Wittgenstein and His Interpreters E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 740

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Comprising specially commissioned essays from some of the most significant contributors to the field, this volume provides a uniquely authoritative and thorough survey of the main lines of Wittgenstein scholarship over the past 50 years, tracing the history and current trends as well as anticipating the future shape of work on Wittgenstein.

• The first collection of its kind, this volume presents a range of perspectives on the different approaches to the philosophy of Wittgenstein
• Written by leading experts from America, Britain, and Europe
• Provides a much needed overview of the complex landscape of Wittgenstein exegesis and Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophy
• Assesses the current state, aims, and future of Wittgenstein scholarship
• An essential guide for both students and scholars

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Works by Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s Nachlass

Lecture Notes by Others, Conversations and Correspondence

Introduction

I Main Approaches to Wittgenstein Interpretation

II Themes and Controversies

III Questions of Style and Method

IV The Articles in This Volume

Chapter 1 Perspectives on Wittgenstein: An Intermittently Opinionated Survey

I The Story of Wittgenstein Reception

II Continuity vs. Discontinuity

III Genetic vs. Immanent Hermeneutics

IV Rationalist vs. Irrationalist Interpretations

V Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Interests

Chapter 2 Wittgenstein’s Method: Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices

I The ‘Essence’ of a Philosophical Prejudice

II One Philosophical Task or Two?

III Techniques for Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices

Chapter 3 Gordon Baker’s Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein

Baker’s New Conception

Waismann and Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on the Psychoanalytic Analogy

Wittgenstein’s Methodology Reconsidered

Wittgenstein and Ryle 1: Categorial Confusions

Wittgenstein and Ryle 2: Logical Geography

Baker’s Wittgenstein

Chapter 4 The Interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations: Style, Therapy, Nachlass

I Introduction

II The Issue of Textual Difficulties and Style

III The PI Preface

IV Baker’s Contextualism

V Applying the Right Kind of Context

VI Conclusions and Further Issues

Chapter 5 Ways of Reading Wittgenstein: Observations on Certain Uses of the Word ‘Metaphysics’

I

II

III

IV

Chapter 6 Metaphysical/Everyday Use: A Note on a Late Paper by Gordon Baker

Chapter 7 Wittgenstein and Transcendental Idealism

Introduction

I Was the Early Wittgenstein a Transcendental Idealist?

II Was the Later Wittgenstein a Transcendental Idealist?

Chapter 8 Simples and the Idea of Analysis in the Tractatus

Chapter 9 Words, Waxing and Waning: Ethics in/and/of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Chapter 10 The Uses of Wittgenstein’s Beetle: Philosophical Investigations §293 and Its Interpreters

I Introduction: Baker on the Private Language Argument

II Strawson’s and Malcolm’s Interpretations of the Beetle Story

III Pitcher’s, Cook’s, and Donagan’s Interpretations of the Beetle Story

IV Cohen’s Repudiation of the Beetle Story

V Hacker’s and Baker’s Interpretations of the Beetle Story

Chapter 11 Bourgeois, Bolshevist or Anarchist? The Reception of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics

I Some Personal Prefatory Remarks

II Introduction: Wittgenstein’s Chief Contribution?

III The Reception of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics in His Own Lifetime

IV The Post 1956 Reaction

Chapter 12 Wittgenstein and Ethical Naturalism

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

This paperback edition first published 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wittgenstein and his interpreters : essays in memory of Gordon Baker /

edited by Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-2922-0 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-59260-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. I. Kahane, Guy, 1971– II. Kanterian, Edward. III. Kuusela, Oskari.

B3376.W564W5545 2007

192–dc22

2007001491

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Killary Bay, Connemara, Ireland. Photograph © 1890–1900. Library of Congress.

Cover design by Nicki Averill Design.

Notes on Contributors

Alice Crary is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She has published articles on moral psychology, ethical theory, meta-ethics, philosophy and literature, feminist theory, animals and ethics, J. L. Austin, Wittgenstein and other issues and figures. She is author of Beyond Moral Judgment (2007). She is also co-editor of The New Wittgenstein (2000) and Reading Cavell (2006) and editor of Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (2007). She is currently writing a book on ethics and animals.

Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. Prior to that he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. He also held visiting positions at Queen’s University, Kingston, the University of Bielefeld and Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Glock is the author of A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell 1996), Quine and Davidson (2003) and What is Analytic Philosophy? (2007). He has edited The Rise of Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell 1997), Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 2001), Strawson and Kant (2003) and is the co-editor of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1991), Wittgenstein and Quine (2005) and Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy (2009).

P. M. S. Hacker is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He co-authored five books with Gordon Baker: the first two volumes of the monumental multi-volume Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell 1980, 1985), Frege: Logical Investigations, Language, Sense and Nonsense (Blackwell 1984), and Scepticism Rules and Language (Blackwell 1984). In addition, he has written Insight and Illusion (Blackwell 1972/1986), Appearance and Reality (Blackwell 1987) and the remaining two volumes of the Commentary (Blackwell 1990, 1996), as well as the epilogue Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell 1996). More recently, he has written, together with Max Bennett, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell 2003). His next book is entitled Human Nature: The Categorial Framework.

Guy Kahane is Deputy Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He works mainly in moral philosophy. Kahane is also co-editor of Enhancing Human Capacities (2011).

Edward Kanterian is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Previously he held a lectureship at Trinity College and Jesus College, Oxford. He works in theoretical philosophy and history of modern philosophy. He is the author of Analytic Philosophy (2004), Frege (2012) and has a forthcoming book on Kant’s God.

Oskari Kuusela is Senior Lecturer at School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (2008) and Key Terms in Ethics (2011) as well as the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (2011).

Marie McGinn is a senior lecturer in the Philosophy Department at York University. She is the author of Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (1997) and Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language (2006).

Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He studied philosophy at the universities of York and Oxford, writing his postgraduate thesis on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. He has written biographies of Wittgenstein (1990) and Russell (1999) and is working on a biography of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer. He is also the author of the book How to Read Wittgenstein? (2005). His current philosophical research interests are the philosophy of biography and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.

A. W. Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Infinite (2nd edition 2001), Points of View (1997) and Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (2003). He is also the editor of Meaning of Reference (1993), Infinity (1993) and Bernard Williams’ posthumously published anthology Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006).

