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Head Colds and Thoughts in the Head
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
‘There just has to be some connection between thinking and what goes on in my head when I am thinking,’ said someone to me recently. ‘When I am thinking,’ he continued, ‘the thinking is going on in here’, at which he pointed with his forefinger at his head. I indicated mild dissent. ‘You seem to me to be overlooking plain facts,’ he retorted. ‘There are thoughts in my head. Nothing could make me doubt that. If I am given a complicated calculation to do, I might start off by trying to do it in my head (once again, pointing at his head) but, finding it too hard, I might continue the calculation I had begun in my head on paper, on the table in front of me (now pointing at an imaginary piece of paper in front of him). The calculation started off being done in my head and finished up being done on paper.’
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1989
References
1 These Remarks were originally published in German in Synthése, vol. xvii, 1967, 233–53Google Scholar. Unless stated otherwise, subsequent page references to these Remarks are to the English translation by A. C. Miles and Rush Rhees, which appeared, with an introductory note by Rhees, Rush, in ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, no. 3, The Human World (05 1971), 18–41.Google Scholar
2 Wittgenstein, , ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, 31–33.Google Scholar
3 I should emphasize that my criticism is directed at what Rhees says in his Introductory Note (p. 20) about a cold's moving from the head to the chest, not at what Wittgenstein says about the way in which uneducated people in our society speak of an illness as though it was a liquid to be drawn off (Wittgenstein, 's own example, ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, 31Google Scholar, line 36), or about their mistaken notion (falsche Vorstellung) that an illness travels from the head into the chest (die Krankheit ziehe sich vom Kopf in die Brust (Synthèse, 238, line 37))Google Scholar, or from one part of the body to another (die Krankheit ziehe von einem Teil des Körpers in den andern (Synthèse, 237, lines 31–2))Google Scholar. Wittgenstein himself does not mention the case of a cold's moving from the head to the chest at all.
4 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations, Part II, section xii.Google Scholar