Volume 16, Issue 1

My text contributes to the debate taking place in the current research on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and how to interpret his Tractatus logico-philosophicus appropriately. In contrast to the realist standard interpretation on the one hand, and as distinguished from the not only anti-realist but strictly anti-metaphysical approach of the resolute reading on the other, I want to suggest, or at least remind of its possibility, a third way of interpreting the text that takes Wittgenstein’s early philosophy closer to the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (again). More precisely, I want to show how the Tractatus can be read in a transcendental way in a Kantian sense of transcendentality, and how this approach enables the avoidance of those problems that seem to make the resolute reading problematic. The latter can be done under the following two conditions: first, one has to take into account in one’s transcendental approach that Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus under the impression of the general linguistic turn at the beginning of the twentieth century. Second, it is also necessary to consider Wittgenstein’s statements concerning the pictural nature of all our linguistic references of reality. I want to argue that both of these conditions are necessary for an appropriate transcendental understanding of the Tractatus , and that for this reason Wittgenstein’s philosophical method should be understood as a kind of transcendental philosophy that is not only coined linguistically, but also materialized in a pictural way. Because my interpretation is focused on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the pictural nature of all our linguistic references to reality, I want to call it the “iconological reading” of the Tractatus .

Russellian monism is any view that proposes that we cannot solve the mind-body problem because natural science cannot tell us about the aspects of physical reality that are necessary to know to explain consciousness. I argue that Russellian monism should be combined with the Heil-Martin theory about dispositions. However, this combination becomes a theory with some profound epistemic pessimistic consequences, namely that we cannot bridge the explanatory gap between physical and conscious states and that we cannot solve the other minds problem. However, this epistemic pessimism does not constitute an unacceptable kind of “mystery-mongering” because we can also find analogous results in the well-established sciences. This may make it easier to accept Russellian monism’s epistemic pessimism.

The aim of the paper is to show that moral reasoning is not really reasoning in the sense usually assumed in moral philosophy. Instead, moral reasoning is one aspect of repressing conscience. The formal dimensions of moral reasoning function as a repressive depersonalisation of our sense of being an I who stands in a relationship to a you. For instance, “moral principle” invokes a formal and hence impersonal understanding of a moral problem. The thinking person loses her sense of being a particular person related to another particular person and focuses instead on the moral principles with their inherent, systematic implications. However, and as I will show in connection to so-called moral dilemmas, the thinking person does not actually act in the rational manner that is presupposed by reasoning. Instead, moral reasoning will reveal itself as a discourse for repressing conscience. Part of the aim of the paper is to show that, contrary to what is generally assumed, repression is a morally related phenomenon that arises as a result of a person’s difficulties with acknowledging the character of a moral difficulty; an acknowledgement that is an essential aspect of moral understanding.

In what sense is Hegel’s Logic metaphysical? And what is metaphysics? This paper deals with different interpretations of both the notion of metaphysics and in what sense Hegel’s Logic is considered as metaphysical. Is Hegel’s Logic metaphysical in a pre-Kantian sense, Kantian sense or Aristotelian/Platonic sense? Or are different versions of metaphysics part of Hegel’s Logic ? And may Gadamer’s hermeneutics provide an answer to this last question?

This is the third Aarhus lecture by Markus Gabriel submitted by editor in chief Brock Steen.