The Disenchantment of Nonsense: Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus

This paper aims to argue against the resolute reading, and offer a correct way of reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus. According to the resolute reading, nonsense can neither say nor show anything. The Tractatus does not advance any theory of meaning, nor does it adopt the notion of using signs in contravention of logical syntax. Its sentences, except a few constituting the frame, are all nonsensical. Its aim is merely to liberate nonsense utterers from nonsense. I argue that these points are either not distinctive from standard interpretations or incorrect. Instead, the Tractarian elucidations help to shed light on the nature of language and logic, and introduce the correct method in philosophy. Philosophy deals with philosophical utterances and Tractarian elucidations by pointing out that they are nonsensical. By doing this, one is helped to see that what they appear to be saying is shown by significant propositions saying something else.     

Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Nonsense

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: “Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.” In this paper I show how Wittgenstein developed this insight in On Certainty. My principal aim is to show that this is a logical insight, that it is bound up with the distinction between saying and showing, and that one misses the point of On Certainty if one reads it, as some commentators have, in epistemological terms. Throughout all of this I pay special attention to why Wittgenstein thought that skepticism is nonsensical, and what it might mean to say that philosophy is a logical investigation.     

A lemma science of mind: the potential of the Kegon (Flower Ornament) Sutra

The paper argues for a new perspective on the relationship between Buddhism and European psychology, or sciences of the mind, based in the Kegon Sutra, a text that emerged in the early stages of Mahayana Buddhism (3^rd ‐ 5^th century CE). The basis of European science is logos intellection, formalized by Aristotle as following three laws: the law of identity, the law of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Logic in the Buddhist tradition, by contrast, is based in lemma (meaning to understand as a whole not with language, but with intuition). Lemma‐based science born in the Buddhist tradition shows that rational perception is possible even without the three laws of logos. The Kegon Sutra, which explains what Buddha preached only a week after he attained enlightenment, is unified under the logic of lemma and can be seen as an effort to create a ‘lemma science of the mind’. The fundamental teaching of the Kegon Sutra is explored, and its principles are compared with primary process thinking and the unconscious as outlined by Freud and Jung. Jung's research of Eastern texts led him to create a science of the mind that went further than Freud: his concept of synchronicity is given by way of example and can be seen anew within the idea of a lemma‐based science.     

The Arabico-Islamic background of Al-Fārābī's logic

This paper examines al-Fārābī's logical thought within its Arabico-Islamic historical background and attempts to conceptualize what this background contributes to his logic. After a brief exposition of al-Fārābī's main problems and goals, I shall attempt to reformulate the formal structure of Arabic linguistics (AL) in terms of the ontological and formal characteristics that Arabic logic is built upon. Having discussed the competence of al-Fārābī in the history of AL, I will further propose three interrelated theses about al-Fārābī's logic, in terms of which I will attempt to redefine it: the logico-linguistic conception, the project of logicization, and nuclear logic. The final question that will arise is how Aristotle's logic could be built upon AL, which has a nature contrary to logic. The present paper also contributes to examining our traditional research habits in Arabic studies.     

Heidegger: The Role of Logic in his Thought

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger's statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misundersanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger's is a barely recognizable caricature of it. We shall, therefore, attempt to determine precisely what Heidegger understands by logic. When he “attacks” logic, as he did in the inaugural lecture, as well as in many other of his writings, what “logic” is he attacking? The word “logic” is, after all, placed in quotation marks which would seem to indicate some special sense. This paper will argue that if one takes logic as it has traditionally been understood and practiced that one is forced to the conclusion that it is incompatible with Heidegger's “way of thought” (Denkweg). This rejection of logic, however, does not deliver him up to irrationalism or the enthronement of blind instinct in place of reason, as some of his critics have charged. Neither is it a self-indulgent refusal to achieve clarity and precision which ends in a kind of mystical pseudo-poetry. Rather, it will be argued, it represents a quite valid, and indeed rich, approach to Being, though certainly not a “logical” one in the traditional sense.     

Wittgenstein on Dreaming and Skepticism

In this paper I aim to elucidate Wittgenstein’s claim that the so-called dream argument is senseless. Unlike other interpreters, who understand the sentence “I am dreaming” as contradictory or self-defeating, I intend to elucidate in what sense one should understand it as senseless or, more precisely, as nonsensical. In this sense, I propose to understand the above-mentioned claim in light of Wittgenstein’s criticism of skepticism from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus to his last writings. I intend to show that the words “I am dreaming” are nonsensical in the same sense as the alleged proposition “There are physical objects” or the expression of doubt about the existence of external objects.