Katherine Morris is a supernumerary fellow in philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, where she has been since 1986; she completed an M. Phil. in Medical Anthropology at Oxford in 2005. She is the co-author, with Gordon Baker, of Descartes’ Dualism (1996) and the editor of Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects (Blackwell 2004), a collection of the later Baker’s essays on the later Wittgenstein. She has written numerous articles on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and is writing a book on Sartre for Blackwell’s Great Minds series.

Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford. He was previously a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He is the author of On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (1990), Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (2001), Philosophical Myths of the Fall (2005) and Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, 243–315 (2006).

Alois Pichler is the Director of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. He has co-edited with the Wittgenstein Archives Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (2000), and with Georg Henrik von Wright Wittgenstein’s Vermischte Bemerkungen/Culture and Value (1994; Blackwell 1998). His other publications are mainly in the field of Wittgenstein scholarship: Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen: Vom Buch zum Album (2004) and Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works (2006), co-edited with Simo Säätelä, and in the field of Humanities Computing, where he relates his work on Wittgenstein to the digital turn, as in ‘Encoding Wittgenstein: Some remarks on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, the Bergen Electronic Edition, and future electronic publishing and networking’ (2002).

Hilary Putnam is Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He has written extensively on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In recent years he has also written extensively on the relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledge and on American pragmatism. His book Ethics Without Ontology (2004) deals with many of these topics.

Joachim Schulte teaches at the University of Zurich. He has published a number of articles and four books on the philosophy of Wittgenstein: Experience and Expression (1993), Wittgenstein: An Introduction (1992), Chor und Gesetz: Wittgenstein im Kontext (1990) and Wittgenstein: Leben Werk Wirkung (2005). He is co-editor of critical editions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1989) and Philosophical Investigations (2001). In recent years, he has chiefly worked on Wittgenstein’s middle period.

David G. Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (2004) and Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (1995), and co-editor of Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, with Béla Szabados (2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, with Hans Sluga (1996).

Acknowledgements

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Baker, distinguished interpreter of Wittgenstein and our former supervisor at Oxford. We are indebted to Katherine Morris for encouraging us to pursue this project and for much helpful advice. We are also grateful to P. M. S. Hacker and Rupert Read for useful comments on the introduction as well as to Jakob A. Bertzbach, William Child, Steven Hall, and Jonathan Witztum for their advice and assistance. We also want to thank our publisher, in particular Nick Bellorini and Gillian Kane.

Abbreviations

Works by Wittgenstein

The following abbreviations are used to refer to Wittgenstein’s published works, listed in chronological order.

TLP

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

. Translated by Ogden, C. K. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.

BB

Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations,” Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books

. Edited by Rhees, R. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

NB

Notebooks 1914–1916

. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961.

TLP

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

. Translated by Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

RFM

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics

. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M., Rhees, R., and von Wright, G. H., translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1956. 2nd edition 1967, 3rd revised edition 1978.

Z

Zettel

. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

EPB

“Eine Philosophische Betrachtung.” In

Schriften

, Vol. 5, 117–282. Edited by Rhees, R. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.

PT

Prototractatus, An early version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

PG

Philosophical Grammar

. Edited by Rhees, R., translated by Kenny, A. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.

PR

Philosophical Remarks

. Edited by Rhees, R., translated by Hargreaves, R. and White, R. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975.

RPPi

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology

, Vol 1. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

BBB

Das Blaue Buch, Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (Das Braune Buch)

. Edited by Rhees, R. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984.

OC

On Certainty

. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright G. H., translated by Anscombe, E. and Paul, D. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

LE

“Lecture on Ethics.”

Philosophical Review

74 (1965): 3–12. Reprinted in PO, pp. 37–44.

PO

Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951

. Edited by Klagge, J. and Nordmann, A. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993.

DB

Denkbewegungen, Tagebücher 1930–1932/1936–1937

. Edited by Somavilla, I. Innsbruck: Haymon, 1997.

PI

Philosophical Investigations

, 2nd edition. Edited by Anscombe, G. E. M. and Rhees, R., translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

CV

Culture and Value

, revised edition. Edited by von Wright, G. H. in collaboration with Nyman, H., revd. edn. by Pichler, A., translated by Winch, P. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. First edition 1980.

PIKr

Philosophische Untersuchungen, Kritisch-genetische Edition

. Edited by Schulte, J., Nyman, H., von Savigny, E. and von Wright, G. H. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001.

BT

Big Typescript: TS 213

. Edited by Luckhardt, C. G. and Aue, M. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Wittgenstein’s Nachlass

References to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (as cited in the von Wright catalogue; von Wright 1982/1993a) are by MS or TS number followed by page number.

BEE

Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, The Bergen Electronic Edition

. Edited by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. Copyright by Oxford University Press, the University of Bergen, the Wittgenstein Trustees, 2000.

Lecture Notes by Others, Conversations and Correspondence

LC

Barrett, Cyril, ed.

Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

EL

Engelmann, Paul.

Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. With a Memoir.

Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

WVC

McGuinness, Brian, ed.

Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann.

Translated by Schulte, J. and McGuinness, B. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.

AWL

Ambrose, Alice, ed.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1932–35.

Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.

LWL

Lee, Desmond, ed.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures 1930–1932. From the notes of John King and Desmond Lee.

Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

DC

Drury, M. O. C. “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein.” In R. Rhees, ed.,

Recollections of Wittgenstein,

1984, pp. 76–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Also in R. Rhees, ed.,

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Personal Recollections,

1981, pp. 91–111. Oxford: Blackwell. And in ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in R. Rhees ed., 1981, pp. 112–189. See also

The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein.

Edited by Berman, D., Fitzgerald, M. and Hayes, J. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996.

BC

Bouwsma, O. K.

Wittgenstein: Conversations,

1949–1951. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986.

LFM

Diamond, Cora, ed.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939, From the Notes of R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies.

London: Harvester, 1976 / Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.

VW

Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Waismann, Friedrich,

The Voices of Wittgenstein, The Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann.

Edited by Baker, G. London: Routledge, 2003. (For abbreviations of Waismann’s works, see below.)

