wittgenstein is one of the most prominent philosophers in the twentieth century; his views in both periods of his thinking have influenced many issues, including religion. his view on religion is expressed in his tractatus logico-philosophicus. in terms of the picture theory of meaning and the distinction between the meaningless and meaningful propositions, he has made an attempt to show that t...

James Conant, a proponent of the ‘New American Wittgenstein’, has argued that the standard interpretation of Wittgenstein is wholly mistaken in respect of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics and the attendant conception of nonsense. The standard interpretation, Conant holds, misascribes to Wittgenstein Carnapian views on the illegitimacy of metaphysical utterances, on logical syntax and gram...

1. Is assertion a natural kind? Wittgenstein is often thought to have challenged the view that assertion is an important theoretical category in a philosophical view of language. One of Wittgenstein’s main themes in the early sections of the Investigations is that philosophy misses important distinctions about the uses of language, distinctions hidden from us by ‘the uniform appearances of word...

The early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein aimed at outlining a set of postulates about the use of language to describe the world. This work bears a remarkable resemblance to the methodologies developed for data modelling. This paper discusses the features and constraints of object-oriented data modelling with UML class diagrams in light of the early theories developed by Wittgenstein and first publ...

Central to a new, or 'resolute', reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus is the idea that Wittgenstein held there an 'austere' view of nonsense: the view, that is, that nonsense is only ever a matter of our failure to give words a meaning, and so that there are no logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Resolute readers tend not only to ascribe such a view to Wittgenstein, but als...

This paper is excerpted from a manuscript in which James Conant argues that Wittgenstein’s famous closing description of sentences of the Tractatus as nonsensical draws on a conception of nonsense at odds with the conceptions at play in a couple of standard interpretations. Conant describes these interpretations as (i) positivist interpretations which depict Wittgenstein as furnishing a method ...

In recent years, analytic philosophy has gained a new historical self-consciousness. A considerable amount of work, both historically informed and philosophically subtle, is being done now on its origins and development. This is especially true for early analytic philosophy (roughly 1880-1930) and the corresponding works of Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. In this collection, fifteen pr...

In 1931, when writing about those who had inspired him, Wittgenstein singled out Boltzmann; nobody seems to know why, however. Most commentators have ignored this remark, while a few tried guess what the inspiration might been by searching popular and philosophical writings of Boltzmann. article, I hypothesize that may Boltzmann’s scientific research program from his famous 1877 article. This h...

The paper investigates the role played by ethical deliberation and ethical judgment in Wittgenstein's early thought in the light of twentieth-century German legal philosophy. In particular the theories of the phenomenologists Adolf Reinach, Wilhelm Schapp, and Gerhart Husserl are singled out, as resting on ontologies which are structurally similar to that of the Tractatus: in each case it is ac...