Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy

338 Pages·2009·1.32 MB·English

Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy
P.M.S.Hacker
PhotographbyJosephRaz
Wittgenstein and
Analytic Philosophy
Essays for P. M. S. Hacker
Editedby
Hans-Johann Glock
and
John Hyman
1
1
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Wittgensteinandanalyticphilosophy:essaysforP.M.S.Hacker/editedbyHans-Johann
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p.cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978–0–19–921323–8(hardback)
1.Wittgenstein,Ludwig,1889–1951.2.Analysis(Philosophy)I.Hacker,P.M.S.(Peter
MichaelStephan)II.Glock,Hans-Johann,1960-III.Hyman,John.
B3376.W564.W553662009
192—dc22
2008046050
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PrintedinGreatBritain
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ISBN978–0–19–921323–8
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Contents
Preface vii
Contributors andAbstracts xii
Abbreviations for Works by Wittgenstein xix
Wittgenstein’s Knight Move: Hacker on Wittgenstein’s Influence
on Analytic Philosophy 1
Avishai Margalit
Wittgenstein and Frege’sLogical Investigations 26
Wolfgang Ku¨nne
‘Moses’: Wittgenstein on Names 63
Joachim Schulte
Analytic Truths and Grammatical Propositions 83
Severin Schroeder
Back to the Rough Ground: Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language 109
John V. Canfield
The Private Language Argument 133
Bede Rundle
Language-Games and Language: Rules, Normality Conditions and
Conversation 152
Stephen Mulhall
Wittgenstein’s Ethics: Boundaries and Boundary Crossings 175
Hans Oberdiek
The Lessons of Life: Wittgenstein, Religion and Analytic
Philosophy 203
John Cottingham
Hard and Easy Questions about Consciousness 228
John Dupre´
vi contents
Cognitive Scientism 250
Anthony Kenny
Knowing How To and Knowing That 263
David Wiggins
Action, Content and Inference 278
Jonathan Dancy
P. M. S. Hacker: A Bibliography 299
Index 311
Preface
Peter Hacker is the pre-eminent interpreter of Wittgenstein’s philosophy,
a powerful and sophisticated exponent of Wittgensteinian ideas in the
philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, and a distinguished
historian of the analytic tradition.
Hacker studied PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford
from 1960 to 1963. He was first directed to read Wittgenstein as a D.Phil.
student by his supervisor H. L. A. Hart. But it was only in 1966, when
he became a tutorial fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, that he ‘settled
down to study Wittgenstein with care’, as he put it, partly under the
guidance of Anthony Kenny. At that time, he was also stimulated by P. F.
Strawson’slecturesonKant.Asaresult,hewasinitiallyinterestedintopics
on which there are significant similarities and differences between Kant
and Wittgenstein, notably idealism, the metaphysics of experience and
the nature of philosophy itself. Moreover, Hacker found in Wittgenstein’s
remarks on solipsism surprising echoes of ideas he had encountered in the
SchächteritemovementinIsraelinhisteens.Asaresult,hewasalsoattuned
to the Schopenhauerian influences on the Tractatus, which appeared alien
from a moreconventional Anglo-American point of view.¹
The eventual result of this research, Insight and Illusion (1972), took the
exploration of the intellectual roots and of the development of Wittgen-
stein’s philosophy to a new level. It also connected Wittgenstein’s later
ideaswithcontemporary developments inanalytic philosophy, notably the
semantic anti-realism that Michael Dummett was developing in Oxford at
that time. The revised edition of the book (1986) elaborated and modified
the account of Wittgenstein’s intellectual development, and of his later
ideas on mind, language and the nature of philosophy. To this day, the
revised edition of Insight and Illusion is probably the best single book on
Wittgenstein. It also involved two substantial changes of mind. First, the
¹ Hacker describes his early philosophical career in Philosophical Investigations 24 (2001), 121–30.
He recounts his collaboration with Gordon Baker, and comments on the disagreements that arose
betweenthemin‘GordonBaker’sLateInterpretationofWittgenstein’,inG.Kahane,E.Kanterian
andO.Kuusela(eds.),WittgensteinandhisInterpreters(Oxford:Blackwell:2007),88–122.
viii hans-johannglockandjohnhyman
similarities Hacker had detected between Wittgenstein and Kant were
qualifiedordownplayed. Second,Hackernowstressedtheincompatibility
between Wittgenstein’s opposition to philosophical theorizing and Dum-
mett’santi-realistsemantics,indeedtheentireprojectofasystematictheory
of meaning for a natural language, which Davidson and Dummett had
pioneered.
