Wittgenstein and his impact upon Anglophone philosophy, Peter Hacker

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Peter Hacker. He discusses the salient achievements of Wittgenstein’s two masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and their influences on philosophy.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_13 0:08

Good evening, everybody. Thank you all very much for coming. Well done for finding your way to this, at least for this year's series, unfamiliar venue. And welcome to what I'm sorry to say is the last of this series of centenary lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Don't despair, there will be another series starting in October, the title of which is Children in Philosophy. So watch out for our social media and our website for details of where and when on that. That is a long time in the future, though. For this evening, it's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker, Peter Hacker. Peter has spent most of his academic career at Oxford. He's been a fellow of St. John's College since 1966 and an honorary fellow of the Queen's College since 2010. He's held research awards from the British Academy, the Leverhume Trust, and visiting positions all over the world. He is the world's pre-eminent authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Now, his books are too numerous to mention, but I'm going to mention one at his request. So this is a beginner's guide to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, 17 lectures and dialogues on the philosophical investigations in all good bookshops. And the reason Peter asks me to draw your attention to this is that he says this evening's lecture is a very much abbreviated version of what you'll find in this book. So if you want more of the same, that's where to go. He's published an extraordinary number of books. Against the current is not one of them. That, as you know, is by Isaiah Berlin. But Peter has swung courageously against the current of philosophical orthodoxy over the whole course of his career, taking on orthodoxies such as the causal theory of perception, Chomskyan theories of knowledge of language, the causal theory of action explanation, and the philosophical pretensions of neuroscience. And he's recently completed a four-volume work on human nature. Tonight Peter is going to speak, I believe, on Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy. Peter, over to you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_07 2:40

Thank you very much. The reason that I uh asked Edward to mention the book is that what I'm going to discuss this evening is discussed in three long chapters in that book. So this is very much a compressed version in which many questions are raised, but I don't have time to answer them in detail. I hope some of those questions will arise in the question time after my lecture. We're celebrating the centenary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, a century of lucid, often deep contributions to philosophical debates in Britain, always intelligible to the educated non-professional, and never spattered with the detritus of formal logic, and always averse to what Gilbert Ryle called foot and note disease. It has been the century of the rise and fall of analytic philosophy. What goes by the name of analytic philosophy today is merely a residue of a once great and multiphased tradition, a many branched array of tributaries, today it is a many branched array of tributaries in the delta of what was once a great flowing river. Georg Henrik von Reit or von Fricht, a fine analytic philosopher himself, remarked that perhaps all that will remain of analytic philosophy as he knew it in his times, and I may add, as I knew it in mine, will be that the history of philosophy will be better written than it has hitherto been. Within that many-phased tradition, beginning with Moore's and Russell's turn against neo-Hegelianism in Cambridge in 1898, Wittgenstein occupies a special position. He bestrides 50 years of English of British philosophy much as Picasso bestrides 50 years of 20th century painting. His first great masterpiece, The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, was published with an English translation in 1922. Of it, his friend, the great economist John Maynard Keynes, wrote, I still don't know what to say about your book, except that I feel certain that it is a work of extraordinary importance and genius. Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussion at Cambridge since it was written. It was also of prodigious influence on the most influential philosophical school of the 20th century, namely logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Its influence in Britain was terminated by Wittgenstein's lectures and seminars in Cambridge from 1930 onwards, in which he demolished his first masterpiece and replaced its vision with a diametrically opposed one, which culminated in his second masterwork, The Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953, two years after his death. The impact of this book transformed Anglophone philosophy both in itself and via his most eminent pupils and admirers, such as, for example, Max Black, Norman Malcolm, Georg Hendrik von Wright, Elizabeth Anskom, Peter Geach, Friedrich Weismann, Herbert Hart, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire, and many others. It dominated the scene until the 1970s, after which it waned under the impact of American philosophy of Quine, Putnam, and Davidson, and the successive impacts of Dummit, Peacock, and latterly Timothy Williamson in Oxford. Some, myself included, would view this as progressive degeneration. Be that as it may, it is altogether appropriate that in this celebration of the centenary of the Royal Institute, a lecture should be dedicated to Wittgenstein, who dominated so large a part of the last century. And I'm honored to have been asked to give it. I have chosen to discuss what is perhaps the most controversial of Wittgenstein's later views, his revolutionary conception of the nature and limits of philosophy. The great tradition of Western philosophy conceived of philosophy as a cognitive discipline with a subject matter of its own. What that subject matter was, disputed endlessly. According to Plato, philosophy is an investigation into eternal truths that yields knowledge of the essences of all things. Aristotle held philosophy to be continuous with the sciences, investigating their distinctive presuppositions and methodological