Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Reza Mosmer

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Institute of Cognitive Sciences, Tehran, Iran

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 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.

Keywords

• Tractatus
• Philosophical Investigations
• Wittgenstein
• Simple object
• name