The influence of Heinrich Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus has been studied for decades, but it has never become a mainstream topic in the Wittgensteinian literature. This paper focusses on Tractarian notions of objects, elementary facts and elementary sentences and discusses their similarities with Hertz's concepts of mass, its constituents and their mechanistic images. As the paper demonstrates, the Hertzian context provides some fruitful interpretational leads concerning several controversial ideas endorsed by early Wittgenstein, namely propositional (...) analysis, logical independence of elementary facts, logical independence of elementary sentences, and modalities. (shrink)

Dans cet article, j’essaie de montrer que le dépassement et le rejet du dogmatisme sont un aspect décisif du changement dans la pensée de Wittgenstein qui a eu lieu au début des années 30, quand il commence à mettre en valeur l’autonomie de la grammaire du langage et à parler d’images grammaticales et de jeux de langage en tant qu’objets de comparaison. En examinant certains traits fondamentaux de ce changement, je mettrai en évidence l’impulsion et les idées décisives que Wittgenstein (...) a reçues des nouveaux développements dans les mathématiques et la science naturelle du début du 20e siècle.It will be argued that the overcoming and avoiding of dogmatism is a decisive feature of the change in Wittgenstein’s thinking that takes place in the beginning of the 1930’s when he starts to emphasise the autonomy of the grammar of language and to talk about grammatical pictures and language games as objects of comparison. By examining certain crucial features in this change in Wittgenstein’s thinking, it will be shown that he received decisive impulses and ideas from new developments in mathematics and natural science in the early 20th century. (shrink)

My propositions serve as elucidations in this way: he who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up over them. (He must, so to speak,...

This article is an investigation of parallel themes in Heinrich Hertz's philosophy science and Kant's theory of schemata, symbols and regulative ideas. It is argued that Hertz's "pictures" bears close similarities to Kantian "schemata", that is, they are rules linking concepts to intuitions and provide them with their meaning. Kant's distinction between symbols and schemata is discussed and related to Hertz's three pictures of mechanics. It is argued that Hertz considered his own picture of mechanics (the "hidden mass" picture) as (...) symbolic in a different way than the force and energy pictures. In the final part of the article it is described how Harald Høffding soon after the publication of Hertz's Principles of Mechanics developed a general theory of analogical reasoning, relying on the ideas of Hertz and Kant. (shrink)

This article is an investigation of parallel themes in Heinrich Hertz's philosophy science and Kant's theory of schemata, symbols and regulative ideas. It is argued that Hertz's "pictures" bears close similarities to Kantian "schemata", that is, they are rules linking concepts to intuitions and provide them with their meaning. Kant's distinction between symbols and schemata is discussed and related to Hertz's three pictures of mechanics. It is argued that Hertz considered his own picture of mechanics as symbolic in a different (...) way than the force and energy pictures. In the final part of the article it is described how Harald Høffding soon after the publication of Hertz's Principles of Mechanics developed a general theory of analogical reasoning, relying on the ideas of Hertz and Kant. (shrink)