Philosophy Bites Back by David Edmonds & Nigel Warburton

Author:David Edmonds & Nigel Warburton [Edmonds, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

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BARRY C. SMITH ON

Ludwig Wittgenstein

David Edmonds: Gardener, primary school teacher, architect, engineer, war hero, millionaire who gave away most of his money, hospital porter—and arguably the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest child of a wealthy steel magnate. He moved to Cambridge in 1911 to study under Bertrand Russell and to pursue his interest in logic. Russell would write the forward to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, completed in the trenches of World War I. The Tractatus, Wittgenstein initially believed, solved all the fundamental problems of philosophy. But by the time he returned to Cambridge in 1929 he was having second thoughts. His legendary charisma, his frenetic mental energy, his beguiling prose, his deep originality—all helped ensure that a new generation of disciples would absorb, adopt, and transmit his ideas. Barry Smith is a Wittgenstein expert and the director of the Institute of Philosophy.

Nigel Warburton: We’re talking today about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view about what philosophy is. He’s often described as a philosopher’s philosopher.

Barry C. Smith: I think he is a philosopher’s philosopher because, as well as giving us philosophical ideas, theses, and positions for us to explore, he’s actually interested in the activity of philosophy. What is philosophy about? What’s its subject matter? Unlike science, there is no automatically demarcated domain of enquiry or set of facts that we’re studying. So, he’s self-conscious, all the time when he’s doing philosophy, and he’s wondering what he is up to.

NW: In order to make sense of how he got to his later philosophical views about what philosophy is, we need to fill in some details about his philosophical background. He began as a student of engineering, came to England before World War I to study with Bertrand Russell. What was his view of philosophy at that point?

BCS: As an engineer, he was interested in rather abstract problems: he was into aeronautical engineering. But to do that, you had to have a concern with mathematics and this was where he really began to have his first philosophical thoughts. What was mathematics about? What made mathematical statements true? We don’t doubt that 2 + 2 = 4, but when we arrive at these undoubted truths, what is the subject matter? We don’t trip over numbers in the world, we don’t spill our coffee on them, and yet we seem to be talking about something that’s absolutely sure and certain. The subject matter of both mathematics and logic became a central preoccupation, and he found out that in Cambridge there was a philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who was interested in the nature of logic, and who had got these questions going.

NW: But his interest was not just in the philosophy of mathematics; he was interested in how our thoughts relate to the world.

BCS: All our thinking, if it is in good order, is logically correct thinking. But what are the truths of logic truths of? What actually gives

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