129. The Philosophy of Wittgenstein

The purpose of this topic is to enable you to study some of the key ideas of one of the best-known and most influential philosophers of the 20th Century: Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It deals primarily with logic and the philosophy of language and responds to, and is deeply informed by, the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein argues that representation is fundamentally pictorial; a proposition is a picture of the state of affairs it represents. And he claims that the propositions of logic do not describe a world of logical objects and states of affairs; rather, they are tautologies. The Tractatus deals more briefly with a number of other topics, including solipsism, the nature of ethics, and the meaning of life. Like his later work, the Tractatus is composed in a distinctive and memorable style, and is informed by a distinctive conception of the nature and role of philosophy.

The works principally covered in this section are Philosophical Investigations, The Blue and Brown Books, and On Certainty. Wittgenstein covers a great range of issues, focusing largely on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. In philosophy of language, key topics include meaning and understanding, the relation between language and non-linguistic activities, and the nature of rules and rule-following. In the philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein is especially famous for his discussion of the idea of a private sensation language: a language whose words would refer to a person's immediate private sensations', and which only that person could understand. Other topics include the nature of the self, introspection, and the intentionality or representational character of mental states. In his writings on epistemology, Wittgenstein responds to philosophical discussions of scepticism. He argues that our most fundamental beliefs are founded in action rather than on intellectual justifications. And he explores the distinctive role in a system of belief, or world-picture', of those framework' or hinge' propositions that are taken for granted in all our beliefs but for which we typically cannot provide any non-question-begging justification.