Introduction

Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela

In what way, if any, is interpreting Wittgenstein different from interpreting other great philosophers? Are there any special difficulties relating to Wittgenstein interpretation? With some philosophers, we face straightforward obstacles. Take the example of Socrates. The only remaining record of Socrates’ thought is its representation in Plato’s dialogues and a handful of reports from other ancient sources. Indeed, to vividly illustrate the difficulty in accurately ascertaining what the historical Socrates really thought, Gregory Vlastos once suggested that we imagine that all that we knew of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy were scattered reports and the writings of a close student (Vlastos 1991, 98).1 Vlastos’s choice of Wittgenstein as an object of comparison is probably not accidental. During Wittgenstein’s lifetime the only sources of information about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy were rumour and hearsay, the articles of some of his students, and manuscripts of dictations to students that were circulated from hand-to-hand. But Wittgenstein’s death was followed by the publication of the Philosophical Investigations, the primary statement of his later views, and the decades that followed saw the publication of many collations of earlier and later writings: The Blue and Brown Books, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Culture and Value, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, and others. More recently, Wittgenstein scholars have been granted electronic access to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, his literary remains. Those who embark today on the project of attempting to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy thus have a wealth of writing to study. One might think that by now there should be no difficulty in putting together an accurate picture of Wittgenstein’s views – that the contrast between our understanding of Wittgenstein and of Socrates couldn’t be greater. The irony is that the opposite is true.

Wittgenstein interpretation is a fertile project. His work has been the subject of thousands of articles, collections and books. Yet from all the wealth of available evidence there has emerged, not a single clear portrait, but a series of competing and often wildly contradictory Wittgensteins. It is still common for interpreters to claim that all prior readings of Wittgenstein have got things fundamentally wrong.2 Disputes over numerous points of detail, as well as over the very aim of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, continue.

What explains this situation? What does it tell us about the project of Wittgenstein interpretation? On what aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is there general consensus, and what remains under dispute? The essays collected in this volume, written by some of the leading Wittgenstein scholars today, discuss these and related questions. Starting out from a range of distinct and often opposing perspectives, the contributors consider various aspects of Wittgenstein interpretation: the relation between our understanding of his conception of philosophy and our reading of specific passages and remarks; the intimate connection between the substance and style of Wittgenstein’s singular mode of philosophical writing; the usefulness of associating Wittgenstein’s work with specific schools of thought or philosophical traditions; and related matters. Many of the essays touch on various aspects of the work of the late Wittgenstein scholar Gordon Baker, to whom this volume is dedicated. This is more than appropriate, since in his rich career Baker made an essential contribution to the painting of not one, but at least three of the dominant competing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.3

The essays in this volume certainly do not add up to any unified portrait of Wittgenstein. What we do hope, however, is that the juxtaposition, in a single volume, of these snapshots from different interpretative angles will offer an accurate and much needed view (or, to borrow a term of Wittgenstein’s, an Übersicht) of the current state of Wittgenstein interpretation.4

In this introduction, we attempt to provide a framework for the discussion. We shall proceed as follows. Section I sketches a brief history of Wittgenstein interpretation, and in the course of doing so, highlights the main exegetical approaches. In Section II we try to identify some main points of contention, and to trace the way these have changed over time. Section III turns to look at various aspects of Wittgenstein’s writings – his view of philosophy, and the way that view is expressed in the unique style and mode of his writings – and consider the ways that these make interpreting Wittgenstein so challenging. Finally, Section IV presents the papers in the volume.

I Main Approaches to Wittgenstein Interpretation

Within the mass of work on Wittgenstein, it is possible to identify several broad patterns of assumptions and methods shared by groups of interpreters. It is important, however, to note that our list of interpretative approaches is drawn for a particular purpose: to serve as a guide for orientation in the vast body of writing on Wittgenstein. As such, it inevitably plays down important differences between the figures grouped together as well as interesting affinities between figures placed under opposing headings. We shall give most attention to approaches to Wittgenstein within the English-speaking or analytic tradition, though we end by mentioning some readings of Wittgenstein in relation to so-called continental philosophers or readings of him in a ‘continental context’. Although our focus is on scholarly work that explicitly aims to interpret Wittgenstein’s writings, we shall not ignore attempts to apply his philosophy in various areas; such attempts implicitly embody an interpretation of Wittgenstein, and they often bring to light the implications and commitments of a given reading.

1 Initial responses

Writings referring to and discussing Wittgenstein appear from the 1920s onwards – mainly by the members of the Vienna Circle, by Oxford and Cambridge philosophers or in texts about logical positivism.5 The early/mid 1950s, however, really mark the beginning of a steady accumulation of articles on Wittgenstein.6 The details of the Tractatus conception of language and the world were now discussed in journals and edited volumes.7 With the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953, general attention was drawn to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Among the earliest responses to that work were the reviews by Norman Malcolm, Peter Strawson and Paul Feyerabend (see Pitcher ed. 1968). Fierce debates followed, and several of Wittgenstein’s closest students assumed the role of explaining as well as defending Wittgenstein’s later work. A famous example of this trend is Rush Rhees’s dispute with Ayer on the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language (Rhees 1954, Ayer 1954, both reprinted in Pitcher ed. 1968).

The first book-length treatises on Wittgenstein appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s.8 Wittgenstein’s work now became an object of scholarly study. Anscombe’s, Black’s and Stenius’s books from this period on the Tractatus still retain the status of standard commentaries, and their basic approach to the Tractatus remained unchallenged until fairly recently (see §3 below). Certain persisting types of Wittgenstein commentary also emerged around this time. One natural way to respond to Wittgenstein’s style of writing is a remark by remark commentary, as exemplified by Black in the case of the Tractatus. Thirteen years later the same format was employed by Hallet (1977) in a commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as well as in the 1980s by von Savigny (1988; 1989) and most famously by Baker and Hacker (see §2 below). A second widely employed format is first to discuss Wittgenstein’s early philosophy and then move on to his later philosophy, often through an examination of his later criticism of his early thought. Again a basis can be found in Wittgenstein’s writings themselves, especially in his suggestion in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations that his later work should be studied by juxtaposing it with the Tractatus. This form readily invites questions concerning the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, a topic addressed explicitly, for instance, in Kenny (1973).9

The earliest readers perceived a sharp contrast between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, presenting Wittgenstein as holding, at different points, two radically opposing philosophies. As Wittgenstein’s intermediate writings became available, it became clear that his route from his early to the later views was gradual. Nevertheless, the conception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as divided into early and late periods has persisted. What remains an object of dispute in later readings is the nature of Wittgenstein’s route to his later thought and how exactly to understand the relation between his early and later philosophy – or perhaps his early and later philosophies.

