Wittgenstein's treatment of number words and arithmetic in the Tractatus reflects central features of his early conception of philosophy. In rejecting Frege's and Russell's analyses of number, Wittgenstein rejects their respective conceptions of function, object, logical form, generality, sentence, and thought. He, thereby, surrenders their shared ideal of the clarity a Begriffsschrift could bring to philosophy. The development of early analytic philosophy thus evinces far less continuity than some readers of Wittgenstein, from Russell and the Vienna positivists to many contemporary readers of the Tractatus, have supposed.
In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics cannot be located in an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse, true or false. At the same time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose, and his attitude was not that of the emotivist. The trajectory of this conception of the normativity of philosophy as it developed in his subsequent thought is traced. It is explained that and how the notion of a ‘form of life’ ( Lebensform) emerged only in his later thought, in 1937, earmarking a significant step forward in his philosophical method. We argue that the concept of Lebensform represents a way of domesticating logic itself, the very idea of a claim or reason, supplementing the idea of a ‘language game’, which it deepens. Lebensform is contrasted with the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt through a reading of the notions of ‘I’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ as they were treated in the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. Finally, the notion of Lebensform is shown to have replaced the notion of culture ( Kultur) in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s spring 1937 ‘domestication’ of the nature of logic is shown to have been fully consonant with the idea that he was influenced by his reading Alan Turing’s 1936/1937 paper, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’.
In his richly suggestive essay "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy", Cavell writes that Kant's treatment of aesthetic judgment is "as elsewhere, deeper and obscurer" than Hume's:Universal agreement, or as [Kant] also calls it, the "harmony of sentiment" or "a common sense of mankind," makes its appearance in the Critique of Judgment not as an empirical problem ... but as an a priori requirement setting the (transcendental) conditions under which such judgments as we call aesthetic could be made überhaupt. Kant begins by saying that aesthetic judgment is not "theoretical," not "logical," not "objective," but one "whose determining ground can be no other than subjective" (KU § § 7-8) (Cavell: 1976, 88).Cavell goes on to propose that Kant's account of aesthetic judgment may be usefully seen to model or parallel the sort of claims made by philosophers such as Austin and Wittgenstein about "what we (would) say". In particular, Cavell is concerned to try to make sense of the idea that such claims "are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses"; in both these sorts of judgments the first person plural "we" functions "still [as the] first person," despite making a kind of "a priori" claim (Cavell: 1976, 94, 96). Cavell writes, Kant seems to be saying that apart from a certain spirit in which we make judgments we could have no concepts of the sort we think of as aesthetic.[Note: Another way of describing this assumption or demand, this thing of speaking with a universal voice, of judging "not merely for himself, but for all men," Kant also describes as "[speaking] of beauty as if it were a property of things." Only "as if" because it cannot be an ordinary property of things: its presence or absence cannot be established in the way ordinary properties are; that is, they cannot be established publicly, and we don't know (there aren't any) causal conditions, or usable rules, for producing, or altering, or erasing, or increasing this "property".] (Cavell: 1976, 89) Cavell's analogy between Kant's account of aesthetic judgment and the claims of Austin and Wittgenstein not only gives a novel conception of recent philosophical methods; it also suggests a novel way of construing Kant's overall intent in the Third Critique. In this paper I offer an interpretation of that work inspired by, and intended to expand upon, Cavell's suggestion that the notion of a subjective yet non-psychological a priori is central to Kant's Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 7/4/15 7:18 AM
This essay accounts for the notion of Lebensform by assigning it a logical role in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Wittgenstein’s additions of the notion to his manuscripts of the PI occurred during the initial drafting of the book 1936-7, after he abandoned his effort to revise The Brown Book. It is argued that this constituted a substantive step forward in his attitude toward the notion of simplicity as it figures within the notion of logical analysis. Next, a reconstruction of his later remarks on Lebensformen is offered which factors in his reading of Alan Turing’s “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ (1936/7), as well as his discussions with Turing 1937-1939. An interpretation of the five occurrences of Lebensform in the PI is then given in terms of a logical “regression” to Lebensform as a fundamental notion. This regression characterizes Wittgenstein’s mature answer to the question, “What is the nature of the logical?”
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