Bilder, Klänge und Gedanken als Orientierungsfaktoren: Anhaltspunkte bei Nietzsche und Wittgenstein

Images, sounds and thoughts as orientation factors: Clues with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. – The paper demonstrates how images and sounds become clues both for Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in order to understand sentences and thoughts (I). Nietzsche pursues the question of how we orient ourselves not only through thoughts but also through images and sounds from his philosophical beginnings and, by doing so, he draws horizon lines for answering this question (II). In approximately these leeways, Wittgenstein asks how thinking, instead of simply thinking itself, shows itself: he explores the possibilities of methodically describing this showing itself and finds them in analogizing the understanding of a sentence on the one hand and the understanding of an image and of a piece of music on the other (III).

The Unutterable as a Mode of Utterance: Wittgenstein’s Two Remarks on “Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn” by Ludwig Uhland

Uhland’s poem has found fame as a litmus test in philosophical debates about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Like many works of art, the poem is dynamically produced in its effort to resolve a fundamental conflict. The poem’s conflict arises from the difficulty to connect the count’s life and his daydream. In the end, the poem as a whole serves to embody a critique of the capacity of a daydream to recover memories faithfully. Wittgenstein makes two remarks in a 1917 letter to Paul Engelmann that pertain to the poem. They are to be read in keeping with a resolute reading (James Conant, Cora Diamond) of the Tractatus; Wittgenstein’s first remark imitates the very movement of thought we find in the poem – and in doing so Wittgenstein makes good on his claim to talk about the poem: “the unutterable is, – unutterably – contained in what is uttered.” His second remark has, thus far, played no role in literature – Wittgenstein speaks of Engelmann’s dreams, yet he does not explicitly formulate the poem’s bearing on them. Here, too, he reenacts, in the formulation of his remark, the core conflict of the poem. My interpretation of the poem, finally, distinguishes three interpretive approaches (symbolistic, realistic, critical) in order to capture the understanding of the poem embodied in Wittgenstein's remarks.

Philosophische Superlative und die Maschine als Symbol

Philosophical Superlatives: Machines as Symbols. – In this paper, my chief aim is to present a close reading of parts of a central sequence of remarks from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (191 – 197, cf. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, I, 121 – 130). The apparent theme of this sequence is the idea of a ‘machine as a symbol of its mode of operation’. Obviously, this idea requires a good deal of clarification, and the present paper attempts to elucidate relevant passages which, in their turn, are discussed in the hope of succeeding in spelling out some of the points Wittgenstein has in mind in appealing to the picture of a machine as a symbol of its mode of operation. What will serve as a kind of framework of these elucidations is the notion of a philosophical superlative appealed to by Wittgenstein in a number of remarks that can be seen as particularly characteristic of his later thought. In the course of developing the idea of a philosophical superlative six aspects, or types, of superlatives are distinguished, and the last of these is found to shade into the image of a machine as symbol in a way that allows us to draw on various superlatives in striving to clarify the train of thought underpinning the sequence PI 191 – 197 and related passages.

Can Wittgenstein’s Philosophy account for Uncertainty in Introspection?

What happens when we are uncertain about what we want, feel or whish for? How should we understand uncertainty in introspection? This paper reconstructs and critically assess two answers to this question frequently found in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein: indecision and self-deception (Hacker 1990, 2012; Glock 1995, 1996). Such approaches seek to explain uncertainty in introspection in a way which is completely distinct from uncertainty about the ‘outer world’. I argue that in doing so these readings fail to account for the substantial role the intellect seems to play in the process of resolving such uncertainties. I then attempt to show that Wittgenstein’s remarks connecting psychological vocabulary, behaviour and public criteria (e. g. PI 2009: 580) provide alternative ways for thinking about uncertainty in introspection which allow for a substantial role of the intellect.

The Linguistic Idealism Question: Wittgenstein’s Method and his Rejection of Realism

After the publication of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work the question was raised whether that work involved idealist tendencies. The debate also engaged Wittgenstein’s immediate students. Resistance to presumed idealist positions had been ideologically central to G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and other representatives of realism and early analytic philosophy. While Wittgenstein disagreed with them in key respects, he accepted their tendentious definition of ‘idealism’ at face value and bequeathed it to his students. The greatest flaw in the Realists’ view on idealism was their assumption of symmetry between realist and idealist approaches. For Realists, the chief task of philosophy was to establish what kinds of thing exist, and they took Idealists to offer an alternative account of that. However, the Idealists’ guiding concern was rather to investigate the subjective conditions of knowledge. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method was closer to theirs than to that of the Realists. This is especially obvious in his rejection of Moore’s idea of immediate knowledge. Ultimately, the trouble with Wittgenstein was not that he endorsed any kind of idealist ontology. It was his refusal to deliver the expected realist ontological messages on the supposed question of whether reality is independent of language or otherwise.

The Interpretation of Probability in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In this paper, I propose an assessment of the interpretation of the mathematical notion of probability that Wittgenstein presents in TLP (1963: 5.15 – 5.156). I start by presenting his definition of probability as a relation between propositions. I claim that this definition qualifies as a logical interpretation of probability, of the kind defended in the same years by J. M. Keynes. However, Wittgenstein’s interpretation seems prima facie to be safe from two standard objections moved to logical probability, i. e. the mystic nature of the postulated relation and the reliance on Laplace’s principle of indifference. I then proceed to evaluate Wittgenstein’s idea against three criteria for the adequacy of an interpretation of probability: admissibility, ascertainability, and applicability. If the interpretation is admissible on Kolmogorov’s classical axiomatisation, the problem of ascertainability brings up a difficult dilemma. Finally, I test the interpretation in the application to three main contexts of use of probabilities. While the application to frequencies rests ungrounded, the application to induction requires some elaboration, and the application to rational belief depends on ascertainability.