2 The ‘orthodox’ interpretation

Wittgenstein interpretation reached a high point of scholarly detail in Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker’s comprehensive commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, published in four volumes from 1980 onwards. Baker and Hacker’s interpretation of Wittgenstein is continuous with earlier work, most notably that of Anscombe (1959), Malcolm (1954), Stenius (1960), Black (1964), Ambrose (1966), Pears (1971), Kenny (1973; 1984) and Fogelin (1976), but their interpretation is worked out in greater detail, making careful use of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.10 More recent interpreters following a similar approach include Hans-Johann Glock (1991; 1996), Oswald Hanfling (1989; 2004), Richard McDonough (1986), Joachim Schulte (1992; 1993), Severin Schröder (2006), and to an extent Stephen Mulhall (1990) and David Stern (1995).11 This reading dominated the field from the 1970s until the 1990s. It has recently been labelled ‘orthodox’ by its opponents.

Although there are many important differences between the above authors,12 they share a broadly similar approach to Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy insofar as they attribute substantial views and arguments to Wittgenstein. To take Baker and Hacker as a representative example, they view the Tractatus both as a reaction to and culmination of a representational conception of the relation between language or thought and reality that had dominated European philosophy for centuries, a model which reached Wittgenstein through his immediate predecessors Frege and Russell, and which he refined in the picture theory of meaning. According to the picture theory, language mirrors the world, propositions are descriptions of states of affairs consisting of names that stand for objects in the world, and language connects to reality via mental acts relating names to their meanings. Thus, the Tractatus is understood as offering a subtly worked out version of the representational model, articulating a theory of the essence of any possible language, the metaphysical structure of the world, and their interrelation. The theory delimits what can be said from what cannot be said but at most shown, where the latter includes the very essence of language and the world. This leads to the paradox of the Tractatus, since its propositions must be themselves nonsensical, given that they are trying to say what cannot be said but can only be shown. While this paradox has suggested to orthodox interpreters that something is awry with the Tractatus conception of language, they do not believe that everything in the book needs to be rejected. For instance, Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege’s and Russell’s conceptions of logic, and his own positive contribution to the clarification of the nature of logical propositions, stand firm. Similarly, his discussion of the problem of intentionality contains insights fundamental to his later solution (see Hacker 1996, Ch. I). Finally, the Tractatus’ programme for future philosophy as a non-cognitive, elucidatory discipline is significant and an important connection to the later work.

The Philosophical Investigations, by contrast, is understood by the ‘orthodox’ interpreters as a rejection of the Tractarian model of the language-world relation, and through it, of the tradition behind it. In particular, the book propounds an explicit anti-metaphysical view: philosophy is not taken to consist in the pursuit of the sempiternal and hidden structure of language and the world. Language can still be said to have essential features, but they lie in plain view and need only to be made perspicuous by way of describing the uses of words or by tabulating the rules by which language is governed (see PI §92). Many of these features are not immutable, however, but belong to changing linguistic practices. The world, on the other hand, is no longer viewed as an object of a priori philosophical speculation, but only of empirical scientific investigation. The logical syntax of language does not mirror the hidden structure of the world, but is simply a means of representing the world. The study of language will thus not uncover any hidden metaphysical features of reality, since there are none. The traditional conception of the aims of philosophy, shared by the Tractatus, is taken to be the result of a misunderstanding of the relation between language and the world by (i) sublimating the essence of our language, and (ii) mistaking features of our linguistic representation of the world for features of the world. What previous philosophers took to be metaphysical truths about the nature of reality are in fact no more than ‘shadows cast by grammar’ (Baker and Hacker 2005, 97). Therefore, we need to discard this idealised model of language and give a systematic account of the language-games in which concepts are used and thus make our conceptual framework explicit in order to resolve philosophical problems. Since such problems arise when we use expressions ‘in a language-game other than the one appropriate to it’ (Kenny 1973, 164), bringing ‘words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI §116) will do away with these problems.

Accordingly, the Philosophical Investigations is seen as engaging in both a positive and a negative task: on the one hand in the tabulation of grammar and the interrelations of concepts such as meaning, rule, understanding, knowledge, thinking, the inner and the outer, etc., and on the other hand, in dispelling confusions brought about by misunderstanding these concepts and the network of conceptual relationships in which they are embedded. For example, the later Wittgenstein is taken to argue that since language is a rule-governed practice (positive result), the idea of a private language is incoherent (negative result). Reading Wittgenstein as providing an overview of grammatical rules that will dissolve philosophical problems and confusions, this interpretation sees his later work as largely continuous with the work of Oxford philosophers such as Ryle, Austin and Strawson.

Concerning the Philosophical Investigations the interpretative method employed by orthodox interpreters consists in a systematic reading of the main text by establishing interconnections between remarks, often based on tracing individual remarks to their earlier contexts. In addition, in many cases orthodox readers interpret Wittgenstein’s arguments as direct responses to, and thus to some extent as engaging with, the argument of other philosophers such as Frege, Russell and Moore. The orthodox interpretation attributes to Wittgenstein a concern with a methodical account of philosophically relevant concepts for the therapeutic purpose of releasing us from deep-seated confusions, but not primarily an ethical interest in philosophy, as certain other interpreters do (see below). Consequently, the hermeneutic task is seen as consisting in working out his nuanced and complex arguments and analyses, both positive and negative. On this approach, then, interpreting Wittgenstein need not be fundamentally different from the interpretation of other major philosophers.

3 The new interpretation of the Tractatus

It is characteristic of both the early readings of the Tractatus and the ‘orthodox’ interpretation that they attribute to the early Wittgenstein theories such as logical atomism or the picture theory of language.13 The remarks in the Tractatus to the effect that its propositions are to be considered nonsensical (TLP 6.54) did, of course, catch the attention of Russell, Ramsey and others of the very earliest commentators. Nevertheless, the problem of the self-proclaimed nonsensicality of the book did not become a main focus of the interpretation of the book. This approach to the Tractatus was challenged from the 1980s onwards by an alternative interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others.14 The proponents of this type of reading are sometimes referred to as the ‘New Wittgensteinians’, following the publication in 2000 of The New Wittgenstein, an influential collection of articles representing this approach. This interpretation of the Tractatus is also described as resolute, and contrasted with the ineffability reading defended by orthodox interpreters. The debate about the interpretation of the nonsensicality of the Tractatus dominated Wittgenstein scholarship from the late 1990s onwards.

