Reza Mosmer
Abstract
In the Notebooks and final pages of the Tractatus Wittgenstein identifies “good” with “happy”, and the latter with “being in harmony with the world”. He makes a distinction between two notions of self: Empirical and Transcendental. While the former stands in causal ...
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In the Notebooks and final pages of the Tractatus Wittgenstein identifies “good” with “happy”, and the latter with “being in harmony with the world”. He makes a distinction between two notions of self: Empirical and Transcendental. While the former stands in causal connection with the World, the latter is causally independent of the world. The subject matter of ethics, Wittgenstein claims, is not actions of the self, but its attitudes (of approval or disapproval) towards the world. Moreover, he argues that it is merely the attitude of the transcendental self and its state of “Willing” that can be judged from an ethical point of view. In this paper, I will argue that this account of ethics faces a formidable difficulty: to be a legitimate subject matter of ethics, the self ought to be transcendental and at the same time have some attitude (acceptance or disapproval) towards the world. I argue that the transcendental subject cannot meet both requirements. Finally, I use Backström (2018) and McGuinness (2002), as examples, to explain how this difficulty has led to misreadings of Wittgenstein’s account of ethics in the Tractatus.
Reza Mosmer
Abstract
In his later philosophical reflections, Wittgenstein, criticizes his early views in the Tractatus. Since the publication of Philosophical Investigations commentators and philosophers have made various attempts to explain the nature and the scope of these criticisms and revisions. Paul Horwich in his ...
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In his later philosophical reflections, Wittgenstein, criticizes his early views in the Tractatus. Since the publication of Philosophical Investigations commentators and philosophers have made various attempts to explain the nature and the scope of these criticisms and revisions. Paul Horwich in his recent work “Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy” attempts to give a new and systematic account of these revisions. In the current study, I aim to examine some themes in Horwich’s reading of later Wittgenstein. I shall first give a rough description of the metaphysics of the Tractatus. Then, I discuss Horwich’s picture of the notion of Tractarian “object”. This will be followed by a discussion of Horwich’s picture of some of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the Tractatus ontology in the third section. In this section, I will explain through three criticisms (T3), (T4), and (T6). The paper will end up with a series of objections to Horwich’s (T3), (T4), and (T6). I argue that his account of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the Tractatus, as they are expressed in Philosophical Investigations, is exegetically problematic and philosophically incoherent.
