Free Issue of Philosophical Investigations

The journal Philosophical Investigations has published a "virtual issue" that collects some of their best material from the past 30 years, without a paywall. It looks like a pretty good group. So far I've read the Stove review (which is fun fluff) and the Rush Rhees article, which I recommend to anyone who cares about Wittgenstein's views of what he was doing in (at least) his later philosophy. This bit in particular jumped out at me, given my most recent post:

There was something misleading about Wittgenstein’s use of the phrase Krankheiten des Verstandes: since we do not know what a Gesundheit des Verstandes would be. He certainly did not think that the unreflecting philistine was in a better state of mind than the person who knows genuine philosophical puzzlement. And the notions of ‘health‘ and ‘illness’ are not very helpful here.

Rhees also discusses the relationship between the übersichtliche Darstellung der Grammatik and the Tractarian say/show distinction, though at a disappointingly short length. This is an interesting bit though:

[The say/show distinction] was an idea which he did retain [in his later philosophy], in his account of recursive proofs or proofs by induction, for instance; and it had much to do with the discussion of generality.

Here we have a clear instance of a place where the thing "shown" has to have the shape of something like "how to go on". You can't add something propositional to an inductive proof that makes it into a deductive one -- there's no point at which "logic takes you by the throat" (and I think that the "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" case is another example of this). If you try to add a premise like "If you've checked N cases and they've had results consistent with [x,y,z] then all cases will give results consistent with [x,y,z]" or "If you've checked N cases and they've had results consistent with [x,y,z], assume that all cases will have results consistent with [x,y,z]" then you have the problem of having to motivate those assumptions/imperatives, and there's no way to do that without falling back on induction. It's formally akin to the "interpretations" in the "rule-following paradox" of PI 201:

It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.

I think this passage from Rhees lends some support to Kremer's view of the say/show distinction as lining up with the knowing-that/knowing-how distinction. These aren't cases where you might (per impossible) be able to say something that "grammar" or "logical syntax" forbids you from saying, and have it do the work you want. There's something deeper to "showing" than that.

ungrumbles

Day two of the Wittgenstein conference was better. On reflection, part of my trouble yesterday was just that I was tired from the previous day; I was in a bad mood to start with, and then little things bugged me more than they should have.

I got to the first presentation about halfway through, because Hyde Park is hard to find a parking spot in. The paper being discussed was just what I wanted, though: It included a discussion of Ramsey's remark about double-meanings I posted about a while ago, and much ado was made of Wittgenstein's personal aesthetic demands (which were always serious and severe). A welcome shift from the previous day's discussion, which just spent too much time explaining how the resolute readings of the Tractatus are supposed to work, and not enough actually poking at Wittgenstein or his weird little book.

The line pitched about Ramsey's remark seemed to be a very general one: Wittgenstein really liked puns and wordplay, and apparently often took quite seriously a pun he would notice in something he'd written, or would reorganize his remarks to emphasize the repetition of certain words, etc. The main example discussed was something from the middle period: Wittgenstein started a few typescripts with a discussion of "übersehen" and its dual meaning of "miss" and "get an overview of". ("Overlook" has some of the same ambiguity, in English, though generally in descriptions like "a scenic overlook".) I can buy this. It would mean that Ramsey was probably talking more about the things Wittgenstein was saying/writing while he was visiting him than in the Tractatus itself, but it wouldn't surprise me to find some German wordplay in the Tractatus with a deeper point to it.

The discussions about Wittgenstein's aesthetics seemed to not really reach a resolution, or at least I didn't write down much. I suspect there were some points made in passing that I either was already aware of, or just didn't think to write down. We seemed to spend a good deal of time today just looking very hard at passages from "Culture & Value", then having someone mention their original context, then doing it again. Amusingly, one of the presenters had been meaning to read "Culture & Value", but hadn't gotten to it yet because he was trying to buy a German copy. ("Culture & Value" is a collection of various coded remarks from across his corpus, so it doesn't correspond to anything specific in the German edition of his works.)

David Wellbury claimed that Wittgenstein's aesthetics were responding to/criticizing Schopenhauer's aesthetics, or something like that (it was a very broad and vague claim, made in passing). I asked him about literature on the Schopenhauer/Wittgenstein connection. Basically all he could think of was one chapter of Brian Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (which was one of the first things on Schopenhauer I read). He told me to ask Ray Monk about this.

