Nordic Wittgenstein Review

What’s Reality Got to Do with It? Wittgenstein, Empirically Informed Philosophy, and a Missing Methodological Link

Cecilie Eriksen — 2023-01-16

“Don’t think, but look!” (Wittgenstein 2009: § 66). This insistient advice has served as methodological inspiration for several influential thinkers in the broad range of ‘empirically informed’ philosophy, which has flourished over the last decades. There is, however, a worrisome tension between Wittgenstein’s work and these turns to practices, history, science, field work, and everyday life: Wittgenstein is in general doing something different from what the thinkers who claim to be inspired by him are doing. An argument for the legitimacy of the move from Wittgenstein to empirically informed philosophy is so far missing in the literature. This article shows how this move can be justifiable within a Wittgensteinian frame, philosophically beneficial, and at times even necessary.

The Philosophical Significance of Secondary Uses of Language in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy

Marco Marchesin — 2023-01-02

This paper aims to provide an account of Wittgenstein’s employment of the distinction between primary and secondary use of words. Against views that circumscribe its relevance to aesthetics and ethics, the paper demonstrates that there are many instances of secondary uses in Wittgenstein’s work that are not reducible to those limited applications. Additionally, as secondary uses are often interpreted as having an expressive function, the paper argues that we cannot reduce secondariness to a single unifying principle, because the distinction is philosophical, as it works as a powerful device to tackle different, often unrelated, philosophical issues.

Embracing the In-Betweenness of Aspect-Perception's Normative and Evaluative Dimensions

Janette Dinishak — 2022-09-29

Abstract: This paper examines the following two ideas and their relations: (i) aspect-perception is a perceptual experience; (ii) veridicality is the primary standard for evaluating the success of a perceptual experience. I argue that a valuable lesson to glean from Wittgenstein’s investigations of aspect-perception is that aspect-perception is “in-between” when it comes to whether and how veridicality is at issue in it. Yet it does not follow from this in-betweenness that there is no standard by which we evaluate aspect-perception, no notion of success at perceiving an aspect. Aspect-perception has normative and evaluative dimensions that are not a matter of veridicality, or at least not in any straightforward way, some of which I explore here. These dimensions are brought to light, in part, by shifting evaluative focus to what the perceiver “brings” to aspect-perception experiences and attending to the ways aspect-perception requires and involves mastery of a technique. The shift in focus also helps illuminate different ways of understanding aspect-blindness and the kinds of failure at play in different kinds of aspect-blindness. All in all, embracing aspect-perception’s in-betweenness regarding whether or not veridicality is at issue in it illumines aspect-perception’s distinctive character and richness.

Book Review: Mauro Luiz Engelmann, Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Nikolay Milkov — 2022-09-19

Book review

Book Review: Jônadas Techio, The Threat of Solipsism: Wittgenstein and Cavell on Meaning, Skepticism, and Finitude

Rogério P. Severo — 2022-09-29

Book review

Book Review: James C. Klagge, Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry.

Philip Mills — 2022-09-29

Book review

Book Review: Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé: A Different Order of Difficulty, Literature after Wittgenstein, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2020

Reidar Due — 2022-09-30

Book review

Wittgenstein and Critical Theory: Mickaëlle Provost in Conversation with Alice Crary

Alice Crary — 2022-09-29

This is the second of two parts of an interview with Alice Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The first part on “Wittgenstein and Feminism” is published in the NWR Special Issue “Wittgenstein and Feminism”, forthcoming later this year.

Towards an ultra-diplomatic transcription of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass

Konrad Bucher — 2023-02-24

Over the following pages, I want to present a sample of ultra-diplomatic transcription of the Wittgenstein Nachlass. The sample builds upon the diplomatic transcription of the Nachlass provided by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) which I modified using Adobe’s InDesign. The contribution renders in ultra-diplomatic transcription pages 154 and 155 of Ms-115. It also includes facsimiles of the two pages.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein — 2023-02-25

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein: Three parallel tree-structured editions. (1) Tree-structured arrangement of the German text, edited by David G. Stern, Joachim Schulte and Katia Saporiti. (2) Tree-structured arrangement of the English translation by Ogden and Ramsey, edited by David G. Stern. (3) Tree-structured arrangement of the English translation by Pears and McGuinness, edited by David G. Stern.

Tree-structured readings of the Tractatus

David G Stern — 2023-02-24

I argue that the numbering system of the Tractatus lets us see how it was constructed, in two closely related senses of that term. First, it tells us a great deal about the genesis of the book, for the numbering system was used to assemble and rearrange a series of drafts, as recorded in MS 104. Second, it helps us understand the structure of the published book, as cryptically summarized in the opening footnote. I also discuss an unpublished letter from Anscombe to von Wright from 1948 which contains the very first sketch of a tree-structured reading, and what I believe is Stenius’s response to Anscombe’s proposal. The paper critically evaluates previous work on tree-structured readings and contends that we need to read the Tractatus in both the number order used in the published book and the tree order that Wittgenstein used to draft it. It also considers some of the main ways of turning this complex branching structure into a linear, printed text, and so serves as an introduction to the three tree-structured editions of the Tractatus that accompany this paper (the German text, and the translations by Ogden/Ramsey and Pears & McGuinness).

Note from the Editors and Open Review Information

Simo Säätelä — 2022-08-14