Liberating Language in Linji and Wittgenstein

Our aim in this paper is to explicate some unexpected and striking similarities and equally important differences, which have not been discussed in the literature, between Wittgenstein's methodology and the approach of Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen Buddhism. We say ‘unexpected’ similarities because it is not a common practice, especially in the analytic tradition, to invest very much in comparative philosophy. The peculiarity of this study will be further accentuated in the view of those of the ‘old school’ who see Wittgenstein as a logical positivist, and Zen as a religious excuse for militarism or sadomasochism. If the second claim were true, the following investigation would not only be futile but also impossible. That the first claim, concerning the ‘old school’ perspective on Wittgenstein, is incorrect, we will demonstrate in the ensuing discussion. By now more experts have come to accept this claim and we hope that our comparative perspective will add even more momentum.     

Wittgenstein,Quasi-fideism,and Scepticism

In the discussion of certainties, or ‘hinges’, in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty some of the examples that Wittgenstein uses are religious ones. He remarks on how a child might be raised so that they ‘swallow down’ belief in God (§107) and in discussing the role of persuasion in disagreements he asks us to think of the case of missionaries converting natives (§612). In the past decade Duncan Pritchard has made a case for an account of the rationality of religious belief inspired by On Certainty which he calls ‘quasi-fideism’. Pritchard argues that religious beliefs are just like ordinary non-religious beliefs in presupposing fundamental arational commitments. However, Modesto Gómez-Alonso has recently argued that there are significant differences between the kinds of ‘hinges’ discussed in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and religious beliefs such that we should expect an account of rationality in religion to be quite different to the account of rational practices and their foundations that we find in Wittgenstein’s work. Fundamental religious commitments are, as Wittgenstein said, in the foreground of the religious believer’s life whereas hinge commitments are said to be in the background. People are passionately committed to their religious beliefs but it is not at all clear that people are passionately committed to hinges such as that ‘I have two hands’. I argue here that although there are differences between religious beliefs and many of the hinge-commitments discussed in On Certainty religious beliefs are nonetheless hinge-like. Gómez-Alonso’s criticisms of Pritchard mischaracterise his views and something like Pritchard’s quasi-fideism is the correct account of the rationality of religious belief.

     

Harry Silverstein’s Four‐Dimensionalism and the Purported Evil of Death

Abstract

Amongst those views sometimes attributed to the later Wittgenstein are included both a deflationary theory of truth, as well as a non-factualism about certain regions of discourse. Evidence in favor of the former attribution, it is thought, can be found in Wittgenstein’s apparent affirmation of the basic definitional equivalence of ‘p’ is true and p in §136 of his Philosophical Investigations. Evidence in favor of the latter attribution, it might then be presumed, can be found in the context of the so-called ‘private language argument’, wherein Wittgenstein provides an expressivist treatment of first-person present tense sensation utterances. In this paper, by contrast, I will argue that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is best understood as endorsing neither a non-factualism about sensation utterances, nor a deflationism about truth. Wittgenstein should instead be understood as offering a ‘mixed’ view of sensation utterances according to which some while not others are apt for expressivist treatment. Moreover, he should be thought of as identifying truth-conditions with semantic ‘correctness-conditions’, and thus truth with semantic ‘assertibility’.     

From Metaphysics and Philosophical Theses to Grammar: Wittgenstein's Turn

The paper discusses the question ‘what does Wittgenstein mean by not having theses in philosophy?’ His conception of philosophy without theses, as this is articulated in his later work, is understood as a response to the problem of dogmatism in philosophy and a non‐metaphysical form of philosophy. I argue that although already the Tractatus aims at a philosophy devoid of theses, it involves a relapse back to such theses. Its conception of philosophical clarification involves a particular conception of the essence of propositions. This way the form of the activity of clarification is determined by a philosophical/metaphysical thesis. In his later philosophy Wittgenstein, however, manages to solve this problem. His solution, explained with the help of the metaphor of ‘turning our whole investigation around’, consists of a change in the comprehension of the status of philosophical statements. For instance rules (e.g. definitions) and examples are understood as what he calls ‘objects of comparison’. Such objects of comparison are something that cases of language use (to be investigated with the purpose of clarification) are to be compared with, but the philosopher is not to make the claim that such objects of comparison show what the cases of language use under examination must be. The modality (expressed by ‘must’) is a characteristic of the philosopher's mode of presentation. It should not be claimed to be a feature of his object of investigation (the uses of language to be clarified).     