Monk was good to talk to. The first thing that came to his mind was the chapter from Brian Magee's book. I told him that I'd read it, and some other things, and that I'd had trouble finding anything other than pieces that just list all of the places where it looks like there's some connection between early Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer (and there are a lot!) -- that nobody ever has much of a story to tell about what this comes to. He mentioned "Insight and Illusion", which (in fairness) I should look at again, but we both wished there was something that told a story about this which was tied to a better reading of the Tractatus than Hacker gives. Monk asked if any of the "resolute" readers had discussed Schopenhauer, and I realized this was something I should've already asked.

Monk also said he thought Michael Tanner's Schopenhauer book had something about Wittgenstein; Amazon search-inside says it's just a brief note that Wittgenstein thought music was important. He also said that the Blackwell Companion to Schopenhauer has probably commissioned an essay on Wittgenstein, which is probably true: I'll find out when it comes out in 2012.

The Blackwell "Great Minds" volume on Schopenhauer does have a brief chapter on Wittgenstein, though. The reading of Wittgenstein isn't very good (I just read it, while writing this post), but it does make a suggestion that I can't remember if I've seen before (Holbo's dissertation might have made it): Just as Schopenhauer replaced Kant's architectonic (the categories, the forms of intuition, Reason and Understanding etc.) with his (fourfold) Principle of Sufficient Reason, Wittgenstein replaces Schopenhauer's PSR with modern formal logic. And just as Schopenhauer's shift lead him to deny things of the thing-in-itself that Kant had affirmed (at least problematically), like that practical reason could be causally efficacious, so Wittgenstein denies even more than Schopenhauer did of the thing-in-itself: he now denies everything of it (since there is nothing "outside" logic), so the thing-in-itself shrinks to an extensionless point.

I don't think the story can go this quickly, but there's probably something to it. Wittgenstein had told Frege he still believed there was a "deep and true core in idealism, an important feeling that is wrongly gratified, hence a legitimate need" in a letter lost in WW2, and Frege brought this up again when Wittgenstein complained about "The Thought" attacking idealism on its weak side instead of its strong side (Frege's reply was, in effect, to wonder why Wittgenstein was defending those dorks, since he agreed with Frege that they were dorks, right??). And the 1916 notebooks have Wittgenstein saying "There are two godheads: the world and my independent I". You can take the story we get in the Tractatus about the solipsistic self shrinking to an extensionless point, apply it to the other "godhead" of the thing-in-itself, and get the sort of picture the Blackwell "Great Minds" book paints. (This is probably moving too quickly, but I'm just thinking aloud here.)

Weirdly, the "Great Minds" book says that Schopenhauer's ending in mysticism is just inconsistency on his part, and should be jettisoned. The worry is that if Schopenhauer allows that there are mystical truths that he can't talk about, then they might include things like "The thing-in-itself isn't actually Will, it's this other thing, Pwill" and this would make his metaphysics inconsistent. But surely this is putting things backwards: I don't doubt for a moment that Schopenhauer would abandon his metaphysics, if he could be assured of the sorts of mystical bliss he thinks the Vedic sages had. It also means you lose what's surely the most striking parallel between the Tractatus and "The World as Will and Representation": they both end by saying "Oh yeah, there's also stuff I can't talk about. It's really important. It's called the mystical. The book is over now, bye!"

One thing that's obvious now that I think of it, but which had slipped from my view: The Tractatus at least nominally says there is value outside of the world (and not in it). Schopenhauer says this. Frege never says anything like this. I doubt Russell ever said anything like this, though I'd need to check. (I suspect he generally just went with Moore's "non-natural" property of goodness as part of the world, or else just denied that there is value to be found anywhere -- but I really don't know. Surely Russell wrote about moral philosophy at some point during his early work, at least in passing?) So this is a big area of the Tractatus that can't have been meant to be appealing to either Frege or Russell. Today I saw Conant and Kremer not have much of interest to say about the "Death is not lived through" parts of the Tractatus, and I am feeling more and more firmly that the "New Wittgensteinians" need a story to tell about Schopenhauer. (That the world ceases with death is something Schopenhauer has to say, since the world only exists as long as the subject exists, and the subject is mortal. This is not the most awkward thing Schopenhauer has to say about the subject.)

