Part II of this contribution makes available materials preserved of G. H. von Wright’s hitherto unknown edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s last writings (1949–51) from 1967–68. The edition was never published. The underlying MS material (MS 169–177) was, instead, published in four different edited volumes in 1969, 1977 and 1992. Part I, an introduction to the archival items, contextualizes von Wright’s edition historically, presents a reconstruction of its structure, compares it with the published volumes and discusses reasons for its abandonment.
{"title":"G. H. von Wright's Unpublished Edition of Wittgenstein's \"Last Writings\": Editors' Preface and Other Materials, ca. 1967–68","authors":"L. Jakola","doi":"10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3598","url":null,"abstract":"Part II of this contribution makes available materials preserved of G. H. von Wright’s hitherto unknown edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s last writings (1949–51) from 1967–68. The edition was never published. The underlying MS material (MS 169–177) was, instead, published in four different edited volumes in 1969, 1977 and 1992. Part I, an introduction to the archival items, contextualizes von Wright’s edition historically, presents a reconstruction of its structure, compares it with the published volumes and discusses reasons for its abandonment.","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"135 10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86487499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning, eds. James Conant and Sebastian Sunday","authors":"João Esteves da Silva","doi":"10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3609","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76128539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In one of his late notebooks containing remarks on the philosophy of psychology, Wittgenstein states in passing: ‘If someone can believe in God with complete certainty, why not in Other Minds?’ (MS 137, 67a). In this paper, I introduce and explain some of the assumptions and observations behind this remark. In doing so, I give an example of what I describe as an ‘indirect or derived philosophy-of-religion reading strategy’, which highlights some of Wittgenstein’s very late thoughts on the grammar of religious belief and language. The crucial observation in Wittgenstein’s remark is the existence of a family resemblance between ‘the foundation’ of the religious attitude and belief on the one hand, and the complex ‘pattern of our experience that is hard to describe’, and which forms the basis of our reactions to and understanding of other persons’ behaviour and psychical states (MS 174,2) on the other. Thus this paper draws attention, firstly, to the fact that, in his late work, Wittgenstein emphasises that our use of concepts to determine other people’s feelings and states is comparable to certain religious uses of language, and secondly, to some of the familial connections between these uses of language.
{"title":"‘The swaying scaffolding’","authors":"Peter K. Westergaard","doi":"10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/NWR.V0I0.3586","url":null,"abstract":"In one of his late notebooks containing remarks on the philosophy of psychology, Wittgenstein states in passing: ‘If someone can believe in God with complete certainty, why not in Other Minds?’ (MS 137, 67a). In this paper, I introduce and explain some of the assumptions and observations behind this remark. In doing so, I give an example of what I describe as an ‘indirect or derived philosophy-of-religion reading strategy’, which highlights some of Wittgenstein’s very late thoughts on the grammar of religious belief and language. The crucial observation in Wittgenstein’s remark is the existence of a family resemblance between ‘the foundation’ of the religious attitude and belief on the one hand, and the complex ‘pattern of our experience that is hard to describe’, and which forms the basis of our reactions to and understanding of other persons’ behaviour and psychical states (MS 174,2) on the other. Thus this paper draws attention, firstly, to the fact that, in his late work, Wittgenstein emphasises that our use of concepts to determine other people’s feelings and states is comparable to certain religious uses of language, and secondly, to some of the familial connections between these uses of language.","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79570355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the discourses that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works (or both), the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena (so we might say) at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term (such as “nature” or “biology), or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s (for instance, from the terminology of logic to that of psychoanalysis, or back again). Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it.
{"title":"Language, Ethics and \"The Merits of Being Involved in Meaning\". Review of Maria Balaska: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment","authors":"P. Livingston","doi":"10.15845/nwr.v0i0.3567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v0i0.3567","url":null,"abstract":"Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the discourses that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works (or both), the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena (so we might say) at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term (such as “nature” or “biology), or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s (for instance, from the terminology of logic to that of psychoanalysis, or back again). Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it. ","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75400420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The theme of change is one of the most prominent traits of Wittgenstein’s later work, and his writings have inspired many contemporary thinkers’ discussions of changes in e.g. concepts, ‘aspect-seeing’, practices, worldviews, and forms of life. However, Wittgenstein’s conception of the dynamics of change has not been investigated in its own right. The aim of this paper is to investigate which understanding of the dynamics of changes can be found in the later Wittgenstein’s work. I will argue that what emerges is a rich and complex picture that has the potential to aid our thinking in politics and elsewhere when developing strategies for creating changes. It can do so both as source of inspiration and by countering tempting, yet ultimately problematic ways of conceptualizing change like the hope for transforming harmful traditions and social practices with the help of a general explanatory theory of the fundamental dynamics of changes.