Diamond and Conant reject the ‘orthodox’ attribution to the Tractatus of ineffable doctrines and claim that it should be read as engaging in a therapeutic activity whose goal is to make its reader turn away from philosophical theorising. Wittgenstein aims to achieve this by adopting an alternative method of philosophising designed to help its reader to come to see how doctrines which at first sight appear to make sense collapse into nonsense upon closer examination.15 It would be mistaken to conceive of the Tractatus as seeking to draw a limit to language by appealing to a nonsensical theory or a set of nonsensical arguments. The Tractatus does indeed seek to draw such a limit, but it aims to do so simply by relying on the reader’s pre-theoretical comprehension of what makes sense. On this view, the method of the Tractatus is perhaps better compared to Kierkegaard’s ironic style than to argumentative philosophical texts such as those of Aristotle and Kant. Also, rather than arguing for any particular ‘fixed’ readings of the remarks of the Tractatus, Conant and Diamond see themselves as articulating a programme for reading the book. Ultimately it is up to the individual readers of the Tractatus to work their way through the book and experience the collapse of its sentences (Conant and Diamond 2004, 47).

One apparent advantage of this reading is that it avoids portraying the Tractatus as straightforwardly self-undermining. After all, on the orthodox interpretations, the statements of the book are thought by Wittgenstein to be at once true (Preface) and nonsensical (TLP 6.54), at once trying to say what can only be shown and insisting that it cannot be said. Diamond and Conant too believe that the Tractatus ultimately fails to advance a philosophy without doctrines. But they portray this failure as less straightforward than the early and ‘orthodox’ readings. In their view, the project of the Tractatus ultimately fails because the method of philosophical clarification as logical analysis which the book advocates has built into it a doctrine about the essence of language (Conant and Diamond 2004).16

The new interpretation of the Tractatus also raises anew the question of the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This question had been posed earlier when, for example, interpreters wondered whether Wittgenstein retained a version of the picture theory in his later philosophy (see Stenius 1960; Kenny 1973), or even aspects of his conception of philosophy (see Kenny 1973; for a similar, more recent account, see Hacker 2005, 303–6). The New Wittgensteinians claim that there are even stronger affinities between Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy (see Conant 2004).17 This raises the stakes in the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, because it now becomes harder to explain why the later Wittgenstein rejected his earlier work.

4 Therapeutic and other alternative readings of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

Although this dispute about the Tractatus continues to excite much attention, the debate has partly shifted to the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work. Here too recent work has challenged the received interpretations by placing a very different emphasis on the therapeutic aspect of Wittgenstein’s later work.18 Accordingly, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not to be understood as trying to convince the philosopher’s interlocutor with the force of arguments or facts about ordinary language use. Rather, Wittgenstein’s aim is to release us from disquietude and puzzlement due to philosophical pictures or ways of looking at things we have adopted and which entangle us in philosophical problems, and to replace such disruptive conceptions with more helpful ones.19 It is thus of the very nature of the therapeutic interpretation that it does not converge on a set of shared doctrines attributed to Wittgenstein. Instead of making philosophical assertions, Wittgenstein is thought to employ, for instance, analogies and rules as objects of comparison to make relevant aspects of language use perspicuous. Readings of this type thus tend to pay more attention to the details of Wittgenstein’s style (for more on this, see §4 below).

Although this therapeutic interpretation has until fairly recently been on the margins of Wittgenstein scholarship, it has its roots in some of the earliest readings of Wittgenstein: those of John Wisdom (1953), O. K. Bouwsma (1961 and BC)20 and Friedrich Waismann, who was Wittgenstein’s collaborator in the 1930s (see Waismann 1997 and VW). In the United States, this reading is associated especially with Stanley Cavell (Cavell 1976; 1982; 2005) and Burton Dreben, and in Britain, with the later work of Gordon Baker (2004).21 Further criticism of the orthodox view that is in line with the therapeutic approach emerged in the 1990s, focusing on Wittgenstein’s method (Pichler 2004; Stern 2004; see also §3 above).22

One form of the therapeutic approach may be captured by an aphorism widely attributed to Burton Dreben: ‘Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship’.23 Dreben, whose influence is to a great extent due to his teaching at Harvard, focused on the critical dissection of philosophical texts, aiming to demonstrate the points at which their authors fell into nonsense. He also emphasized the importance of recognizing that philosophical debates are often not genuine disputes, but rather cases where philosophers are talking past each other, because, for example, of their different assumptions. Thus, the resolution of such debates may not be a straightforward matter of who is right, and requires a close examination of what is really being said, whereby the importance of the history of philosophy for philosophy also comes to the fore.

Another unique voice in Wittgenstein interpretation is Stanley Cavell, who reads Wittgenstein as a modernist author grappling with the plight of a self-conscious modern subject who can no longer take for granted common conventions of history. A central theme in Cavell’s aesthetic-ethical reading of the Philosophical Investigations is the tension between the deep human need to transcend the ordinary and the common, and the ultimate futility of any such attempt.24 Cavell accordingly resists orthodox interpretations that portray Wittgenstein, for example, as conclusively dissolving scepticism by appeals to fixed rules of language (Cavell 1976, Ch. IX; 1982).25 In his many writings, Cavell has applied Wittgensteinian ideas to ethics, literature, music and film.26

A version of the therapeutic approach was developed by Gordon Baker from the late 1980s onwards, arising out of dissatisfaction with his earlier interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations co-authored with Peter Hacker (see Baker 2004). Characteristic of the later Baker’s work is detailed attention to Wittgenstein’s language, such as his use of modal expressions. Rather than seeking to articulate doctrines about language, the aim of the later Wittgenstein is to articulate pictures and conceptions employed for the purpose of dissolving philosophers’ ‘thought cramps’. Baker emphasised Wittgenstein’s comparison between philosophy and psychoanalysis (see MS 109, 174; also Hacker in this volume): he saw Wittgenstein’s philosophy as concerned with problems which particular individuals have in specific historical contexts – whereby it is not assumed that such problems could not be shared by many, but only that the ‘medicine’ that works for one might not necessarily work for everyone. G. H. von Wright, the editor of many of Wittgenstein’s works, also stressed the relativity of philosophical problems and clarifications to particular historical contexts, although von Wright is probably not best characterised as a therapeutic interpreter in Baker’s sense (see von Wright 1982, 216).