Styles of Reasoning,Human Forms of Life,and Relativism

The question as to whether Ian Hacking’s project of scientific styles of thinking entails epistemic relativism has received considerable attention. However, scholars have never discussed it vis-à-vis Wittgenstein. This is unfortunate: not only is Wittgenstein the philosopher who, together with Foucault, has influenced Hacking the most, but he has also faced the same accusation of ‘relativism’. I shall explore the conceptual similarities and differences between Hacking’s notion of style of thinking and Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. It is a fact that whether or not the latter entails epistemic relativism is still a controversial question. From my comparative analysis, it will emerge that there are stronger reasons to conclude that Hacking’s notion of style leads to epistemic relativism than there are to reach the same conclusion in the case of Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. This point will be at odds with the anti-relativistic stance that Hacking has taken in his more recent writings.     

Religion and Madness

The question I try to answer in this paper is: How should we distinguish mad from sane religious belief? After looking at the clear-cut but opposed answers of Freud and Jung, I then examine the modern psychiatric answer, particularly as presented in the DSM IV. After arguing that each of the three answers is unsatisfactory, I look at what I take to be the more promising approach of Con Drury, Wittgenstein’s friend and biographer, in an essay called “Madness and Religion,” where, drawing on the religious histories of Joan of Arc, George Fox and Tolstoy and three of his own psychiatric patients, Drury suggests that there is no objective yet ethical way to make the distinction. This leads to my own answer, which is that the best we can do is to distinguish mad from neurotic religious belief; and hence that the safest position, although not the most comfortable, is the neurotic one.     

The End(s) of Philosophy: Rhetoric, Therapy and Wittgenstein's Pyrrhonism

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical‐therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy.     

Wittgenstein Studies and Contemporary Pyrrhonism

Interpretation of Wittgenstein’s statement ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ and consequences of rule-following paradox is the topic of this article. The revision of Wittgensteinian approach to the relations between speech and mind, and approaches to the speech by Vygotsky and Austin allow approving the disagreement with Wittgenstein and exhibit the cases when is necessary ‘to break silence and speak’. Argument is based on the hermeneutical approach to the skeptical image of Wittgenstein studies that disclose the meaning of hypothetic relevance between performative utterances and impulses generated by inner speech. Wittgenstein’s ideas are demonstrated as the contemporary version of a Pyrrhonism. Classical skepticism intensifies procedures for justification of philosophical knowledge, because philosophy tries to disprove skeptical claims. Wittgenstein studies play approximately the same role. Interpretation of the proposition ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ in a view of performative utterance allow coordinating the inner philosophical speech made by Wittgenstein, and the speech made by his commentators and critics.     

Wittgenstein and the Phenomenological Movement: Reply to Monk

Abstract

Monk’s ‘The Temptations of Phenomenology’ examines what the term ‘Phänomenologie’ meant for Wittgenstein. Contesting various other scholars, Monk claims that Wittgenstein’s relation to ‘Phänomenologie’ began and ended during 1929. Monk only partially touches on the question of Wittgenstein’s relation to the phenomenological movement during this time. Though Monk does not mention this, 1929 was also the year in which Ryle and Carnap turned their critical attention toward Heidegger. Wittgenstein also expressed his sympathy for Heidegger in 1929. Furthermore, though in 1929 Wittgenstein agrees with the early Husserl on relating logic and science to phenomenology, it is not clear that they mean the same thing by either logic or phenomenology, or that they agree on what the relation between the two should be.     