{"title":"Winds of Change: The Later Wittgenstein’s Conception of the Dynamics of Change","authors":"Cecilie Eriksen","doi":"10.15845/nwr.v0i0.3515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v0i0.3515","url":null,"abstract":"The theme of change is one of the most prominent traits of Wittgenstein’s later work, and his writings have inspired many contemporary thinkers’ discussions of changes in e.g. concepts, ‘aspect-seeing’, practices, worldviews, and forms of life. However, Wittgenstein’s conception of the dynamics of change has not been investigated in its own right. \u0000The aim of this paper is to investigate which understanding of the dynamics of changes can be found in the later Wittgenstein’s work. I will argue that what emerges is a rich and complex picture that has the potential to aid our thinking in politics and elsewhere when developing strategies for creating changes. It can do so both as source of inspiration and by countering tempting, yet ultimately problematic ways of conceptualizing change like the hope for transforming harmful traditions and social practices with the help of a general explanatory theory of the fundamental dynamics of changes.","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78623546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The development of G. H. von Wright’s work in ethics is traced from the early 1950s to the publication of The Varieties of Goodness in 1963, with special focus on the influences stemming from Wittgenstein’s later thought. In 1952, von Wright published an essay suggesting a formal analysis of the concept of value. This attempt was soon abandoned. The change of approach took place at the time von Wright started his work on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and tried to articulate the main lines of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen in spoken and written form. This preoccupation with Wittgenstein led to a new approach to value judgments in an 1954 article, which shows strong late-Wittgensteinian influences on methodical as well as stylistic levels. Some traces of the 1954 approach are still visible in The Varieties of Goodness, while the stylistic imitations and allusions have mostly been dropped. Furthermore, von Wright’s approach in The Varieties is wider in scope, aiming at a broad overview of the phenomenon von Wright calls the “varieties of goodness”. But new conncections to the later Wittgenstein also seem to emerge: the idea of a "perspicuous presentation" of ethical concepts and the will to make philosophy relevant for "kulturens större sammanhang".
{"title":"Wittgenstein and G. H. von Wright’s path to The Varieties of Goodness (1963)","authors":"L. Jakola","doi":"10.15845/nwr.v9i0.3546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v9i0.3546","url":null,"abstract":"The development of G. H. von Wright’s work in ethics is traced from the early 1950s to the publication of The Varieties of Goodness in 1963, with special focus on the influences stemming from Wittgenstein’s later thought. In 1952, von Wright published an essay suggesting a formal analysis of the concept of value. This attempt was soon abandoned. The change of approach took place at the time von Wright started his work on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and tried to articulate the main lines of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen in spoken and written form. This preoccupation with Wittgenstein led to a new approach to value judgments in an 1954 article, which shows strong late-Wittgensteinian influences on methodical as well as stylistic levels. Some traces of the 1954 approach are still visible in The Varieties of Goodness, while the stylistic imitations and allusions have mostly been dropped. Furthermore, von Wright’s approach in The Varieties is wider in scope, aiming at a broad overview of the phenomenon von Wright calls the “varieties of goodness”. But new conncections to the later Wittgenstein also seem to emerge: the idea of a \"perspicuous presentation\" of ethical concepts and the will to make philosophy relevant for \"kulturens större sammanhang\".","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82440139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Simo Säätelä, G. Bengtsson, Cato Wittusen, Oskari Kuusela
{"title":"Note from the Editors and Prepublication Open Review Information","authors":"Simo Säätelä, G. Bengtsson, Cato Wittusen, Oskari Kuusela","doi":"10.15845/NWR.V9I0.3569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/NWR.V9I0.3569","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79729608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-19DOI: 10.15845/nwr.v8i1-2.3535
J. Mácha
Review of Kuusela, Oskari. Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Re-examining the Roots and Development of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
{"title":"Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Re-examining the Roots and Development of Analytic Philosophy, by Oskari Kuusela","authors":"J. Mácha","doi":"10.15845/nwr.v8i1-2.3535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v8i1-2.3535","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Kuusela, Oskari. Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Re-examining the Roots and Development of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87229954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Clearing philosophical ground for diagnoses of the contemporary ‘post-truth’-problematic, this article discusses the systematic and ineliminable ambivalence of claims to truth in public discourse and collective life generally, where truth cannot ultimately be disentangled from untruth. Truth becomes a problem in the relevant sense only where matters are morally-existentially charged, so that acknowledging truth threatens, e.g., loss of self-respect, and self-deception becomes tempting, individually and collectively. To the extent that our life is marked by injustice and destructiveness, it is necessarily also marked by systematic falsification, a conspiracy to deny the truth about it, about us. Collective life exhibits pervasive hostility to interpersonal (moral) understanding, which is repressed through collectively established fake ‘understandings’ and regimes of respectability. The fact/opinion and fact/value distinctions function as defences against understanding, while meaning and truth are seen as things to be determined rather than understood, and the concept of representatability, how things can be made to appear, becomes central. However, standard philosophical views on truth, meaning and morality render the problematic sketched here invisible, because they effectively move – as Wittgenstein arguably realised – wholly within the collective perspective that needs to be problematised. Keywords: moral understanding, self-deception, collective life, representation, conspiracy theories, political corrrectness
{"title":"Pre-Truth Life in Post-Truth Times","authors":"Joel Backström","doi":"10.15845/NWR.V8I0.3504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15845/NWR.V8I0.3504","url":null,"abstract":"Clearing philosophical ground for diagnoses of the contemporary ‘post-truth’-problematic, this article discusses the systematic and ineliminable ambivalence of claims to truth in public discourse and collective life generally, where truth cannot ultimately be disentangled from untruth. Truth becomes a problem in the relevant sense only where matters are morally-existentially charged, so that acknowledging truth threatens, e.g., loss of self-respect, and self-deception becomes tempting, individually and collectively. To the extent that our life is marked by injustice and destructiveness, it is necessarily also marked by systematic falsification, a conspiracy to deny the truth about it, about us. Collective life exhibits pervasive hostility to interpersonal (moral) understanding, which is repressed through collectively established fake ‘understandings’ and regimes of respectability. The fact/opinion and fact/value distinctions function as defences against understanding, while meaning and truth are seen as things to be determined rather than understood, and the concept of representatability, how things can be made to appear, becomes central. However, standard philosophical views on truth, meaning and morality render the problematic sketched here invisible, because they effectively move – as Wittgenstein arguably realised – wholly within the collective perspective that needs to be problematised. \u0000Keywords: moral understanding, self-deception, collective life, representation, conspiracy theories, political corrrectness","PeriodicalId":31828,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Wittgenstein Review","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79148046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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