Abstracts
Thomas Ricketts:
Over 30 years ago, in her seminal paper, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” Cora Diamond introduced an approach to TLP subsequently dubbed the resolute reading that denies that the body of that work intimates or points towards ineffable truths about logic, language, and ontology. I consider the prospects for a ‘moderate’ resolute reading of TLP by examining the place for and role of the general sentence-form in such a reading.
Ben Ware:
This lecture moves through three stages. First, it highlights some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory; and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply as a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of what I will call philosophical modernism. Second, this notion of philosophical modernism is applied to the Tractatus: one of the Tractatus’ key modernist achievements is to provide not a new modernist theory of language, but rather a critique of modernist theories of language, and thus a critique of the kinds of linguistic bewitchment and alienation that we often encounter in modernist literary works. Third, the lecture concludes by looking at a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the ‘apocalyptic view of the world’: while these remarks appear in his later post-War notebooks, they can nevertheless, I argue, shed interesting new light on the conception of philosophy that we encounter in the Tractatus.
Oskari Kuusela:
In this talk, I argue that the key to the Tractatus’ philosophy of logic and to unlocking the Tractatus’ philosophical significance is what Wittgenstein calls his Grundgedanke, his fundamental thought or basic idea. The interpretational strategy that takes the Grundgedanke as its starting point is contrasted with two traditional (Anscombe and Hacker) and one more recent (therapeutic) interpretational approach that appears unable to do justice to the novelty of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of logic on which its relevance for contemporary philosophy arguably depends.
Göran Sundholm:
It is customary to view Logic as “the Art and Science of Reasoning”. Accordingly, from Aristotle onwards, inference has been a key notion in logical theory. A main tradition in the History of Logic characterizes the validity of inference in terms of epistemic containment: an inference is valid when the conclusion is “contained” in the premises. Another main tradition takes validity of inference as the incompatibility between truth of the premises and falsity of the conclusion. Under simple classical conditions, this amounts to the preservation of truth, under all variations, from premises to conclusion.
My talk will position Tractarian logical doctrine at the point of intersection between the containment and variational traditions, and point to some analogies with respect to the logical positions of (Kantian) Idealism and Austrian Realism.
Sami Pihlström:
Examining the “ethics” of the Tractatus in the “transcendental” tradition of interpretation, it may be argued that Wittgenstein was concerned with understanding the very conditions for the possibility of adopting an ethical stance – just as he was concerned with the necessary conditions for the possibility of linguistic representation of the world. None of these transcendental conditions can be theoretically explicated in language, and famously there are, according to the Tractatus, no meaningful ethical propositions at all. This transcendental account of the ethical – limiting the area of moral concern “from within” our always already being committed to ethics in our lives, insofar as we have a life, a world, or language at all – is, I will suggest, a major aspect of the significance of the Tractarian picture of ethics. In order to appreciate the importance of the transcendental account of the ethical, we need to explore a number of key ideas of Wittgenstein’s views: his rejection of the significance of moral rewards and punishments, his characterizations of ethics as lying beyond anything that can be said in language, his conception of happiness as harmony with the world, his remarks on the metaphysical subject and solipsism, as well as the question about the relation between the transcendental and the transcendent.
Benjamin de Mesel:
The main aim of the talk is to shed light on some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about ethics in the Tractatus. How are we to understand, for instance, that ‘there can be no ethical propositions’ (TLP 6.42) and that ‘ethics is transcendental’ (TLP 6.421)? I will seek to clarify these remarks by linking them to similar remarks about logic, aesthetics and religion. First, I will argue that logic, aesthetics, religion and ethics, as Wittgenstein understands them, are conditions of the possibility of meaning. Something can have meaning only if it has a form, if it is somehow limited and can be seen as a whole (a proposition, a work of art, a life). Second, I will point at some dissimilarities between ethics, logic, aesthetics and religion in the Tractatus. Third, because I will focus on the parts of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein talks about ethics, I will briefly discuss Conant’s claim that these parts are not more directly about ethics than other parts of the work.
Kevin Cahill:
Michael Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways vividly describes the pivotal role played by Rudolf Carnap in the formation of today’s philosophical landscape. For it was Carnap’s reaction to Heidegger that both widened and cemented the fissure between “Analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. My talk concerns another philosophical fissure involving Carnap, one whose roots are shown in the difference between his understanding of the account of the propositions of logic in the Tractatus and that of Wittgenstein himself. After laying out the difference between Wittgenstein and Carnap on tautology, I explicate Wittgenstein’s rejection of what would soon become Carnap’s metalogical stance in Logical Syntax of Language. I do this in terms of Wittgenstein reception of Frege, the significance for Wittgenstein of the sign/symbol distinction, and his views of ordinary language already in the Tractatus. Finally, I draw some connections between Heidegger and later Wittgenstein on ordinary language that distinguish them from both the dominant tradition in analytic philosophy of language and from much contemporary post-modernist views of language.