It’s worth noting that although the therapeutic approach to the later Wittgenstein might invite comparisons with the ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus, it shouldn’t be assumed that the two necessarily go together: Baker, for example, held on to a more or less orthodox reading of Wittgenstein’s earlier work.27

5 Wittgenstein interpretation and mainstream analytic philosophy

Most of the interpreters we’ve discussed so far are not interested only in establishing the correct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views, but also see themselves as followers of Wittgenstein – accepting in the main Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, as they interpret it, if not that of the Tractatus.28 These readings of Wittgenstein are presented, then, from what is sometimes called a Wittgensteinian point of view. There are however also interpretations of Wittgenstein that aren’t developed from an explicitly Wittgensteinian standpoint.29 The most famous and influential example of such a reading is Saul Kripke’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following and private language (Kripke 1982), but in fact many contemporary mainstream analytic philosophers who could by no means be described as followers of Wittgenstein often invoke his name and claim to present an account of his views. Some of these authors, of course, merely draw on some conventional understanding of what Wittgenstein supposedly said (an understanding that broadly corresponds to what we called the “Orthodox Interpretation”). But others clearly aim to give a more or less novel, and more or less sympathetic, account of Wittgenstein’s views on this or that matter, and relate them to contemporary discussions of first-person authority, sensation language, necessity and normativity, meaning and use, and many other topics. These accounts are naturally very diverse, but what they have in common is that they try to extract and assess particular theses or arguments they purport to find in Wittgenstein’s texts, to state them in contemporary jargon, and to assess them by contemporary methods and standards.30

Thus Kripke claimed to find, in the remarks on rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations, a powerful argument that leads to a troubling sceptical paradox. Kripke then claimed to find in these remarks a sceptical solution to the paradox. But although this struck many Wittgenstein scholars as a thoroughly misguided reading of the text,31 Kripke was in fact only following in the footsteps of the first reader of Wittgenstein’s earliest work. Russell’s introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus notoriously questioned the self-destructing pronouncements that bracket that text and thus found in it, against the apparent wishes of its author, a range of substantive philosophical theses and arguments. Kripke’s is, therefore, an interpretative dilemma (or temptation) that confronted readers of Wittgenstein’s work from the very start (see Mulhall in this volume).

This interpretative dilemma is due to the apparent chasm between Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy and that held by many mainstream analytic philosophers. Despite significant disagreement about Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, the majority of his interpreters agree that Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy is radically at odds with a traditional conception of philosophy as a form of positive theoretical inquiry into the nature of world, mind and language. And although mainstream analytic philosophers of the last fifty years or so also have opposing views of philosophy, they mostly share, at least in broad outline, this traditional conception of philosophy.32 The problem, then, is that when a philosopher treats Wittgenstein’s writings as a repository for philosophical theses or theories, or for arguments for such theses or theories, he is wilfully ignoring what Wittgenstein himself claimed to be doing (cf. PI, §128).

There are several ways of dealing with this conundrum. One approach, pursued most vigorously by Michael Dummett and later on by Crispin Wright, is to decline to take Wittgenstein’s remarks about his own work seriously: to insist that despite his repeated disavowals, Wittgenstein does traffic in substantive philosophical theses, such as, for example, a use theory of meaning or behaviourist view of sensation language (see Dummett 1959; 1978; Wright 1980; 1986; 2001).33 Note however that to take this route is to commit oneself to substantive exegetical claims about a tension inherent within Wittgenstein’s philosophy, something that most mainstream readers of Wittgenstein have declined to do.34

A different version of this strategy is to claim to accept Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy at least in broad outline, but to understand its implication for philosophical method more liberally than Wittgenstein himself and most Wittgensteinians. John McDowell, for instance, follows Wittgenstein in seeing philosophy as having exclusively critical and therapeutic aims, but is rather more sceptical about the possibility of achieving these aims through the assembly of reminders about everyday language use. He thus sees greater room for internal engagement with traditional and contemporary philosophy, employing their own idiom in the service of a more satisfying ‘diagnostic deconstruction’ of philosophical problems (see McDowell 1994),35 and this also shapes his reading of Wittgenstein’s texts.36

Yet another approach is to simply dismiss such worries of fidelity to the authors’ intentions. In line with the impatience that some analytical philosophers still have regarding questions of history and interpretation, it might be claimed that it simply doesn’t matter what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote the Philosophical Investigations. What matters is rather whether certain propositions and arguments – whatever their source – are philosophically interesting or defensible. Indeed Kripke’s attitude to the exegetical question is revealing. He employs a device that has also been taken up by others: instead of explicitly attributing the argument he sets out in his book to Wittgenstein, he presents it as an argument that struck him while reading the Philosophical Investigations. Hence the common label of ‘Kripkenstein’ to the imaginary philosopher who raises a sceptical paradox about rule-following. Those who take this approach are obviously positioning themselves outside the orbit of the project of Wittgenstein interpretation, and indeed, the voluminous mainstream discussion of rule-following has increasingly detached itself from any explicit consideration of Wittgenstein’s texts.37

It’s worth remarking, however, that similar problems arise, as we have seen, within the circle of avowedly Wittgensteinian interpreters. For although most of these interpreters decline explicitly to ascribe to Wittgenstein philosophical theories and theses, or arguments for such theses (as opposed to clarificatory statements, or arguments such as reductio arguments intended to make perspicuous the logical consequences of philosophical views), it is still very much in dispute among them what counts as ascribing to Wittgenstein theses and arguments in the first place. For, as we saw earlier, on some therapeutic readings of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, to read his remarks on, say, the intelligibility of a private language as a reductio ad absurdum argument, as many interpreters have done, is a gross misunderstanding of the text that is no better than finding in it a sceptical paradox.38

