Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T10:05:22.489Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Throwing Away the Ladder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Cora Diamond
Cora Diamond
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Whether one is reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus or his later writings, one must be struck by his insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses; or by his suggestion that it cannot be done, that it is only through some confusion one is in about what one is doing that one could take oneself to be putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses at all. I think that there is almost nothing in Wittgenstein which is of value and which can be grasped if it is pulled away from that view of philosophy. But that view of philosophy is itself something that has to be seen first in the Tractatus if it is to be understood in its later forms, and in the Tractatus it is inseparable from what is central there, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 243 , January 1988 , pp. 5 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Geach, P. T., ‘Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein’, Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G. H. von Wright, Hintikka, Jaakko (ed.), Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1976) (Amsterdam: North-Holland), 54–55, 64.Google Scholar

2 Hans Sluga also touches briefly on the point; see Sluga, , Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 144.Google Scholar

3 Frege, Gottlob, ‘Function and Concept’, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Geach, P. T. and Black, Max (eds) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), 41.Google Scholar

4 Frege, Gottlob, ‘On Concept and Object’, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 42–48.Google Scholar

5 McDowell, John, ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following’, Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, Holtzman, Steven H. and Leich, Christoper M. (eds) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 141–162passim, but especially 150.Google Scholar

6 See Evans, Gareth, The Varieties of Reference, McDowell, John (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 11Google Scholar; also Geach, P. T. ‘Frege’, Three Philosophers, Anscombe, G. E. M. and Geach, P. T. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 136–139.Google Scholar

7 Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand, Principia Mathematica to *56 (Cambridge University Press, 1962), 66.Google Scholar

8 Frege, Gottlob, The Foundations of Arithmetic, Austin, J. L. (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 90.Google Scholar

9 Waismann, Friedrich, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, McGuinness, Brian (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 39.Google Scholar

10 Erege, , in The Foundations of ArithmeticGoogle Scholar (see pp. 40 and 62), is sometimes said to hold, like Wittgenstein, a ‘contrast’ theory of meaning. But I believe that Wittgenstein's view is not Frege's. There is no suggestion that Frege's view is a view about the logical structure of sentences.

11 Hacker, P. M. S., Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 20–24.Google Scholar

12 Hacker, , 23.Google Scholar

13 Russell, Bertrand, Principles of Mathematics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937), 46.Google Scholar

14 I have discussed those arguments of Frege's in ‘What does a Conceptscript do?’, Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1984), 343–368.Google Scholar

15 Frege, Gottlob, Posthumous Writings, Hermes, Hans et al. (eds) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 118, 178.Google Scholar