Preface
Wittgenstein says that the nature of his investigation is such that he could not proceed from one subject to another in a natural, smooth sequence.
What exactly is the problem here? - There are plenty of philosophy books that are organised topic-by-topic or organised into chapters.
Wittgenstein's explanation is that his investigation "compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought".
Questions:
- Is this to do with his conception of philosophy as 'assembling reminders'? - Is it that philosophy is inevitably involved in tackling (conceptual) problems as they arise??
- Is it something to do with the way in which 'perspicuous representations' of particular concepts are laid out?
- Is it that he doesn't want to 'spare other people the trouble of thinking'?
- All of the above?
Also in the preface Wittgenstein explicitly contrasts his way of thinking in the PI with the Tractatus and says that he made 'grave mistakes' in his earlier work. - This seems to me to be of relevance to the debate with the 'new Wittgensteinians' - if the Tractatus were wholly nonsense then how could it contain grave mistakes?
Don't both old and new Wittgensteinians vary between themselves on how much of TLP is nonsense?
ReplyDeleteI have to admit I haven't read the 'new Wittgenstein' stuff for quite a while. I looked up Hackers' papers on them this morning and I notice that according to his account they all accept that everything except the 'frame' is complete nonsense.
ReplyDelete("Diamond extracts from these considerations three salient theses. First, all the propositions of the book are nonsense, except for the frame. Second, they are plain nonsense, no different from ‘A is a frabble’, with one proviso. Some of them are ‘transitional ways of talking’ in a ‘dialectic’ that culminates in their whole-hearted rejection. They are the
(nonsensical) rungs of the ladder up which we must climb before we reject them in toto. Hence, thirdly, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown but not said is itself part of the nonsense that is to be discarded. These three theses are common ground to most of the proponents of this interpretation of the Tractatus."
I'll have to read them again myself and see to what extent what he has said is correct.
- Anyhow - it is at least some kind of evidence that Wittgenstein thought that he was rejecting something substantial in rejecting his own earlier work. - The first part of the Investigations is dedicated to rejecting the Augustinian picture and he presumably has his own earlier position in view.
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Was%20he%20trying%20to%20whistle%20it.pdf
ReplyDelete