This is a tale of two readings, and of a non-encounter, the missed encounter between two philosophers whose legacy, as has been noted, might jointly define the scope of problems and questions left open, in the wake of the twentieth century, for philosophy today. In particular, I will discuss today two remarks, one by Wittgenstein on Heidegger, and the other by Heidegger on Wittgenstein; as far ...

G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did’’ would be ‘‘absurd’’. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore’s discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions b...

Listening to Unreason: Foucault and Wittgenstein on Reason and the Unreasonable Man

It is well known that Russell abandoned his multiple-relation theory of judgment, which provided the philosophical foundations for PM ’s ramified typetheory, in response to criticisms by Wittgenstein. Their exact nature has remained obscure. An influential interpretation, put forth by Sommerville and Griffin, is that Wittgenstein showed that the theory must appeal to the very hierarchy it is in...

RésuméLes discussions contemporaines du concept fécond de forme vie ont permis mettre en évidence à quel point le lui-même est essentiel chez Wittgenstein, structurant la continuité entre premier et second Wittgenstein. En passant « logique » au vie, Wittgenstein entend renoncer une unité pour passer famille structures apparentées. Mais ne disparaît pas – contraire. Le sur lequel...

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models—for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as “cognitivists” claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language ...

[This is a late but not final draft of my chapter in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind, eds.