The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) 2nd Edition by Hans Sluga (PDF)

Description

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is one of the most important and influential philosophers in modern times, but he is also one of the least accessible. In this volume, leading experts chart the development of his work and clarify the connections between its different stages. The essays, which are both expository and original, address central themes in Wittgenstein’s writing on a wide range of topics, particularly his thinking about the mind, language, logic, and mathematics. The contributors illuminate the character of the whole body of work by focusing on key topics: the style of the philosophy, the conception of grammar contained in it, rule-following, convention, logical necessity, the self, and what Wittgenstein called, in a famous phrase, ‘forms of life’. This revised edition includes a new introduction, five new essays – on Tractarian ethics, Wittgenstein’s development, aspects, the mind, and time and history – and a fully updated comprehensive bibliography.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As an introduction to making sense of Wittgenstein’s work (and his contribution to 20th C. Philosophy), or as a scholarly apparatus, this is a superb collection of articles. It places the reader square in the middle of current discussion in Wittgenstein studies, and this anthology is a good entry into the threshold of that research. With this, you enter into a world of pain [I just had to say that. Somehow it is appropriate to juxtapose W. with quotes from the The Big Lebowski (a film)].Wittgenstein is a difficult and at times obscure philosopher. However, this anthology and Crary’s New W. (Routledge) makes the best case for W’s relevance to the philosophy of math and the philosophy of mind.Some of the more important articles included here are: Stern, “Availability of W’s Philosophy,” Cavell, “Notes and Afterthoughts,” Stroud, “Mind, Meaning and Practice” (excellent), Sluga (on W’s subjectivism), Fogelin, Ricketts on W’s Tractatus, and the following figures on math and math necessity: Diamond, Gerrard, and Glock.I highly recommend this anthology. I also recommend: Crary’s New W; W. in America; McDowell’s articles on rule-following; Stroud, Mind Meaning and Practice (Oxford UP); Dummett, Putnam, and Diamond’s Realistic Spirit. Also see David Stern’s book on W, as well as Diamond’s Realistic Spirit.

⭐Some articles illuminate the subject; others don’t.

⭐So what could an esoteric collection of essays about Ludwig Wittgenstein have to do with Donald Trump and modern politics?Quite a bit, actually, and I’ll answer that first before delving more into the book itself.One of Wittgenstein’s main points, elaborated in several of these essays by prominent Wittgenstein scholars, is that language consists of many subsets, which he calls “language games.” These games all have different “rules” — that is, the words actually can have different meanings depending the game. (For example, in some youth subcultures, the word “sick” means “excellent” in a particular language game; obviously, the word means something quite different when you’re telling your boss you won’t be coming in.)There’s also an issue of being “wrong,” and what it means to say something that’s incorrect, or breaks a rule. Donald Trump, as is well known, has a slippery relationship with many call “truth,” but it’s important to note that “truth” varies from language game to language game. For example, traditionally political speeches that refer to facts and statistics are supposed to have a direct correlation to the “truth” of those facts and statistics, and in that language game, Trump breaks the rules on a regular basis.But consider a different language game, one that Trump has mastered, one in which feelings are more important than facts. This language game is as legitimate as the political language game (which is why Trump was elected), and it ignores political correctness and fact-checking and is often filled with stereotypical generalizations that we all make at one point or another. Those generalizations could be as harmless as “Maids never clean behind couches” to as misleading as “Crime rates would be way lower if there weren’t any immigrants.” It is true, however, that people talk this way, participate in this kind of language game, and that’s the one that Trump uses to deliver his populist message.Those who do not understand the rules of these wildly different language games cannot understand why Trump’s support remains steady despite the cascade of what many would call “lies” that he spoken in public because they miss the sense in which saying things like “The Chinese have stolen all our jobs” rings true to many listeners.In short, philosophy, even at its most esoteric, can sometimes illuminate the world around us, and though most of “The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein” is demanding, the majority of the essays shine a light on the nooks and crannies of our language, and how our conception of what our language really is misses important aspects of the underlying structure.Of course, we can’t really get too far in our grasp of what language really is because we swim in that sea, and we literally cannot even think without using language — which means there is really nowhere outside language we can stand in order to look at it objectively.But better understanding is something to strive for, as the Trump example illustrates, and this book not only helped me understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy and way of thinking more clearly, it also did the same for my understanding of the world around me.

⭐Wittgenstein is considered among the most important philosophers of the 20th century, he is certainly among the most difficult. But he is also among the most worthwhile. He was concerned, among other matter, with the relationship of language to the world, of the ontological status of mind and consciousness, and of showing how language itself helped create false philosophical problems. “When language takes a holiday,” as Wittgenstein puts it, we can create all sorts of philosophical problems – the mind-body problem may be one of these if Wittgenstein is correct.There are a number of good essays in this collection, but Hans Sulga’s “Whose House is That?: Wittgenstein on the Self” may be the best. Sulga explores how Wittgenstein’s analysis of language led him to a rejection of Cartesian substantialism – or the idea that consciousness, the soul, or the mind, was an immaterial substance – a “soul atamon” as Nietzsche would put it – tethered to a physical body and capable of existing independently of that body. But Wittgenstein also rejected opposing views such as materialism, behaviorism, and reductionism as well. Indeed, he shows how such opposing camps actually share some of the same underlying assumptions. All this leads Wittgenstein to a radical and important new way of understanding subjectivity. For those interested in an accessible introduction to Wittgenstein’s thinking on these matters this volume is a good place to start – particularly Sulga’s essay.

⭐Good!

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