理雅各宗教思想中的中西融合倾向

伦敦会传教士、汉学家理雅各(1815-1897)受其家乡苏格兰的神学思想和非国教家庭背景的影响而产生了独立、开放的宗教意识。尽管他以自身的信仰为本位,但在对中国文化的诠释和评价上表现出了明显的中西宗教融合的倾向,这使他在西方传教士中处于颇为孤立的境地。     

The Middle Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frege

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse Wittgenstein’s 1929–1932 notes concerning Frege’s critique of what is referred to as old formalism in the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein disagreed with Frege’s critique and, in his notes, outlined his own assessment of formalism. First of all, he approvingly foregrounded its mathematics-game comparison and insistence that rules precede the meanings of expressions. In this article, I recount Frege’s critique of formalism and address Wittgenstein’s assessment of it to show that his remarks are not so much a critique of Frege as rather a defence of the formalist anti-metaphysical investment.     

Editorial: minding the (explanatory) gap

‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, says the robust and bluff believer, Francis Bacon, as the studio manager reaches to switch off the sound on his Elizabethan cultural perceptions, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind... God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it...’. ‘It is true’, he goes on, ‘that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion’. Bacon assumes that the atheist rejects ‘religion’, not just belief in God: no middle term is readily available to him. There is a lingering nuance that ‘atheism’ is ‘shallow’ in its rejection of ‘religion’, which we can register, and even deploy, without thereby endorsing theism: can now insist that the rejection of theism is not yet atheism. Or can we? This is familiar enough stuff for Buddhists, who seem typically in their ‘non-theism’ to represent an agnosticism of indifference rather than of perplexity. But we need to recall why it might seem contentious, and revisiting the scene of religious perplexity can be salutary, since religious dialogue is not apologetic opposition but imaginativeengagement.     

On Wittgenstein's Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy

In 1931 Wittgenstein wrote: ‘the limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the fact that corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence without simply repeating the sentence’. Here, Wittgenstein claims, ‘we are involved?…?with the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy’. This paper shows how this remark fits with Wittgenstein's early account of the substance of the world, his account of logic, and ultimately his view of philosophy. By contrast to the currently influential resolute reading of the Tractatus, the paper argues that the early Wittgenstein did not aim at destroying the idea of a limit of language, but that the notion lies at the very heart of Wittgenstein's early view. In doing so, the paper employs and defends the Kantian interpretation of Wittgenstein's early philosophy.     

Brown

In Remarks on Colour Wittgenstein discusses a number of puzzling propositions about brown, e.g. that it cannot be pure and that there cannot be a brown light. He does not actually answer the questions he asks, and the status of his projected ‘logic of colour concepts’ remains unclear. I offer a real definition of brown from which the puzzle propositions follow logically. It is based on two experiments from Helmholtz. Brown is shown to be logically complex in the sense that the concept of brown can be ‘unpacked’ or resolved into simpler concepts. If my solutions to Wittgenstein's puzzles are the right ones, then science does bear upon the ‘logic of colour concepts’, and the contrast between logic and science which Wittgenstein sets up is a false one. At best it will appear as the contrast between the demands of logic and the demands of a particular kind of scientific theory and a particular mode of scientific theorizing. The solutions to the puzzles about brown are distinguished from psychological explanations, and the paper ends by suggesting what it was in his own doctrine that prevented Wittgenstein from answering the questions he had set himself.     

