- [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
Rene Descartes, in his Third Meditation, argues that the only possible explanation for his having an idea of God is that God actually exists; and that his idea of God is an innate idea placed in him by God. The details of Descartes's argument need not detain us now — except to comment that the scholastic elements in it put it more or less beyond the pale of contemporary analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, something strikingly similar, in broad outline, can be found in a book that is very much of our time and squarely within the analytic tradition, namely, Thomas Nagel's The Last Word (1997). Nagel reflects on our use of reason — ‘a local activity of finite creatures’ — to arrive at the idea of infinity. Ludwig Wittgenstein would recoil from a realist model of the relation between our grammar of the infinite and the infinite itself. Both Aristotle and Wittgenstein recognise a fundamental and intimate relation between time and possibility.
Keywords: Rene Descartes, philosophy, Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, infinity, grammar, Ludwig Wittgenstein, quasi-perceptual model, realist model, Aristotle
Andrew W. Moore is a professor at the 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
