The Later Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy by Benjamin De Mesel

Author:Benjamin De Mesel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319976198
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Footnotes

1Diamond seems to acknowledge this objection as a strong objection to her argument, but she does not discuss it, because ‘[…] there is no space for the kind of discussion that the objection requires’ (Diamond 1996: 246).

2Diamond explicitly recognizes this (Diamond 1996: 245), but one can explicitly recognize an objection or problem and at the same time not answer it satisfactorily or see its full impact on one’s argument.

3To say that Wittgenstein thinks that ethics has a subject matter because he writes that he will ‘make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of ethics’ is to take Wittgenstein at his word. It could be objected that this straightforward interpretation of ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ is not the only possible one. A reviewer remarks that Wittgenstein may have done in the lecture what he did in the Tractatus: to dismiss his own statements as sheer nonsense , not containing any intelligible doctrines. For a defence of this interpretation of the lecture, see the introduction in Zamuner, Di Lascio and Levy (2014: 1–41). For a brief discussion of some problems with this interpretation, see De Mesel (2017). I can only say here that I am not convinced by so-called Nonsense Interpretations of the Tractatus and that I take, for example, Severin Schroeder’s arguments against them (Schroeder 2006: 105–112) to be decisive. It should be clear that, if Wittgenstein did not dismiss his own propositions as sheer nonsense in the Tractatus, the proposal that he may have done something similar in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ only leads to the view that he does not dismiss his own propositions as sheer nonsense in the Lecture either. In any case, if it is possible to read the lecture as calling into question its own propositions, then that is the interpretation that requires a substantial argument.

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