Truth in the Investigations

According to a widespread interpretation, in the Investigations Wittgenstein adopted a deflationary or redundancy theory of truth. On this view, Wittgenstein’s pronouncements about truth should be understood in the light of his invocation of the equivalences ‘p’ is true = p and ‘p’ is false = not p. This paper shows that this interpretation does not do justice to Wittgenstein’s thoughts. I will be claiming that, in fact, in his second book Wittgenstein is returning to the pre-Tractarian notion of bipolarity, and that his new development of this notion in the Investigations excludes the redundancy-deflationary reading. Wittgenstein’s thoughts about truth are instead compatible with another interpretative option: Wittgenstein remains faithful to his methodological pronouncements, and he merely presents us with (grammatical) platitudes about the notions of “true” and “false”.

     

The Tractatus and the Riddles of Philosophy*

The notion of the riddle plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. By examining the comparisons he draws between philosophical problems and riddles, this paper offers a reassessment of the aims and methods of the book. Solving an ordinary riddle does not consist in learning a new fact; what it requires is that we transform the way we use words. Similarly, Wittgenstein proposes to transform the way philosophers understand the nature of their problems. But since he holds that these problems are ultimately unsolvable, rather than attempting to solve the riddles of philosophy, he aims to dissolve them.     

“Metaphysics Without Ethics is Blind”: The Legacy of Hilary Putnam

Two convictions underlie the following article. The first is that Hilary Putnam has been one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a philosopher who was able to propose groundbreaking ideas in virtually every area of philosophy. As the reader will see, the topics he tackled in his writings included questions of philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of mind, metaethics, the fact-value dichotomy, the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later thought, the question of relativism, the analysis of rationality, the analysis of religious experience, the character of Jewish philosophy, the interpretation of pragmatism, the elucidation of the concept of truth, the question of realism, the relationship between mind and the world. The second is that the changes some of his positions underwent, far from being a point of weakness—as some critics have sometimes felt compelled to claim—reveal the freshness and genuineness of Putnam’s way of philosophising and at the same time the essence of philosophical discussion itself.     

The Normalization of Non-religion: A Reply to James Lewis

James Lewis challenged the assertion that religious ‘nones’ are becoming more like the general population. The evidence he offers is insufficient to make his case, however: the generational dynamics of religious change are invisible if one takes a cross-sectional snapshot of the entire population, undifferentiated by age. In addition, write-in responses on census and survey forms do not provide a good basis for studying the characteristics of the very large and growing number of people who are non-religious.     

Knowing How to Talk About What Cannot Be Said: Objectivity and Epistemic Locatedness

I take it that A. W. Moore is right when he said that ‘Wittgenstein was right: some things cannot be put into words. Moreover, some things that cannot be put into words are of the utmost philosophical importance’. There is, however, a constant threat of self-stultification whenever an attempt is made to put the ineffable into words. As Pamela Sue Anderson notes in Re-visioning gender in philosophy of religion: reason, love, and epistemic locatedness, certain recent approaches to ineffability—including Moore’s approach—attempt to find a ‘third way’ of engaging with it, which displaces the traditional dichotomy between the effable and the ineffable, that is, between what can be said and what cannot be said. In this way, they seek to overcome the threat of self-stultification mentioned above. Still, one important challenge to this kind of approach, which Moore addresses, is, as he puts it, ‘to show how it is possible’ to talk about the ineffable ‘without belying its very ineffability’. His solution to the problem of the ineffable takes the notion of ‘knowing how’ to play a central role, and is formulated in accordance with his commitments to truth and objectivity. A further important challenge to the kind of approach to the ineffable Moore proposes concerns the issue of objectivity. In Re-visioning gender in philosophy of religion, Anderson draws attention to our epistemic locatedness, which brings in questions concerning, for example, gender and culture. Pursuing this view, the challenge is to show ineffable insight without ignoring our epistemic locatedness and, in particular, the role of gender in the conceptualisation and imagery through which we seek to come to terms with the ineffable. My paper deals with these challenges. By engaging with Moore’s and Anderson’s discussions of the ineffable, I examine how it is possible to talk philosophically about the ineffable, without breaking a commitment to enlarged or objective thinking, and without ignoring the epistemic locatedness of thinking.