principles. According to Descartes, philosophy seeks to establish the unity of all knowledge and its indubitable foundations in clear and distinct ideas. British empiricists conceived of their subjects as an investigation into the nature and limits of human understanding. With Kant's Copernican revolution, there occurred a paradigm shift. Philosophy should concern itself not with knowledge of objects, but with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as it is possible a priori. Within this whole tradition, there was one unshakable conviction, namely that philosophy is a cognitive discipline, that there are philosophical propositions expressing philosophical knowledge. Now, Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, pursued the goals of what we may call the great tradition. In particular, the metaphysical goal of disclosing the a priori order of the world. Philosophy, he had declared at the very beginning of his investigations, consists of logic and metaphysics, the former its basis. For logic seemed to be the great mirror of the essence of the world, and logical investigations seemed to explore the essence of all things. As his work progressed, he distinguished between what can be said by the use of a symbolism and what is shown but cannot be said by it. Just as Kant drew the boundaries of knowledge in order to make room for faith, so Wittgenstein drew the boundaries of sense in order to make room for ineffable metaphysics. The essence of the world is shown but cannot be said by language. The a priori order of the world cannot be described in language. But in thus drawing the bounds of sense, he no more meant to be throwing away metaphysical insight than Kant, in drawing the boundaries of knowledge, meant to be throwing away belief in God and the immortality of the soul. Wittgenstein had viewed the Tractatus as the radical culmination of the philosophical tradition, pursuing insights into the essence of the world by logical investigations. With the demise of that conception and the emergence of a new method, Wittgenstein self-consciously engendered a revolution in philosophy. On the one hand, he considered himself to be this a destroyer of the great tradition of Western philosophy, to be remembered perhaps only like the man who destroyed the Library of Alexandria. For the systematic destruction of the deepest ideas that informed the Tractatus evidently seemed to him also to be the destruction of the deepest presuppositions of traditional philosophy. On the one hand, he thought of himself as transforming philosophy into something new. In his 1930 lectures, he said that the nimbus of philosophy has been lost. It can no longer be thought to be the queen of the sciences. It has lost its sublimity. It cannot aspire to investigate the objective, language-independent essence of all things, since there is no such thing. What he was now doing, he asserted, is a new subject, and not merely a stage in a continuous development. It is one of the airs of what used to be called philosophy. There was now a kink in the development of human thought comparable to that which occurred when Galileo invented dynamics, for a new method had been discovered. Now, for the first time, it was possible to have skillful philosophers. The transformation of the subject that Wittgenstein had in mind was the abandonment of all that had seemed sublime about the aspirations of philosophy from Plato until Frege and Russell. Those aspirations rested on a multitude of illusions, at the heart of which was the assumption that philosophy was a cognitive discipline with a genuine subject matter. Our whole way of thinking must be turned around, he said, so that we abandon the illusion that logical investigation can yield insight into the a priori order of the world and the necessary depth structure of all thoughts and language. We must reject the old idea of the great Western philosophers that there are two kinds of problems in the field of knowledge, the essential ones, which is the task of philosophy to investigate, and the inessential, quasi-accidental ones with which the empirical sciences deal. There are no great essential problems, only great and compelling illusions of such problems. The task of philosophy is to investigate the grammar of our language in order to clear the ground of language of such houses of cards. There are no philosophical propositions, effable or ineffable, and there is no philosophical knowledge about the world, sayable or showable. Philosophy is a contribution to human understanding, not to human knowledge of the empirical world, let alone of a transcendent Platonic or Kantian Numenal world. Philosophical problems stem from a disorder in our concepts. They are to be solved by ordering those concepts. The problems of philosophy are posed by questions that can be answered neither by the natural sciences, since they are not empirical questions, nor by mathematics, since they are not questions demanding proofs of new theorems. They are not practical questions. Puzzlement about how it's possible to measure time, which so baffled Augustine, is not solved by showing one how a clock works. Rather, they are questions that manifest a conceptual unclarity. Sometimes they are questions in search of a sense rather than of an answer. For example, when is one conscious of one's consciousness? Sometimes they are to be resolved not by answered, but by further questions that will dissolve them. For example, how is the mind related to the body? Or in particular, how is my mind related to my body? I'm willing to answer questions about that later, but the short answer is there is no relation at all. More generally, philosophical problems are resolved by attaining an overview of a segment of the grammar of our language that will enable us to recognize where we went astray. The problems of philosophy are conceptual, not factual ones, and they are to be resolved by grammatical investigation. What then was the new method? He characterized it in late 1929 as being essentially the transition from the quest for truth to the quest for sense. By the transition to the question of sense, he probably meant the description of the grammar of our language for the purpose of dissolving philosophical problems, and the rejection of aspirations to investigate truths about the essence of the world by investigations into a hidden depth grammar, as envisaged in the Tractatus. In philosophy, he now declared everything that isn't gas is grammar. Logical investigation