In the same decade, Hacker subjected contemporary linguistics and
formal semantics, especially truth-conditional theories of meaning, to a
host of trenchant criticisms in the book Language, Sense and Nonsense
(1984), which he co-authored with his colleague at St John’s, Gordon
Baker. The two also challenged the interpretation of Frege that had
inspired formal semantics in general and Dummett’s work in particular, in
Frege: Logical Excavations (1984). This book was also highly controversial,
but it anticipated many results of the more historically minded revisionism
that has come to prevail in Frege scholarship.
Baker and Hacker presented their joint work-in-progress in their fam-
ous Friday afternoon graduate seminars, which drew large audiences of
graduate students, faculty members and visiting academics. The audience
comprisednotjustWittgensteinscholars,aficionadosandfollowers,butalso
‘mainstream’ Oxonian philosophers interested in finding out whether the
rumours of outrageous heresies could be true. Some were converted to
the view that the targets against which Hacker and Baker were directing
their fire wereindeed nothing but‘houses of cards’; others hadtheir worst
fears confirmed. But it was impossible to deny that philosophical ideas
of exceptional importance were being studied, in an intense and highly
energized debate.
Baker and Hacker had embarked on their most ambitious collaborat-
ive project in 1976: a detailed analytical commentary on Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations. Thefirsttwo volumes (1980and 1985)wereco-
authored, the two later volumes were written by Hacker alone (1990 and
1996). The resulting four-volume work must rank as the major achieve-
ment of Wittgenstein scholarship in the last thirty years, together with the
Bergen electronic edition of the Wittgenstein Nachlass. Composed on a
monumental scale, the Commentary combines authoritative textual exeges-
is, acute philosophical insight, encyclopaedic knowledge of the historical
background and lucidity of expression. It rapidly became the definitive
starting-point for all scholarly approaches to the book, and it will remain
preface ix
sointheforeseeablefuture.Theachievement oftheAnalyticalCommentary
is acknowledged not just by readers who rely on it in trying to make sense
of the Philosophical Investigations, and by its many admirers, but also by its
critics, for whom it represents the orthodox interpretation of Wittgen-
stein’s philosophy. This orthodoxy has been attacked from many quarters.
In response, Hacker has clarified and robustly defended his perspective
on Wittgenstein, notably in exchanges with the so-called ‘New Wittgen-
steinians’. The resulting debate has been extremely lively and continues to
occupy centre stage in contemporary Wittgenstein studies.²
While many scholars distance Wittgenstein—at least the later Wittgen-
stein—fromtheanalytictradition,Hackerregardshimasthepivotalfigure
inthedevelopmentoftwentieth-centuryanalyticphilosophy.Heoriginally
planned to close the final volume of the Commentary with a synoptic essay
describing Wittgenstein’s role in the development of analytic philosophy,
but in the event, the depth of his knowledge about the topic and his
passionately held views about it defeated the attempt to confine it in this
way. Instead he wrote Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic
Philosophy. Like all of Hacker’s books, it could not have been written by
anyone else. It presents the central ideas of Wittgenstein’s evolving work
with his usual clarity and aplomb; it tells, in a learned and gripping way,
the story of the whole analytic movement from the end of the nineteenth
century onwards; it defends the practice of analytic philosophy, as Hacker
sees it, against the movement’s leading apostates, as he sees them; and it
pays a moving homage to the Oxford of Hacker’s youth, dispelling pop-
ular prejudices and pinpointing the fallacies and distortions on which glib
dismissals of ‘Oxford’ or ‘ordinary language’ philosophy typically depend.
Hacker’s exegetical and historical work has always been guided by his
concern for substantive philosophical problems and their solutions, and by
his intense desire to expose conceptual confusion and (perhaps not always
sharply distinguished from this) intellectual bad faith. We have already
mentioned his predominantly critical contribution to the philosophy of
language.Inrecentyearshehasturnedtothephilosophyofmind.Hiswork
onneuroscienceisofparticularimportanceinthecurrentintellectualscene.
He had the good fortune of being able to team up with the distinguished
² See A. Creary and R. Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, London: Routledge, and Hacker,
Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), chs. 4–6; ‘Wittgenstein,
CarnapandtheNewAmericanWittgensteinians’,PhilosophicalQuarterly53(2003),1–23.