Kremer noted that "In death the world does not change, but ceases" is said in a book dedicated to a dead friend, David Pinsent. I thought this was a cute thing to notice. I suspect that one of the things Wittgenstein is playing with in the Tractatus is an ambiguity in the notion of "world". There can't be more than one world of "the totality of facts", but "the world of the happy is quite another from that of the unhappy". Relatedly, the metaphysical subject is the limit of the world, but (if good or bad willing changes the world) willing changes the limits of the world. Our ordinary talk of "world" is ambiguous in a way that allows this, of course (two people who share an apartment can live in different worlds), but it's also an oddness you get in Schopenhauer: the world as representation is a correlate of the subject, so there should (it would seem) be as many worlds (as representation) as there are subjects. Schopenhauer dodges this by claiming that all of us are one subject. And also different subjects. We're each two subjects, one of which is the only subject. (You can see why a Schopenhauerian young Wittgenstein could be attracted to solipsism: it lets you keep the world-subject correlate without the weirdness about how many subjects there are. Incidentally, Schopenhauer's argument against solipsism is literally "It's crazy". He admits it's theoretically irrefutable, but only crazy people could hold it, so he passes it by. And then gives arguments that only work if solipsism is false. Schopenhauer's a glorious mess.)

So anyway: Next I asked Michael Kremer if there was any good work on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. He said he wasn't the one to ask, as he'd never read Schopenhauer(!), but mentioned Brian Magee's book. He also said there was a really bad book about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, but he couldn't remember the title. He said Conant would probably know what it was called.

This is pretty much how the conversation went after this point:

Kremer: Hey, Jim, what was that book called? The small one? Wasn't any good?
Conant: ... you need to give me more to go on.
Kremer: The one about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein.
Conant: Oh, that one. It was small. No idea what it was called.

Kremer later guessed "Art and Talent". I've since figured it out: "Genius and Talent: Schopenhauer's Influence on Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy" has to be what he meant. It's 138 pages, according to Amazon. I figure I should read it, even if it's not any good, since it's small.

I then asked Conant if there was any good work on the Schopenhauer-Wittgenstein relationship. His answer: No. Everything he'd seen just read the Schopenhauer into Wittgenstein.

So, I now know why Schopenhauer hasn't been coming up in these discussions: Nobody's done any good work on his relation to Wittgenstein, and some first-rate Wittgenstein scholars haven't bothered reading him. These both seem fair excuses.

Oh, I should probably say something about the other two papers discussed today. One was by a French guy and used Flaubert for some purpose, and Michael Fried tore him a great many new assholes. I honestly don't remember much else about this paper. But know this: Do not claim that Flaubert was responding to a crisis in the French novel if Michael Fried is within earshot. He will end you.

(It was fun to watch.)

The third paper of the day was about a little travelogue Berkeley wrote about visiting Vesuvius, and also Martin Gustafsson suddenly realizing his daughter would outlive him, and also Wittgenstein's remark "Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur Dichtung", which remark's translation was discussed so much that I didn't have to look up the German to type that. It was actually a really good discussion (until they opened questions up to the floor), but I'm not sure I took much away from it. Other than "Dichtung is hard to translate" and "Holy crap, Berkeley almost got killed by a volcano".

And then I went to Powell's and got a hardback of "Science and Metaphysics" for $20. Good day, all in all.

grumbles

I am currently in Chicago for this, and I found myself feeling bothered about how the first day's discussions went. So this is a rant post, more or less.

One thing that Conant said at the workshop today was that the Tractatus is "a book at war with experience" (or something close to this), and noted that Wittgenstein doesn't talk about experience or epistemological matters in the book. This is in stark contrast to Russell, who considered certain sorts of acquaintances as foundational for logic: acquaintance with logical constants was what let us use symbols like "and", "not", etc. This is fair enough, so far as it goes. The idea that some sort of experience is (or could be, or would have to be) important for logic is something Wittgenstein is fighting against in the 1914 Notebooks, and it's something that Russell held.

Kimhi raised a question about this in connection with the "Lecture on Ethics". In the Lecture, Wittgenstein talks about a certain sort of experience which he calls "ethical", wondering at the existence of the world. This is clearly not a particular sort of experience in the sense of an experience of a sort of particular, but Kimhi said that it was a sort of experience that Wittgenstein thought you needed to have, or else you'd be deficient somehow, ethically. Conant objected that he didn't think that Wittgenstein would've been willing to say this sort of thing at the time he wrote the Tractatus, and that starting to talk about "experience" is something he does only once he returns to philosophy and starts moving away from the Tractatus. Kimhi said he thought there was the same sort of stuff in the Tractatus, but Conant said there wasn't. Conant then tried to think of what was closest to what Kimhi was saying, and starting talking about the world of the happy man and the unhappy man. Conant said that the world of the happy man and the unhappy man was the same world, and this was objected to: he then clarified that he meant there aren't two worlds. The workshop ended shortly after this, due to time.

I should've brought up 6.45: "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling."

