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...

This thesis offers a critical overview of the debate on Wittgenstein’s remarks on Gödel. These remarks—which have since their publication been the source of much controversy—were said by early commentators to show that (a) Wittgenstein did not understand the role consistency plays in the proof of Gödel’s theorem and logic in general, and that (b) he mistakenly thought that a natural language in...

Some of Wittgenstein’s early remarks on the connection between logic and the world leave a highly anticonventionalist impression. For example, in the Tractatus, he says that the world is “in logical space” (TLP 1.13) and that logic “pervades the world” (TLP 5.61). At a first glance, this seems to imply that the rules of logic are determined by the way the world is. And this, in turn, seems to b...

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...