- [UNTITLED]
- List of contributors
- Abbreviations of Wittgenstein's works
- Editors' Introduction
- Wittgenstein and Biography
- Wittgenstein Reads Russell
- Assertion, Saying, and Propositional Complexity in Wittgenstein's <i>Tractatus</i>
- Wittgenstein and Frege
- Wittgenstein and Infinity
- Wittgenstein On Mathematics
- Wittgenstein On Surveyability of Proofs
- From Logical Method to ‘Messing About’: Wittgenstein on ‘Open Problems’ in Mathematics
- The Proposition's Progress
- Logical Atomism in Russell and Wittgenstein
- The <i>Tractatus</i> and The Limits of Sense
- The Life of The Sign: Rule-following, Practice, and Agreement
- Meaning and Understanding
- Wittgenstein and Idealism
- Private Language
- Very General Facts of Nature
- Wittgenstein on The First Person
- Private Experience and Sense Data
- Privacy
- Action and The Will
- Wittgenstein on Criteria and The Problem Of Other Minds
- Wittgenstein on The Experience of Meaning and Secondary Use
- Wittgenstein on Scepticism
- Wittgenstein and Moore
- Wittgenstein on Intuition, Rule-Following, and Certainty: Exchanges with Brouwer and Russell
- The Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy
- Wittgenstein's Methods
- Grammar in the <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>
- Wittgenstein's Use of Examples
- Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty
- Writing Philosophy as Poetry: Literary form in Wittgenstein
- Wittgenstein and The Moral Dimension of Philosophical Problems
- Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
- Wittgenstein on Aesthetics
- Wittgenstein and Ethics
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein talks about action and the will. The main ideas we need to be acquainted with in order to understand Wittgenstein's remarks on this topic are, first, Arthur Schopenhauer's neo-Kantian theory of the will, which Wittgenstein seems to have fully accepted in 1916, and which still influenced his thinking in 1947, and second, the theory advanced in William James's The Principles of Psychology, which Wittgenstein encountered in the 1930s, and rejected root and branch. Schopenhauer and James were in turn reacting, in very different ways, to the empiricist theory of the will, which received its classic exposition in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This article argues that Wittgenstein's treatment of action and the will in Philosophical Investigations is seriously flawed. Wittgenstein fails to disentangle the active/passive distinction and the voluntary/not voluntary distinction; he fails to see that voluntariness is not only an attribute of activity, but of passivity as well; and he confuses action and motion.
Keywords: Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, action, will, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, John Locke, empiricist theory, motion, voluntariness
John Hyman, University of Oxford
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- [UNTITLED]
- List of contributors
- Abbreviations of Wittgenstein's works
- Editors' Introduction
- Wittgenstein and Biography
- Wittgenstein Reads Russell
- Assertion, Saying, and Propositional Complexity in Wittgenstein's <i>Tractatus</i>
- Wittgenstein and Frege
- Wittgenstein and Infinity
- Wittgenstein On Mathematics
- Wittgenstein On Surveyability of Proofs
- From Logical Method to ‘Messing About’: Wittgenstein on ‘Open Problems’ in Mathematics
- The Proposition's Progress
- Logical Atomism in Russell and Wittgenstein
- The <i>Tractatus</i> and The Limits of Sense
- The Life of The Sign: Rule-following, Practice, and Agreement
- Meaning and Understanding
- Wittgenstein and Idealism
- Private Language
- Very General Facts of Nature
- Wittgenstein on The First Person
- Private Experience and Sense Data
- Privacy
- Action and The Will
- Wittgenstein on Criteria and The Problem Of Other Minds
- Wittgenstein on The Experience of Meaning and Secondary Use
- Wittgenstein on Scepticism
- Wittgenstein and Moore
- Wittgenstein on Intuition, Rule-Following, and Certainty: Exchanges with Brouwer and Russell
- The Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy
- Wittgenstein's Methods
- Grammar in the <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>
- Wittgenstein's Use of Examples
- Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty
- Writing Philosophy as Poetry: Literary form in Wittgenstein
- Wittgenstein and The Moral Dimension of Philosophical Problems
- Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
- Wittgenstein on Aesthetics
- Wittgenstein and Ethics
- Index
