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)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical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 It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...)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

Alexander Bogdanov’s first work of philosophy, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature, was fundamentally influenced by Friedrich Engels. As a Marxist philosopher seeking to elaborate a comprehensive, systematic, and scientific worldview appropriate for worker–students, Bogdanov found inspiration in Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which provided him with his monist conception of being and his ‘historical view of nature’ and pointed him toward three critical elements of his work: the monism of motion, Spinoza’s naturalist and determinist system, and Charles Darwin’s conception of (...) natural selection. Bogdanov’s overall goal was to demonstrate that in nature, life, the psyche, and society there is no such thing as self-generated motion; all change occurs because of external action. For the individual and for society this means that existence determines consciousness, and societies evolve as a result of their struggle for existence, which is manifested first and foremost in labor. (shrink)

This edition of G. E. Moore's notes taken at Wittgenstein's seminal Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s provides, for the first time, an almost verbatim record of those classes. The presentation of the notes is both accessible and faithful to their original manuscripts, and a comprehensive introduction and synoptic table of contents provide the reader with essential contextual information and summaries of the topics in each lecture. The lectures form an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein's middle-period thought, covering a broad range (...) of philosophical topics, ranging from core questions in the philosophy of language, mind, logic, and mathematics, to illuminating discussions of subjects on which Wittgenstein says very little elsewhere, including ethics, religion, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume also includes a 1932 essay by Moore critiquing Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, together with Wittgenstein's response. A companion website offers access to images of the entire set of source manuscripts. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's 'middle period' is often seen as a transitional phase connecting his better-known early and later philosophies. The fifteen essays in this volume focus both on the distinctive character of his teaching and writing in the 1930s, and on its pivotal importance for an understanding of his philosophy as a whole. They offer wide-ranging perspectives on the central issue of how best to identify changes and continuities in his philosophy during those years, as well as on particular topics in the (...) philosophy of mind, religion, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mathematics. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this formative period of Wittgenstein's development. (shrink)

Whose values should count – those of patients or the general public – when adopting the quality-adjusted life year framework for healthcare decision making is a long-standing debate. Specific disciplines, such as economics, are not wedded to a particular side of the debate, and arguments for and against the use of patient values have been discussed at length in the literature. In 2012, Sinclair proposed an approach, grounded within patient preference theory, which sought to avoid a perceived unfair discrimination against (...) people with disabilities when using values from the general public. Key assumptions about general public values that beget this line of thinking were that ‘disabled states always tally with lower quality of life’, and the use of standardised instruments means that ‘you are forced into a fixed view of disability as a lower value state’. Drawing on recent contributions to the health economics literature, we contend that such assumptions are not inherent to the incorporation of general public values for the estimation of QALYs. In practice, whether health states of people with disabilities are of ‘lower value’ is, to some extent, a reflection of the health state descriptions that members of the public are asked to value. (shrink)

In the debates concerning the ethics of human enhancement through biological or technological modifications, there have been several appeals to the concept of human dignity, both by those favouring such enhancement and by those opposing it. The result is the phenomenon of ‘dignity talk', where opposing sides both appeal to the concept of human dignity to ground their arguments resulting in a moral impasse. This article examines the use of the concept of human dignity in the enhancement debates and reveals (...) that the problem of dignity talk arises because proponents of various positions tend to ground human dignity in different features of the human individual. These features include species-membership, possession of a particular capacity, a sense of self-worth, and moral behaviour. The article proposes a solution to this problem by appealing to another feature of human beings, namely their being-in-relationship-over-time. Doing so enables us to understand dignity as a concept that affirms the worth of human individuals as complex, multidimensional wholes, rather than as isolated features. Consequently, the concept of human dignity can serve both a descriptive and a normative function in the enhancement debates. At a descriptive level, asking what advocates of a position mean when they refer to human dignity will reveal what aspects of being human they deem to be most valuable. The debate can then focus on these values. The normative function, although it cannot proscribe or prescribe all enhancement, approves only those enhancements that contribute to the flourishing of human individuals as multidimensional wholes. (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)

The current coronavirus pandemic presents the greatest healthcare crisis in living memory. Hospitals across the world have faced unprecedented pressure. In the face of this tidal wave of demand for limited healthcare resources, how are clinicians to identify patients most likely to benefit? Should age or frailty be discriminators? This paper seeks to analyse the current evidence-base, seeking a nuanced approach to pandemic decision-making, such as admission to critical care.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction: Baker on the Private Language Argument Strawson's and Malcolms Interpretations of the Beetle Story Pitcher's, Cook's, and Donagan's Interpretations of the Beetle Story Cohen's Repudiation of the Beetle Story Hacker's and Baker's Interpretations of the Beetle Story.

