of itself expressive. The theme that nature has its own language suggested a continuity between the processes of the inanimate world and the spiritual capacities of man and hence provided a congenial philosophic context for the elaboration of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin’s rhetorical style thus reinforces his own theory, because the highest human activities are explainable in images taken from nature. These metaphors had both a cognitive and an affective dimension, since they enabled his readers to see the evidence of natural history in a new light, and served to soften the shocking theological implications of this new perspective. The idea of nature as an outcome of struggle among random variants obviously clashed with the contemporary religious view of nature as God’s handiwork, but the metaphor of selection personifies nature and suggests the possibility of a divinity immanent in nature. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Darwin was quite impressed by Wordsworth’s version of natural religion. William Paley’s theodicy also intrigued the young Darwin. Paley argued that chance was compatible with divine design, since God’s moral purposes could be represented through the metaphor of a fair lottery where the chances are evenly distributed but the results unforeseeable. Darwin took this concept of chance out of its apologetical context and employed it in the construction of his scientific theory. (shrink)