Hans-Johann Glock:
The Tractatus revolves around the connection between two central topics—the preconditions of symbolic representation and the nature of logic-cum-philosophy. Proper philosophy is an activity, namely of revealing the hidden logical forms that allow language to represent reality. At the same time, the purpose of such logical analysis consists in overcoming metaphysics. In the subsequent development of analytic philosophy, these two ideas parted company—one of them resulted in a programme most closely associated with Davidson, namely a theory of meaning for natural languages that yields metaphysical corollaries, the other in the activity of dissolving the conceptual confusions of metaphysics without employing logical analysis, initiated by the later Wittgenstein. My presentation pursues these historical lines of influence. But the ultimate aim is a substantive one, namely to establish whether the two projects can be kept apart. I contend that the hope of engaging in anti-metaphysical dialectic without relying on logico-conceptual analysis of some kind falls prey to a ‘myth of mere method’.
Dimitris Gakis:
If anniversaries may be considered as a chance for a dialogue with history, then the centenary of the publication of Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung makes the examination of Wittgenstein’s early work in its broader historical context quite apposite. Thus, this talk will mainly engage with the issue of how Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and its author relate to their times. More specifically, I will, first, highlight some of the connections that can be drawn between Wittgenstein’s early philosophical outlook and various – sometimes converging, other times diverging, or even contradicting – aspects of modernism and modernity. Then, I will discuss in some more detail the peculiar character of the Tractatus as a modernist critique of modernity, i.e. as an attempted critique of (certain qualities of) modernity from within. Finally, I will conclude with a few thoughts on if (and how) the Tractatus may be considered still relevant today.
Eli Friedlander:
It is well known that as a young man Wittgenstein was taken by Schopenhauer’s work. But, what is less clear is the extent to which Wittgenstein appropriated and transformed The World as Will and Representation, the extent to which it remained a presence in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. So as to orient our reading of the Tractatus with this context in mind, we will ask, whether and how the duality of aspects, which Schopenhauer expresses as “The world is my representation” and “The world is my will” relates to the single moment in the Tractatus expressed there as “The world is my world” (5.641)
About the speakers
Thomas Ricketts:
Thomas Ricketts received the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has taught at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, and Northwestern University. He is now professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He has authored papers in the history of analytic philosophy on Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine.
Ben Ware:
Ben Ware is the Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts at King’s College London. He is the author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the ‘Tractatus’ and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Living Wrong Life Rightly: Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination (Palgrave, 2017); and editor of Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson, 2019). He is currently completing a new book on extinction and philosophy, which will be published next year by Verso.
Oskari Kuusela:
Oskari Kuusela is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Struggle against Dogmatism (Harvard UP 2008) and Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy (Oxford UP 2019), and the co-editor of Wittgenstein's Interpreters (Blackwell 2007), the Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford UP 2011), Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Routledge 2018), and Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein (Routledge 2019).
Göran Sundholm:
Göran Sundholm read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a schoolboy in 1971. Now an emeritus, after studies at Lund, Uppsala, and Oxford, he held the Chair of Logic at Leiden University for 32 years. He has written widely on the philosophy of mathematical constructivism, and, by contrast, on the historical development of logical realism.
Sami Pihlsröm:
Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also, among other things, the President of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He has published widely on, e.g., pragmatism, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and transcendental philosophy. While he is not primarily a Wittgenstein scholar, Wittgensteinian issues frequently come up in his work on these and related topics. His recent books include Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy (Helsinki University Press, 2020), Why Solipsism Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Sincerity, Normativity, and Humanism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Benjamin de Mesel:
Benjamin De Mesel is Visiting Professor at RIPPLE (Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven), Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He is the author of The Later Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy (Springer, 2018) and co-editor, with Oskari Kuusela, of Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2019). He has published primarily on Wittgensteinian moral philosophy and on P.F. Strawson’s approach to moral responsibility. For more information, see his websites (KU Leuven, Academia.edu, PhilPeople).
Kevin Cahill:
Kevin Cahill received his Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Virginia. Since 2002 he has been a member of the philosophy department at the University of Bergen, Norway. For many years his research was focused almost entirely on the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, both early and late. Much of his research for the last 10 years or so has also been focused on the philosophy of the social sciences and on philosophical anthropology. His books include The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity (Columbia, 2011), Wittgenstein and Naturalism, edited with Thomas Raleigh (Routledge, 2018), and most recently Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture (Routledge, 2021). Kevin Cahill is from San Francisco.
Hans-Johann Glock:
Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the National Centre for Competence in Research Evolving Language. He was rewarded a Humboldt Research Prize in 2015. Among his books are A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell 1996) and What is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press 2008) and A Companion to Wittgenstein (Wiley 2017, co-edited with John Hyman). He has also published in leading international journals on topics in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of animal minds and the history of analytic philosophy. A collection of some of his essays on Wittgenstein is due to be published by Anthem under the title Normativity, Meaning and Philosophy.
Dimitris Gakis:
Dimitris Gakis received his PhD degree from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2012. From 2016 until 2018 he was a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Marx and (post-)Marxism, (post-)modernity and (post-)modernism, metaphilosophy, and biopolitics. He has published, among others, on the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the connections between Wittgenstein and (post-)Marx(ism) in journals such as Constellations and Philosophy & Social Criticism.
Eli Friedlander:
Eli Friedlander teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He writes on aesthetics, early analytic philosophy and on Kant and his aftermath in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. Among his publications are Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (2000), J.J Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (2005), Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (2012) and Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (2015), all published at Harvard University Press. Friedlander is currently at work on a book on the unity of language, nature and history in Walter Benjamin’s thought.