     

A Debate About Anderson's Logic

This article is about the history of logic in Australia. Douglas Gasking (1911–1994) undertook to translate the logical terminology of John Anderson (1893–1962) into that of Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1921) Tractatus. At the time Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), and more recently David Armstrong, recommended the result to students; but it is reasonable to have misgivings about Gasking as a guide to either Anderson or Wittgenstein. The historical interest of the debate Gasking initiated is that it yielded surprisingly little information about Anderson's traditional (syllogistic or Aristotelian) logic and its relation to classical (first-order predicate or Russellian) logic, the ostensible topic; but the materials now exist to interpret Anderson's logic in classical logic, possibly as an algebra of classes. This would be of little interest to contemporary logicians, but it might shed some light on Anderson's philosophy.     

Wittgenstein on Showing What Cannot Be Said

The distinction between saying and showing in Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus is not self‐refuting, unbelievable or nonsensical. It makes good sense given Wittgenstein's equation of saying with communicable information and showing with necessarily true thought. The key to understanding his thinking is his claim in the Preface that unassailable and definitive truths are expressed in the book, and the subsidiary assumption that asserting empty truths is nonsensical. His conception of pictures, propositions, logic, mathematics, mathematical physics, mysticism, the inexpressible and solipsism as showing is of a piece with his conception of necessary/a priori truths as tautologies broadly understood.     

The Mania of Existence: Klein,Winnicott, and Heidegger's Concept of Inauthenticity

This paper offers a new interpretation of Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) in Being and Time. It breaks from the “conformity interpretation” of inauthenticity, according to which the anonymity of the inauthentic person is due to her conformity to das Man. Rather, it argues that the anonymity of the inauthentic person is due to “existential mania” – a state in which a person denies her death and anxiety, understands her abilities to be limitless, and is perpetually active. It shows how this existential mania – and the anonymity to which it gives rise – is analogous to the mania described by the object relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Finally, drawing on D. W. Winnicott's discussion of mania, it shows how both the inauthentic person's conformity to das Man, and her existential mania, give rise to anonymity.     

THE POLITICAL NATURE OF DOCTRINE: A CRITIQUE OF LINDBECK IN LIGHT OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

This article argues that the power of religion to shape experience presupposes the mobilization of religious identity through social opposition. This thesis is developed through a critique of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. The article first examines Lindbeck's thesis that religion shapes experience in light of Talal Asad's critique of Geertz's concept of religion. It argues that in order to understand how ‘religion’ shapes experience we must look outside the immanent sphere of cultural‐religious meaning that Lindbeck, following Geertz, identifies with ‘religion’. Religious authority ultimately derives from the recognition of a social group. Next, looking at the nature of doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's thesis that Christian identity is essentially relational, it argues that church doctrines function to mobilize group identity through social opposition. In this respect they resemble the mobilizing slogans of political discourse more than, as Lindbeck's theory proposes, the grammatical rules governing Wittgensteinian language games.     

Hobbes on the Order of Sciences: A Partial Defense of the Mathematization Thesis

Accounts of Hobbes's “system” of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomatic‐deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes's statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window‐dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes's Elements of Philosophy on the model of a mixed‐mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid's Elements of Geometry. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early‐modern system construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering in a novel way the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.     

The Art of Nature: Hegel and the Critique of Judgment

This essay examines the reasons for Hegel's frequently professed claim that Kant's Critique of Judgment simultaneously reveals the internal limits of critical philosophy and opens the door to his own system of speculative idealism. It evaluates Hegel's contention that the conceptions of aesthetic experience, organic purposiveness, and the intuitive intellect developed in the third Critique together conspire to undermine the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the theories of nature and freedom advanced in the first and second Critiques . Finally it explains how Hegel understands his logic and real philosophy as a realist and quasi-naturalistic alternative to Kant's subjective idealism, one that purports to generate a system of categories adequate not only to dead matter but also to organic life and free self-conscious spirit.     

