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This is the first of three chapters that develop the conception of subjectivity on which the book’s argument relies. It shows that the model of developmental psychology, originating with Jean Piaget and persisting in Lawrence Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development, is embedded in assumptions about achieved rational mastery as the mark of moral and cognitive maturity. Not only does it overlook the part played by sociality and affect in child development, it pays scant attention to the constitutive role of situational factors — cultural, class, racial, gendered, sexual — in the production of human subjectivities. Taking as its point of departure Valerie Walkerdine’s critique of Piaget in The Mastery of Reason, and reading Walkerdine together with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks about “the child”, the chapter argues for an approach to developmentality that is socially and ecologically aware in its conception of subjectivity, sociality, citizenship, and of knowledge as a power-saturated social institution.

This chapter argues that the contemporary Western understanding of the relationship between the body and self is subject to a number of “pictures” that mark significant constraints on our ability to imagine alternative ways of caring for ourselves and others, hence on our self-government, and ultimately on our freedom. Two related pictures are used to explain how the somatic individual has come to dominate ways of understanding the self. The first is a picture in which we have an inner depth and authenticity that the outer (in this case, the flesh) must represent. This is a model of the self in general (selves as objects with an inner essence) and also of each self in particular. In their different ways, both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault challenge this picture, the former primarily through his private language argument, and the latter through his genealogical method. The second picture is one of power, and is characterized by the view that power is a substance, power is held and exercised by a sovereign who rules over us, and power is a force external to the self, whose primary purpose is repressive.

In order to appreciate fully the depth of Ludwig Wittgenstein's commitment to finitism, one ought to look for the causes of his change of mind on quantification. They are to be found in underlying changes in the notion of analysis which took place in the first steps away from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the manuscripts of 1929. Upon his return to Cambridge in January of that year, Wittgenstein immediately started writing extensively. This was a period of intense intellectual fervor. Early entries in his notebooks indicate that he had started to think afresh some of the problems even before his arrival in Cambridge and that he moved in new directions very quickly. This indicates that Wittgenstein had already given up or was about to give up one of the cental claims of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

This chapter looks at some of the parallels and differences between intuitionism and Ludwig Wittgenstein's new logic. One good way to handle this topic is with the help of the notion of truth maker. This expression was introduced by Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith in order to designate in a neutral fashion entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. The basic intuitionist thesis is, on the other hand, that a mathematical proposition is made true by a proof of it. It is on the basis of this thesis that intuitionists developed a new interpretation of logical constants in the 1930s which has interesting affinities not with conceptions found in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus but with Wittgenstein's new form of analysis in the early 1930s.

In the literary response to logical positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein figures both as inspiration and opposition, as the philosopher of what is the case and as the poet of what is not. Wittgenstein’s contradictory reputation reflects the complexities of his philosophy, particularly the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The text exemplifies the logical positivist philosophy to which postwar American writers responded and at the same time prefigures that very response. In casting Wittgenstein as a positivist, each for their own ends, Rudolf Carnap’s Vienna Circle and Theodor Adorno’s Frankfurt School are surprisingly aligned. Yet with its unsettled combination of logical propositions and mystical aphorisms, the Tractatus refuses to correspond to either group’s description of it. Ironically, it is Adorno’s own concept of negative dialectics that makes legible Wittgenstein’s negative aesthetics, the attempt to show the “nonsense” that cannot be said, and that reveals the ways in which Wittgenstein rejects the very positivism his text makes possible.

Representational practices affect moral perception and moral recognition, and so are proper studies for moral philosophy. Using Wittgenstein's idea that a human body pictures a soul, this chapter examines three patterns of representation of human bodies that impair or bias moral perception and proper recognition of human beings. Stereo-graphy fuses representation of the bodies of one kind of human being to a particular kind of comportment. Porno-graphy repetitively pictures certain bodies in sexualized ways. Necro-graphy produces representations of bodies that picture living human beings as already dead or beyond hope, or inscribe dead human bodies with an insult to their humanity. Moral graphics — the study of morally significant patterns of representation — aids in understanding the construction of identities, the nature and impact of stereotypes, and the fact that some kinds of prejudice are not easily accessible by conscious reflection.

This chapter examines Ludwig Wittgenstein's ethical aim in writing the Tractatus. While resolute readings provide a framework for how the relation between ethics and the Tractatus should be understood, none of those readings have offered a detailed explanation of this relation. This chapter first considers the problem of conveying an intention in the context of reading the Tractatus using the resolute approach and proceeds with an overview of the concepts of anxiety, the “they” (Das Man), and authenticity in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. It then analyzes Heidegger's description of an authentic stance toward anxiety and the “they” within the context of the Tractatus, along with the conceptual resonances between wonder and anxiety and how they relate to passages in the Tractatus dealing with the self and solipsism. The chapter concludes by commenting on Michael Kremer's interpretation of the ethical aim of the Tractatus in relation to the writings of St. Paul and St. Augustine as well as James Conant's comparison of the Tractatus to Søren Kierkegaard's work.

This chapter introduces the overarching purposes that motivate the book. It forwards and explicates the book's central premise that unlocking the full resourcefulness of Hans Frei's theological approach requires sustained attention to, and meticulous exposition of, its interdisciplinary and conversational character. This book aims to provide a critical elucidation and expansion of Frei's theology that accounts for the range of criticisms his work has incurred in the decades since his death, and how new developments in cultural theory and nonfoundational philosophy during that period can be used to expand upon his approach. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the central claims and arguments in each of the chapters that follow.