True, Wittgenstein doesn't talk about experience (Erfahrung, Erlebnis) in this passage. But the word for "contemplation" here is Anschauung. This is the word rendered "intuition" in Kant and Frege, and "perception" in (the Payne translation of) Schopenhauer. These are sorts of experiences, as are feelings. This seems to be precisely what Kimhi had in mind. It's even preceded by 6.44: "Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical." A dead ringer for the Wittgenstein of "Lecture on Ethics". It looks like even in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein in some sense thinks there is a certain sort of experience (feeling, perception) that is ethically significant. It's not an experience of some particular fact about "how the world is", but it's something. And Kimhi was right to bring it up: it doesn't fit in at all with anything Conant or Kremer says about the ethical importance book. Neither of them has any sort of special experience as part of the story.

One aspect of Conant's reading of the Tractatus is that it draws the reader in by having sentences that the reader recognizes as being sentences she would like to use to express thoughts, but then (through further reading of the book and thinking about it) they fall apart on her: she realizes there was no such thought as she thought she wanted to express, only confusion on her part. Conant mentioned Frege and Russell in particular as people Wittgenstein wanted to have read the book in this way. Russell could see "The world is all that is the case" and think "Ah, yes, this is what I call 'the totality of atomic facts'". But I don't see how this can work with propositions like "As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases." Nor with the other solipsism passages: Frege and Russell are two of the most adamant opponents of idealism you can find. I don't know who Conant thinks these could've been written for, unless Wittgenstein was writing for himself circa the 1916 notebooks. What other sort of reader is supposed to have wanted to say "Of the will as the bearer of the ethical we cannot speak"?

Conant also said some false things about Frege and elucidations, but my notes are too brief for me to be fair to him. The impression I got was that Frege's "Concept and Object" was supposed to be one of the chief things Wittgenstein was reacting to, and that in it Frege had thought he was communicating unsayable insights into the deep ontological structure of reality by saying paradoxical things like "The concept horse is not a concept." But there are three big problems here. One is that Frege doesn't introduce the notions of concept and object by saying paradoxical things; he introduces them in the preface of "Foundations of Arithmetic", in the three rules he says will govern his inquiry. (I don't have my copy on-hand, so I won't quote it, but I'm pretty sure it's the second rule: Don't confuse the subjective with the objective, don't confuse concepts and objects, and don't ask for the meaning of a word outside the context of a sentence, if memory serves me.) "Concept and Object" only gets written because Kerry misunderstood Frege, and Frege wanted to take the opportunity to try to get more people to care about his project. It's not an essential part of Frege's project, and Frege didn't take it as essential to making the object/concept distinction clear. He's already using what he needs from it in Begriffschrift (the book), insofar as he distinguishes between two slots you can quantify into, and it shows up explicitly, with no fanfare, in the preface to "Foundations". Saying "The concept horse is not a concept" and lamenting that your language misses your thought is a later addition Frege makes, not something there at the outset. The second big problem is that a lot of things Frege says are "elucidations" aren't remotely paradoxical. The prose from the opening sections of "Basic Laws of Arithmetic", where Frege is introducing the vocabulary of his Begriffschrift, is characterized as elucidatory remarks. (I don't have this text on me, either, but you can look it up: the opening stuff is straightforward Fregean prose, not paradoxes.) "Elucidation" is Frege's blanket term for any way vocabulary gets introduced when it's not introduced by explicit definitions. (Kremer seemed to get this part straight, but he seemed to agree with Conant about the first thing I objected to.) The third problem is that some of the things that seem like they should count as paradoxical elucidatory remarks can be expressed in a (slightly) expanded version of Begriffschrift: it's easy to express "Everything is an object" in Begriffschrift, for example. The weirdness in Frege doesn't attach to elucidations, but to the specific terms "function" and "concept" (and possibly a few others -- Frege doesn't tell us much about thoughts, for example, and there's no clear way to talk about them in Begriffschrift, but there's also nothing that looks similar to "Kerry's Paradox" there). Conant seemed to just be getting Frege wrong, and I don't see Wittgenstein getting Frege similarly wrong. But, again, my notes are very sketchy and it's possible I just took Conant wrong on some or all of this.

The only time Schopenhauer came up during today's workshop discussion was when Conant was summarizing his essay "What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not": he mocked those who try to say what Wittgenstein thought about ethics in the Tractatus by saying what Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer thought about ethics. But the curious thing is: a lot of people writing on Schopenhauer's ethics quote the Tractatus to explain what Schopenhauer thought about ethics.

I continue to feel strongly that Schopenhauer is somehow really important for the Tractatus in a way I can't nail down, and that this has been largely neglected by commentators on the book.