Philosophy and reflection: A critique of Frank Welz’s sociological and “processual” criticism of Husserl and Schutz

Frank Welz’s Kritik der Lebenswelt undertakes a sociology of knowledge criticism of the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz that construes them as developing absolutist, egological systems opposed to the “processual” worldview prominent since the modern rise of natural science. Welz, though, misunderstands the work of Schutz and Husserl and neglects how their focus on consciousness and eidetic features pertains to the kind of reflection that one must undertake if one would avoid succumbing to absolutism, that uncovers the presuppositions of the processual worldview itself, and that secures a domain distinctive of philosophy over against sociology. Finally, Welz’s charge that Schutz favors a Neo-Kantian social scientific methodology contradictory to his phenomenology neglects the levels of Schutz’s discourse and ignores how the Weberian ideal-typical approach can be subsumed within phenomenology.     

Completeness: from Gödel to Henkin

This paper focuses on the evolution of the notion of completeness in contemporary logic. We discuss the differences between the notions of completeness of a theory, the completeness of a calculus, and the completeness of a logic in the light of Gödel's and Tarski's crucial contributions.We place special emphasis on understanding the differences in how these concepts were used then and now, as well as on the role they play in logic. Nevertheless, we can still observe a certain ambiguity in the use of the close notions of completeness of a calculus and completeness of a logic. We analyze the state of the art under which Gödel's proof of completeness was developed, particularly when dealing with the decision problem for first-order logic. We believe that Gödel had to face the following dilemma: either semantics is decidable, in which case the completeness of the logic is trivial or, completeness is a critical property but in this case it cannot be obtained as a corollary of a previous decidability result. As far as first-order logic is concerned, our thesis is that the contemporary understanding of completeness of a calculus was born as a generalization of the concept of completeness of a theory. The last part of this study is devoted to Henkin's work concerning the generalization of his completeness proof to any logic from his initial work in type theory.     

Husserl,Givenness, and the Priority of the Self

This article argues that, despite its apparent radicality, Husserl's later, genetic phenomenology ends up confirming and consolidating a very orthodox transcendental egology. First, the article reconstructs an Husserlian phenomenology of givenness; but then, by considering the ambiguous role of intuition, it also establishes (a) the continued prestige of a 'classical' transcendental subject, and (b) the way in which a denial of ontology allows Husserl's transcendental subject to sublate the provocative challenge of primal Gegebenheit . Overall, the article argues that Husserl is subject to a deep egological faultline, brought about by the self-consciously anti-ontological nature of his project: 'givenness without Being', it suggests, necessitates a prioritized and privileged self.     

"This is Simply What I Do"

Wittgenstein's discussion of rule‐following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called “the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date”. But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce's distinctive scientific hierarchy. Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly salient in this context. pertains to general predication. Rule‐following scepticism, the paper suggests, results from running together two questions: “How is it that I can project rules?”, and, “What is it for a given usage of a rule to be right?”. In Peircean terms the former question, concerning the irreducibility of general predication (to singular reference), must be answered in phenomenology, while the latter, concerning the difference between true and false predication, is answered in logic. A failure to appreciate this distinction, it is argued, has led philosophers to focus exclusively on Wittgenstein's famous public account of rule‐following rightness, thus overlooking a private, phenomenological dimension to Wittgenstein's remarks on following a rule which gives the lie to Kripke's reading of him as a sceptic.     

Anything is possible

This paper criticises necessitarianism, the thesis that there is at least one necessary truth; and defends possibilism, the thesis that all propositions are contingent, or that anything is possible. The second section maintains that no good conventionalist account of necessity is available, while the third section criticises model theoretic necessitarianism. The fourth section sketches some recent technical work on nonclassical logic, with the aim of weakening necessitarian intuitions and strengthening possibilist intuitions. The fifth section considers several a prioristic attempts at demonstrating that there is at least one necessary proposition and finds them inadequate. The final section emphasises the epistemic aspect of possibilism.     

The Relation between Formal and Informal Logic

The issue of the relationship between formal and informal logic depends strongly on how one understands these two designations. While there is very little disagreement about the nature of formal logic, the same is not true regarding informal logic, which is understood in various (often incompatible) ways by various thinkers. After reviewing some of the more prominent conceptions of informal logic, I will present my own, defend it and then show how informal logic, so understood, is complementary to formal logic.     

Gay Marriage and the Paradox of Existence

Helping students or workshop participants radically expand their critical-thinking horizons beyond conventional dualistic bounds on the subject of gay marriage is difficult. The paradoxical logic of Nagarjuna's tetralemma is one means to do so. They learn not only this new investigative tool and deepen their understanding of the perspectives surrounding gay marriage, but have to examine the degree to which they limit their own capacity to think.