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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.

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.

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).

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.

With characteristic candour, David Hume is prepared to admit that in ordinary life, but certainly not when reflecting on the nature of perceptual experience, he has no option but to ‘believe in the existence of body’ despite his philosophical reasonings to the contrary. In this instance, his commitment to ‘Common Sense’ has become, as it was not to become for his contemporary Thomas Reid, a direct consequence of participating in a day-to-day existence if nevertheless one which he has no option but to reject when reflecting in the study. Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, presents us with a picture of what has come to be regarded as a form of Humean ‘phenomenalist language’, private in nature, which, in one of the most famous passages of his later philosophy, he appears to reject via a form of reductio ad absurdum argument. In what follows, it will be questioned whether his ‘argument’ clearly represents phenomenalist proposals which Hume’s successors, e. g., A.J. Ayer, accepted without question. If there is a misunderstanding here on both sides, an investigation into its nature must lead to an appreciation of the varying roles attributed by these philosophers to the notion of ‘Common Sense’.

In several publications, Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam have argued that the so-called ‘notorious paragraph’ of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics contains a valuable philosophical insight about Gödel’s informal proof of the first incompleteness theorem – in a nutshell, the idea they attribute to Wittgenstein is that if the Gödel sentence of a system is refutable, then, because of the resulting ω-inconsistency of the system, we should give up the translation of Gödel’s sentence by the English sentence “I am unprovable”. I will argue against Floyd and Putnam’s use of the idea, and I will indirectly question its attribution to Wittgenstein. First, I will point out that the idea is inefficient in the context of the first incompleteness theorem because there is an explicit assumption of soundness in Gödel’s informal discussion of that theorem. Secondly, I will argue that of he who makes the observation that Floyd and Putnam think Wittgenstein has made about the first theorem, one will expect to see an analogous observation (concerning the ‘consistency’ statement of systems) about Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem – yet we see nothing to that effect in Wittgenstein’s remarks. Incidentally, that never-made remark on the import of the second theorem is of genuine logical significance. ‏ ‎This short paper is a by-product of the lecture I gave, as an invited speaker, at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Iranian Association for Logic, 2016. I am grateful to Saeed Salehi for an ongoing and productive discussion on different aspects of Gödel’s 1931 paper, and to Ali Masoudi and Mousa Mohammadian for all the friendly and brotherly support. I’d like to dedicate this paper to the memory of my teacher, John V. Canfield (1934 – 2017).

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.

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.

While Wittgenstein’s work has been extensively investigated in relation to many other important and influential philosophers, there is very little scholarly work that positively investigates the relationship between the work of Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Dilthey. To the contrary, some commentators like Hacker (2001a) suggest that Dilthey’s work (and that of other hermeneuticists) simply pales or is obsolete in comparison to Wittgenstein’s own insights. Against such assessments, this article posits that Wittgenstein’s and Dilthey’s thought most crucially intersects at the related topics of scientism on the one hand and scientific and philosophical method on the other. In reconstructing Dilthey’s conceptions of understanding versus explaining and central points of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it becomes apparent that they share a staunch rejection of scientism and use the notion of understanding as a means to prevent methodologies from the natural sciences encroaching onto the human sciences (in Dilthey’s case) and philosophy (in Wittgenstein’s case). Notwithstanding a number of central ways in which these thinkers differ, this article closes by suggesting that there is some evidence according to which Wittgenstein, like Dilthey, can reasonably be understood as championing some central tenets of the hermeneutical tradition.

Logical Holism and Wittgenstein’s ‘Practical Turn’. – Logical holism is the idea that each elementary proposition belongs to a system and is logically connected to other propositions of that system. In this paper I explore this idea and draw its connections to the nature of negative propositions and the ‘problem of recognition’ on the basis of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. In the first section I argue that in January 1930 the idea leads Wittgenstein to a better understanding of how the negative feature is expressed in propositions, thereby raising the problem of recognition to which he is not yet able to find a proper solution. In the second section I explore how the problem still persists during Wittgenstein’s ‘practical turn’. What he now calls the ‘problem of representation’ forces him to change again his conception of propositions. In the final section I argue that this change is mainly due to the modification of his conception of hypotheses which urges a solution to the problem of representation, though the problem remains unsolved in January 1930.

The influence of Wittgenstein’s work in the study of deep disagreements has been dominated by On Certainty. Since the metaphor of ‘hinges’ plays a central role in the scholarship of On Certainty , a Wittgensteinian theory of deep disagreements is assumed to be based on hinge epistemology. This means that a disagreement would be deep because it concerns parties with conflicting hinges. When we shift our attention to a different part of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, however, another picture of deep disagreements emerges. This article proposes a new Wittgensteinian approach to disagreements through the analysis of the Lectures on Religious Belief. Some of the disagreements that Wittgenstein and his pupils discuss in these lectures are deep, but not because they are grounded in different hinges, but because they are disagreements about pictures. This article is an extension of a paper presented at the 41st International Wittgenstein Symposium. It was published in the proceedings of the symposium with the title: “Pictures in Wittgenstein’s Treatment of Disagreements in the so-called Lectures on Religious Belief ” (Lavorerio, 2018b). I would like to thank the audience at that presentation for their comments, as well as Dejan Makovec, Martin Kusch and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.