Aside: I found it incredibly frustrating how little Conant and Kremer had to say about the propositions of the Tractatus which are nominally about ethics. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have a general story about how "the ethical" works in the Tractatus without being able to say anything about "Ethics and aesthetics are one", for example. Hopefully the other presenters look at those parts of the book more!

Appendix on an incredibly minor textual issue:
Here are some things I learned from the article "A Note on the Text of the Tractatus" (C. Lewy, "Mind" 1967): One of the revisions Wittgenstein marks in Ramsey's copy of the Tractatus is to change 6.522 from "There is indeed the unexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical." to "There is indeed the inexpressible. This appears; it is the mystical." Wittgenstein doesn't say to change the German, and the verb used in this proposition is the same one translated as "show" throughtout the rest of the book (Ramsey and Wittgenstein were marking places to change the text for the 1933 reprint of the Ogden-Ramsey edition.). He also changes 6.23 in the same way: Whether it is the case that two expressions can be exchanged for one another "must appear from the expressions themselves". He doesn't mark the other appearances of the same verb, and there are occurences between these two instances, which he doesn't change, such as 6.36, "If there were a law of causality, it might run: There are natural laws. But that clearly cannot be said. It shows itself."

I don't know what to make of this, but these are corrections made in Ramsey's copy of the Tractatus that weren't incorporated into the 1933 revision. The other two such changes as in 3.33 Wittgenstein wrote "the object meant by" above "the meaning of the sign", but without crossing anything out, and in 5.557 he changed "The application of" to "Applied". The first change seems to me reasonable to skip: he didn't mark out the original. The second strikes me as inexplicable: the revised proposition would begin "Applied logic decides what elementary propositions there are." My guess is that Wittgenstein thought this sounded like better English,
which it doesn't, and that this is why it wasn't incorporated.

I can't shake the feeling that the revision to 6.522 is significant. Even though I can't see any significance in changing 6.23 in the same way. And despite the fact that (for whatever reason) it wasn't incorporated into the 1933 revision. I am perhaps overthinking this: Wittgenstein might have just toyed with changing the translation of "zeigen" and only marked the two spots, then changed his mind.

i has an m.a.

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.

"The point of the book is ethical"

I've occasionally been annoyed at how rarely Wittgenstein interpreters try to flesh out the "ethical point " of the Tractatus. I recall Insight and Illusion particularly annoying me on this point: Hacker clearly had no problems "effing the ineffable" on every other point where there was supposed to be something which "couldn't be said, but only shown", but when he got to "the mystical" he suddenly hits something which really can't be said, and so he just compares it to "feeling absolutely safe" and "wonder and amazement at the existence of the world" -- the only original note Hacker seems to offer as an interpretation of what Wittgenstein was whistling here is that it's "a romantic ethics of the ineffable." "Resolute" readings of the book generally don't leave me greatly more satisfied -- there's often some gesturing to the virtues of avoiding confusion & thinking clearly, but it always seems like thin gruel as ethics.

Kremer's "The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense" explains Wittgenstein by a preliminary discussion of Saints Paul and Augustine, attributes the showing/saying distinction to pride, and claims that the book aims to promote humility & love of one's neighbor. Now that's "not chickening out"!

(Kremer also moves seamlessly from a discussion of "justification" in Romans to a discussion of "justification" in epistemology, which is something I'd always wanted to see done. They're the same word, after all -- we can seek to justify all sorts of things, not just beliefs. Paul's not using "dikaiosune" as some weird technical term; it just means "being right/good", like in normal Greek.)

(I am also reminded here of Isaac Levi's attack on "pedigree epistemology"; Levi's rejection of a justification component in knowledge appears even more radical, in this company. I suppose this sort of thing should be expected when one wants to break down the "theory/practice" dichotomy, like a good pragmatist, but it's still striking when one notices it.)

Kremer's essay is good in general. I like this piece more than "The Cardinal Problem in Philosophy", but I suspect that's partly because I read that one first. "Cardinal Problem"'s central claim about LW's letter seems more plausible now that I've seen more of how Kremer would want to tell this story. Some of the details still seem sketchy -- Kremer likes to claim that "We can't say that p" is nonsense, where it just looks like a contradiction to me (and thus like something with a sense). But his responses to Hacker on the specific points he looks at in the later portions of the paper seem pretty compelling. They require Wittgenstein to have spoken ironically in his letters at some points, but it doesn't seem to me to be a great stretch to think that Wittgenstein didn't talk "straightforwardly" when rushed, since he clearly doesn't in his published works. His writing is just always like that.

Also Kremer quotes an amazon.com reviewer at the start of the paper. The kind of reviewer that spells "philosophy" wrong.