This chapter shows that Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has much less in common with intuitionism than is usually assumed, although some strategical moves are barely distinguishable. At least one such move cannot be overlooked because of its importance for the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy: it concerns quantification theory. This chapter shows that Wittgenstein's stance on quantification was, however, even more radical than that of intuitionists. This is a topic about which Wittgenstein changed his mind around 1929. The search for the source of Wittgenstein's new ideas on quantification leads directly to Hermann Weyl. He actually developed original ideas on topics such as quantification. According to him, propositions containing an existential quantifier ranging over the natural numbers do not possess the full status of judgement.

This chapter examines the purpose of Philosophical Investigations, with particular emphasis on the connections Ludwig Wittgenstein saw between the philosophical problems with which he grappled in his later philosophy and the historical-cultural context in which those problems arose. It begins with an overview of Wittgenstein's development of certain themes he found in Oswald Spengler as an important connecting link between his critique of metaphysics and his concerns with cultural decline. It then considers some ideas broached by Stanley Cavell to show how Philosophical Investigations can be read as a substantial continuation from the Tractatus, both in the way it attempts to embody a nontheoretical conception of philosophy and in the way in which this conception is in the service of what can be seen as an attempt to fulfill something like the earlier work's ethical purpose. The chapter also tackles the question of how these issues intersect with Wittgenstein's attitude toward and engagement with religion.

How does the category of modernism inform our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and how does Wittgenstein’s philosophy elucidate the category of modernism? The essays in this volume take up these questions as they consider how different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy intersect with various uses of the term modernism. Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts or embodies, alternately or simultaneously, modernism as an historical period, an aesthetic style, and a philosophical worldview. Yet even as the concept of modernism affords new understandings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wittgenstein’s multifaceted philosophy raises the vexing question of modernism itself. In discussing Wittgenstein’s philosophy alongside modernist figures such as Beckett, Bellow, Benjamin, James, Joyce, Kafka, Loos, Musil, Stevens, and Woolf, the essays collected in this volume note not simply that one can situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy within cultural modernism but also that Wittgenstein presents a modernist philosophy of culture. In so doing, they make clear a range of possible topics, thus stretching and developing the understanding of what can be included in the new modernist studies and also presenting new ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s modernist philosophy.

Chapter 3 looks at the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy as it emerges from Gottlob Frege, gains momentum in Bertrand Russell, and finds elaboration in the early and middle work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The characteristic move of linguistic philosophy will be the clarification of presumably ‘muddled’ ordinary statements: the bringing to the surface a lucidity that is lurking within language, needing only to be coaxed out. The author shows how in the works of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein, the drive to clarity entails a stripping away of every intersubjective, rhetorical element in discourse. He then argues that a language clarified by professional philosophers is a substitute for the objectivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by showing how intersubjectivity returns first as irony in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and then as the belief that language always ‘works’: that it fails only when external circumstances disturb its inner workings.

The notion of operation plays a pivotal role in the symbolism of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: on the one hand, truth-functions are based on truth-operations; on the other, numbers are exponents of an operation. Considering that operations seem to be so central, it is amazing to notice how little is understood of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks: not enough attention has been paid in the past to the curious piece of symbolism of 6.01. What Wittgenstein says about the notion of operation very much resembles informal explanations of the notion of operator. Two differences with the set-theoretic notion of function were mentioned in Chapter 1: firstly, an operator is defined by describing how it transforms an input without defining the set of inputs, that is without defining its domain. Secondly, there is no restriction on the domain of some operators.

The philosophical world outside Cambridge discovered the later Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics with the publication in the 1956 of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, a selection from manuscripts dating from 1938 to 1944. In his 1958 survey paper, Hao Wang promoted strict finitism, which he then called anthropologism, to the rank of a foundational thesis alongside finitism, intuitionism, predicativism, and Platonism, with the later Wittgenstein being enrolled as its most important representative. This has been by far the prevailing view ever since, with some exceptions. A useful preliminary step would be to give a brief characterization of strict finitism. Various strict finitist programmes have been devised in the past, and they do not show much homogeneity: contrary to intuitionism, there is no orthodoxy.

Zumhagen-Yekplé reads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolutely, alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for understanding Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. Zumhagen-Yekplé traces the shared aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s counter-epiphanic aesthetic practices, concentrating on the explorations they conduct in their respective modernist puzzle texts of the issues of difficulty, question, quest and yearning for transformation (which she argues are a central secular-spiritual concern of European high modernism) while also attending to important differences between their respective projects. Zumhagen-Yekplé explores the ways in which Bloom, Joyce’s own long-doubting, questioning and questing modern “Everyman or Noman” becomes an unexpected literary exemplar of a person who looks upon the world and its problems with this “happy” attitude. She argues that the differences in Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent treatments of what Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus as “seeing the world aright” not only shed light on the continuity of Wittgenstein’s “early” and “late” philosophy, they also give us new purchase on the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote or spoke extensively on the nature of the continuum during the years 1929-–33. This is hardly surprising, since this topic was at the centre of the Grundlagenstreit: classical mathematicians felt that their beautiful Cantorian construction of the continuum was threatened by L. E. J. Brouwer's bolshevism. There are several methods in classical mathematics for introducing real numbers. Wittgenstein's comments were limited to the two principal ones, the introduction of the set of reals via Cauchy sequences of rationals and the method of Dedekind cuts. Wittgenstein's remarks on these are, again, of an elementary nature and of little interest to logicians today, but for people, they are definitely worth a closer look because they show much coherence in his commitment to finitism.