Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 1 Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy
- 2 Pictures, logic, and the limits of sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
- 3 Fitting versus tracking
- 4 Philosophy as grammar
- 5 A philosophy of mathematics between two camps
- 6 Necessity and normativity
- 7 Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics
- 8 Notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein's Investigations
- 9 Mind, meaning, and practice
- 10 “Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the self
- 11 The question of linguistic idealism revisited
- 12 Forms of life
- 13 Certainties of a world-picture
- 14 The availability of Wittgenstein's philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics
Resisting the attractions of realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 1 Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy
- 2 Pictures, logic, and the limits of sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
- 3 Fitting versus tracking
- 4 Philosophy as grammar
- 5 A philosophy of mathematics between two camps
- 6 Necessity and normativity
- 7 Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics
- 8 Notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein's Investigations
- 9 Mind, meaning, and practice
- 10 “Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the self
- 11 The question of linguistic idealism revisited
- 12 Forms of life
- 13 Certainties of a world-picture
- 14 The availability of Wittgenstein's philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.
(PI, 122)How does Wittgenstein's later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this essay be concerned with Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics. She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgenstein's work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an antirealist. Elsewhere I have argued against antirealist readings. One aim of this present essay is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein - its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words.
The clearest unchanging feature of the course over the decades was the opening question: How does the Investigations begin? Against even the brief, varying introductory remarks I would provide - all omitted here - concerning Wittgenstein's life and his place in twentieth- century philosophy, in which I emphasized the remarkable look and sound of Wittgenstein's text and related this to issues of modernism in the major arts, the opening question was meant to invoke the question: How does philosophy begin? And how does the Investigationsaccount for its beginning (hence philosophy's) as it does? And since this is supposed to be a work of philosophy (but how do we tell this?), how does it (and must it? but can it?) account for its look and sound?
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein , pp. 226 - 260Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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