The paper maps out and responds to some of the main areas of disagreement over the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: (1) Between defenders of a “two Wittgensteins” reading (which draws a sharp distinction between early and late Wittgenstein) and the opposing “one Wittgenstein” interpretation. (2) Among “two-Wittgensteins” interpreters as to when the later philosophy emerged, and over the central difference between early and late Wittgenstein. (3) Between those who hold that Wittgenstein opposes only past philosophy in order to do philosophy (...) better and those who hold that Wittgenstein aimed to bring an end to philosophy and teach us to get by without a replacement. It is shown that each of these debates depends on some deeply un-Wittgensteinian, and quite mistaken, assumptions. It is concluded that Wittgenstein’s most polished writing, most notably in Philosophical Investigations I §§ 1–425, is best understood as a kind of Pyrrhonism which aims to subvert philosophical theorizing, by means of a polyphonic dialogue. Because this delicate balance between philosophical questions and their dissolution is not achieved in most of his other published and unpublished writings, we should be very cautious when using the theories and methods we find in those other writings as a guide to reading the Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

This exceptional collection of twenty-two essays on the philosophical fundamentals of tort law assembles many of the world's leading commentators on this particularly fascinating conjunction of law and philosophy. The contributions range broadly, from inquiries into how tort law derives from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant to the latest economic and rights-based theories of legal responsibility. This is truly a multi-national production, with contributions from several distinguished Oxford scholars of law and philosophy and many prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, (...) and Israel. A provocative closing essay by one of the world's leading moral philosophers illuminates how tort law enables philosophers to observe the abstract theories of their discipline put to the concrete test in the legal resolution of real-world controversies based on principles of right and wrong. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...) to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the _Tractatus_ and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the _Prototractatus_, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called__ __ The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his _Tractatus_. One map displays the structure of the published _Tractatus_; the (...) other lays out the structure of the _Prototractatus_. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations.__ __While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”. (shrink)

Examining the significance of Kant's account of "rational faith," this study argues that he profoundly revises his account of the human will and the moral philosophy of it in his later religious writings.

This paper examines a number of river images which have been attributed to Heraclitus, the ways they are used by Plato and Wittgenstein, and the connection between these uses of imagery and the metaphilosophical issues about the nature and limits of philosophy which they lead to. After indicating some of the connections between Heraclitus’, Plato’s and Wittgenstein’s use of river images, I give a preliminary reading of three crucial fragments from the Heraclitean corpus, associating each with a different river image. (...) Each of these images implies an overall conception of the nature of change and continuity and of the relationship between language and world. I then turn to the use of these images by Plato and Wittgenstein, and explore the relationship between their uses of river imagery and their conceptions of philosophy. To put it slightly differently, this paper is about Plato’s and Wittgenstein’s use of certain Heraclitean ideas. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's principal works, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, are each written in such strikingly unconventional ways that it takes considerable effort to translate them into conventional philosophical writing. The most important aspect of Wittgenstein's style for an understanding of his philosophy is his use of multiple voices, and the way he forces his reader to engage with those voices in order to understand him. This chapter provides an outline of the leading macro‐level answers to the question which of Wittgenstein's (...) writings set out his philosophy, and which set out views he rejected. Wittgenstein's method of composition, revision, and rearrangement, leads from the remarks written down in his wartime notebooks, to a manuscript containing several stages of construction of the Prototractatus, and from there to the polished typescript of the Tractatus. The chapter illustrates how to interpret Wittgenstein's remarks without taking a position on questions about texts and style, voice and authorship. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to (...) be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project. (shrink)

In this article, we first offer a model of design knowledge types and their interrelationships in value sensitive design. Then we demonstrate that value sensitive design is a formative framework, which provides a shaping influence on practice, enables creative appropriation, and supports theory and method development.

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)

This chapter examines the explicit and implicit roles that the concept of beneficence plays in the guidelines that govern biomedical research involving humans. We suggest that the role beneficence is actually playing in the guidelines is more comprehensive than is commonly assumed. The broader conceptualisation of beneficence proposed here clarifies the relationship of beneficence to respect for autonomy. It does this by showing how respect for autonomy is at the service of beneficence rather than in tension with it.