6 Connections to the continent

Mainstream readings of Wittgenstein in the English-speaking world have tended to locate his work in relation to the founding figures of analytic philosophy, Frege, Russell and Moore, or to later figures within this tradition, such as Carnap, Quine, Austin and Ryle (Hacker 1996; Glock 2004; Biletzki 2003). But we’ve already noted readings on which Wittgenstein’s philosophy is thought to echo continental figures such as Kant39 or Kierkegaard (see Creegan 1989; Mulhall 2001). Not very surprisingly, readings that interpret Wittgenstein in the light of continental approaches have mostly been spearheaded by adherents of continental philosophy in the English-speaking world. We thus find comparisons between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and that of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.40

In the continent itself, attitudes to Wittgenstein’s work tend to be more cautious, as Wittgenstein has often been taken to belong to the opposing analytic tradition. In France, for example, Wittgenstein’s work was mostly ignored by major figures such as Foucault and Derrida.41 Perhaps the first to write about Wittgenstein in France was Pierre Hadot,42 reading Wittgenstein as continuous with ancient ethics, with its emphasis on philosophy as a way of life. Hadot was followed by others such as Jacques Bouveresse, who attempted to relate Wittgensteinian ideas to the present concerns of French philosophy (see Bouveresse 1987; 1995), and Jean-François Lyotard, who has made controversial use of Wittgensteinian notions in several of his writings (Lyotard 1984; 1988; 1993). In Germany, Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1988; 1998) and Karl-Otto Apel (Apel 1973; 1992) drew on Wittgenstein in their attempts to establish a foundation for critical theory and ethics.

Within this tradition, Wittgenstein’s views on Freud have received special attention. Wittgenstein’s relation to Freud presents a challenge to interpreters. On the one hand, we find positive references such as Wittgenstein’s remark to Rhees that he is ‘a disciple of Freud’ and ‘a follower of Freud’ (LC, 41). On the other hand, Wittgenstein also voices criticisms of Freud’s view of psychoanalysis as a science. According to Wittgenstein this understanding of psychoanalysis involves a confusion between the concepts of cause and reason, and Freud is better understood as having invented a new way of describing phenomena, rather than making factual, scientific claims. In the context of the discussion of Wittgenstein’s relation to Freud some authors have been concerned with elucidating Wittgenstein’s method of philosophy by focusing on his comparison between philosophy and psychoanalysis (see Wisdom 1953; McGuinness 2002, Ch. 20; Baker 2004, chs. 8, 10), while others have sought to make use of Wittgenstein’s ideas in a critical examination of psychoanalysis. Readings of Wittgenstein have thus also played a role in debates about psychoanalysis, both on the continent and in the English speaking world (see Cioffi 1969; 1998; McGuinness 2002, Ch. 20).43

7 Other interpretations

Let us end this section by briefly mentioning readings of Wittgenstein that do not fit neatly any of the broad patterns of exegesis that we’ve considered so far. These include interpretations of Wittgenstein as a pragmatist, sometimes argued on the basis of Ramsey’s influence on Wittgenstein (cf. Putnam 1995), or as a common sense philosopher in the style of G. E. Moore (cf. Stroll 1994). Jaakko Hintikka, partly in collaboration with Merrill B. Hintikka, proposed an interpretation of Wittgenstein according to which Wittgenstein maintained throughout his career a commitment to the ineffability of semantics and the privacy of experience, and which sees the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy centring on a move from giving primacy to phenomenological language in the Tractatus to giving primacy, in his later philosophy, to everyday reference to physical objects, made possible by the practices involved in various language-games (Hintikka and Hintikka 1986; Hintikka 1996). Finally, John W. Cook developed a controversial reading on which in both the early and later work Wittgenstein was a reductionist empiricist committed to a phenomenalist understanding of language (Cook 1994; 1999; 2005).

II Themes and Controversies

Our overview of approaches to Wittgenstein interpretation highlighted a number of radically divergent accounts of Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy. But discussion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy has also centred on particular themes and disputes. These are often interpretative disputes about the significance or intent of aspects of Wittgenstein’s texts – some disputes have focused on a single obscure remark – as well as disputes about the correctness of Wittgenstein’s claims. In this section we will survey, roughly in chronological order, several of the key disputes that dominated Wittgenstein interpretation from the publication of the Philosophical Investigations onwards.44

In early readings of the Philosophical Investigations, special attention was given to Wittgenstein’s use of notions such as language-game45 and family resemblance46 – notions that have since gained currency outside academic philosophy as well – and there was much debate about their meaning and status. Discussion of the notion of a criterion, a notion that appears throughout the Philosophical Investigations, exemplifies this form of exegetical controversy. Wittgenstein contrasted criteria with what he called symptoms, a term he uses to refer to inductive evidence for the presence of a phenomenon. An inflamed throat is a symptom of angina, but a groan or withdrawal of one’s hand from a fire are, according to Wittgenstein, not symptoms but criteria for a person’s being in pain (see BB, 24–25). Wittgenstein thus takes criteria to mark a relation between two phenomena that isn’t merely empirical, but there was much dispute about the exact nature of this relation, as well as about the role that it plays in Wittgenstein’s understanding of mind, language and scepticism. For example, several readers influenced by Michael Dummett’s anti-realism, such as the early Gordon Baker and Crispin Wright, have taken Wittgenstein’s remarks on criteria to offer the foundation for an anti-realist semantics based on assertion-conditions, as opposed to a realist semantics based on truth-conditions (Baker 1974; 1977; Dummett 1978; Wright 1982).47 Opposing readings have denied that the notion of criterion has any such theoretical import and take Wittgenstein’s use of it to be continuous with everyday use, merely marking a grammatical distinction between empirical evidence and conceptual yet defeasible connections between phenomena (Kenny 1972; Canfield 1986; Hacker 1986; 1990).

The view that criteria provide non-inductive evidence for the truth of statements was seen by early readers such as Rogers Albritton and Norman Malcolm as the basis for a definitive refutation of scepticism, and in particular of scepticism about other minds (Albritton 1959; Malcolm 1954).48 Albritton and Malcolm held that when, for example, certain behavioural criteria are met, we can know with certainty that someone is in pain, leaving no logical space for sceptical doubt. An alternative interpretation, associated with Stanley Cavell, sees this as a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s attitude to scepticism. On this reading, criteria do not determine the certainty of statements but have to do with the applicability of the concepts employed in statements (see Affeldt 1998; Cavell 1982).49

Whereas some controversies revolved around the significance of key notions used by Wittgenstein, others focused on the interpretation of central passages in the Philosophical Investigations. One of the very first disputes following its publication was about the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of a private language. A private language, as Wittgenstein defines it in PI §243, is a language whose words refer to immediate, private sensations that can be known only to the speaker. In remarks that came to be known as the ‘private language argument’, Wittgenstein suggests that such a private language is impossible because meaning cannot be assigned to the words of a language that in principle cannot be understood by others. There has been much disagreement about the details and intended conclusion of the argument, as well as about its soundness.50 In early discussion of the argument a central question was whether Wittgenstein is to be read as holding that language is possible only when embedded in an actual community – a reading known as the ‘Community View’ – or whether he is to be rather read as holding the weaker claim that it must be possible only in principle that others would be able to understand the meaning of the words of a language.51 Other disputes concerned the supposed role in the argument of verificationism or scepticism about memory,52 and even, following Kripke, the suggestion that the crucial part of the argument actually takes place in Wittgenstein’s earlier remarks on rule-following (see below).53

Many interpreters have taken Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language to have momentous consequences for epistemology, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Orthodox interpreters have disagreed about the details of the argument, but they generally agree that it amounts to a general refutation, by way of a reductio ad absurdum, of Cartesian dualism, phenomenalism, solipsism, idealism and empiricist views that seek to ground language in immediate experience. Early discussion focused on whether the upshot of Wittgenstein’s argument amounts to a form of behaviourism, a reading now widely rejected by most interpreters.54

More recent disagreement focused on the aim of the argument – and on whether the relevant passages are even best understood as an argument of any kind. Thus according to a reading recently pressed by therapeutic interpreters such as Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language are to be understood, not as a reductio argument that has as its target an entire philosophical tradition initiated by Descartes and Locke, but as having a more limited and specific purpose and as aimed only at specific contemporaries of Wittgenstein, such as Russell.55

From the 1980s onwards the interpretative focus turned to Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, remarks that raise questions about what it is to follow a rule – how a rule can set an objective standard of correctness and determine in advance the correctness of a potential infinity of possible applications. The main trigger for this shift of exegetical interest was the publication of Saul Kripke’s influential monograph which portrayed Wittgenstein as raising a sceptical paradox about the possibility of rule-following and consequently about meaning in general (Kripke 1982).56 Although Kripke was cautious not to present this reading as a straightforward interpretation of Wittgenstein, it evoked an almost unanimous rejection from Wittgenstein scholars both as a reading of Wittgenstein and on substantive philosophical grounds (see for example Baker and Hacker 1984; Winch 1987, Ch. 5), though Kripke’s arguments continue to shape much of the discussion of rule-following in mainstream analytic philosophy (see Boghossian 1989; Hale 1997).57

This common rejection of Kripke’s reading did not prevent Wittgenstein scholars from having disagreements of their own. An example of one such controversy relates to the role of a social practice in following a rule, a controversy that continued the earlier discussion of the Community View. Whereas Malcolm (with Kripke) took the position that rule-following presupposes actual communal agreement, Baker and Hacker defended the weaker view that it merely requires the possibility of such agreement (Baker and Hacker 1985; 2001; Minar 1991; 1994; Malcolm 1995, Ch. 11; Canfield 1996).

Many of Wittgenstein’s reflections about rule-following were made in the context of his extensive remarks on necessity and the philosophy of mathematics, remarks whose interpretation remains a source of great controversy.58 Wittgenstein’s view of mathematics has been interpreted in turn as a form of conventionalism, constructivism, anti-realism or finitism. Such interpretations seem to accommodate various aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the subject, but they have also met much resistance. Although this discussion has a long history, it is only more recently, however, that Wittgenstein’s writings on mathematics have been treated in volume-length studies (see, for instance, Wright 1980; Shanker 1987; Puhl 1993; Frascola 1994; Marion 1998).

Another form of controversy is exemplified by attempts to determine the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for subjects on which he wrote only little, such as religion (Cook 1988; 2005; Malcolm 1993; Hudson 1975; Nielsen 1967; Phillips 1970; 1976; 1986; 1993) and aesthetics (Hagberg 1995; Lewis 2004; Cavell 2005; Gibson and Huemer eds. 2004; Read and Goodenough eds. 2005). One such subject that received much attention is ethics. Although the Tractatus contains remarks on ethics and value, and although Wittgenstein delivered an early lecture on ethics (see PO, Ch. 5), evidence for his later views on the subject depends largely on a few scattered remarks in the Nachlass and reported conversations. This relative silence has not been seen as a reason not to engage in a debate over the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for ethics. Some of the earliest work on this was by Rush Rhees (1969; 1999). By now a large body of work in moral philosophy defends a Wittgensteinian approach to ethics (see Anscombe 1981; Cavell 1982; Lovibond 1983; Diamond 1991; Phillips 1992; McDowell 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; Gaita 1998; 2004; Crary 2007). Wittgenstein’s thought has also played a role in the rise of virtue ethics (for example, McDowell 1998c; Lovibond 2002) and particularist views in ethics (see Hooker and Little 2000 eds.; McDowell 1998c), as well as in discussions of the relation between philosophy and literature in the context of ethical thought (see Diamond 1991, Ch. 15). Wittgenstein’s ideas have been similarly influential in debates within meta-ethics. The scarcity of direct evidence for his views, and the general lack of interpretative consensus, have meant, however, that Wittgenstein’s thought has been taken by different philosophers to support wildly opposing meta-ethical views – whether relativism, realism or anti-realism.59

There has also been disagreement about the implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for subjects on which he wrote or said virtually nothing, such as political philosophy. Wittgenstein’s views have sometimes been interpreted or criticised as expressive of a conservative worldview (see Adorno 1982, 42; Marcuse 1964, 173; Nyíri 1981; Bloor 1983), but more recently it has also been used to develop critical (Habermas 1988; 1998; Apel 1973; 1992), Marxist, postmodernist and feminist approaches to politics.60

Most recently – since the 1990s – discussion of Wittgenstein has increasingly centred on his conception of the nature of philosophy, a focus also reflected by many of the papers in this volume (see Hilmy 1987; Glock 1991; 2004; Kienzler 1997; Baker 2004; Ammereller and Fischer eds. 2004; Baker and Hacker 2005; Kuusela 2008). As we saw earlier, a major area of heated controversy relates to the interpretation of the Tractatus