had seemed to promise the map of Treasure Island. And the promised treasure was insight into the ultimate nature of all things. We still need a map, but the map is the treasure, for it will enable us to find our way around the labyrinth of language. Why did the new method imply that there could now be skillful philosophers? Why could there not have been skillful philosophers in the past? Perhaps because as long as philosophers labored under the illusion that their quest was for the essence of the world, the foundations of knowledge, and the ultimate principles of human understanding, there could be no skills in producing what was sought. Descartes was a great philosopher, but there can be no skillful neocartesians who carry on the work of uncovering the indubitable foundations of all human knowledge. Hume was a great philosopher, but there can be no skillful neo-Humeans who carry on the work of investigating the patterns of association of ideas that determine the scope and limits of human knowledge. In the past, there could be great philosophers gripped by a metaphysical vision. But with Wittgenstein's new conception of what philosophy now is and of what it can and cannot do, there is a new method, indeed, a multiplicity of methods. The philosophical relevant description of the grammar of words, the disclosing of misleading analogies and disanalogies between uses of words, the arrangement of the grammatical data to exhibit the precise character of philosophical illusion that grips us, the noting of the circumstances of use, the detection of misleading pictures in language, and so on and so forth. All these are matters of skill. The exercise of such skills produces results, clarifications, apprehension of conceptual affinities and differences, ordering of concepts that are permanent achievements, and, as Wittgenstein put it, can be put in the archives. Philosophy, Wittgenstein said, is nothing but philosophical problems. Philosophical problems are best characterized by examples, for they form a family that is not fruitfully circumscribed by an analytic definition. Of course, one can say that they are conceptual a priori problems. That serves to distinguish them from scientific problems and to differentiate philosophy from natural science. But it does not demarcate them from things that have nothing to do with philosophy, such as mathematics. But whereas mathematics is concept formation by means of proof, philosophy is concept clarification by means of argument, reminders of the way we use words, the arrangement of familiar grammatical facts, not the disclosure of hidden and hitherto unknown facts of depth grammar, depth grammar, as he had supposed in the Tractatus. The mastering of analogies and disanalogies, the invention of fragments of alternative modes of representation, and so on. Philosophical problems and difficulties rest on conceptual misunderstandings. They do not require new discoveries, but patient unraveling. It is not the task of philosophy to set up a system of the world, but only to intervene where conceptual difficulties emerge. The character of the problems that Wittgenstein called philosophical can be illuminated by examining the sources to which he ascribed them. The primary source of philosophical problems is our language itself. Expressions with different uses look alike. For example, is blue and is true. Or have a penny and have a pain. Or the pronouns I and he. And expressions with similar uses may look very different. I have a pain in my foot and my foot hurts. Or the chess skin move chess king moves a square at a time, and it is a rule of chess that the king moves a square at a time. So too, a fragment of one language game may be analogous to another, even though the two are not homologous. For example, we speak of being certain that our best student will get a first. It's being certain that two plus two equals four. It's being certain that the world has existed for many years, and if it's being certain that I have a pain, we are prone to think that what we have here are degrees of certainty. The certainty that two plus two equals four equals four, enjoying the very highest degree of certainty. We do not realize that what we have here are not degrees of certainty, but kinds of certainty. And the kinds of certainty are as various as the kinds of proposition in question. Embedded in our languages are numerous pictures, emblematic representations that are endlessly misleading, such as the possessive form of to have a penny and to have a pain. And so we think that having a pain is, as Peter Strawson put it, a form of logically non transferable ownership. We conceive of a mental image as a picture in the mind. So we think that mental images are just like physical images, only mental and private. We represent norms of representations. Rules of use. We represent norms of representation in the form of descriptions, as when we say that red is darker than pink, or that nothing can be red and green all over at the same time. So we think of such propositions as statements of facts, of necessary facts rather than contingent ones. Well, then we may wonder what on earth a necessary fact might be. So we concoct an answer. A necessary fact is a fact that obtains in all possible worlds. And then we rest on our pathetic laurels. Other sources of error are non-linguc. Today the main source of pernicious metaphysics is science. For the allure of science and its amazing success in unlocking the secrets of nature inclines philosophers to succumb to scientism. Scientism in philosophy is the endeavor to emulate argument forms of science in the conceptual domain where it is totally inappropriate. And this rapidly becomes a seedbed for metaphysical weeds that need to be uprooted. Philosophers labor under the illusion that their task is to construct theories, to explain phenomena on the model of science. But philosophy is not a science and its aims are not those of the sciences. According to Wittgenstein, we may construct no theories, for there is no confirming a conceptual elucidation by experiments. We can make no inferences to the best explanation, since, unlike such inferences in sciences, such inferences in philosophy can be neither confirmed nor infirmed. So we explain nothing on the model of scientific theories in all their variety. But then we need not postulate anything in philosophy, for we already have all the information we need at our fingertips in our mastery of and so too our knowledge of the language we speak. What we lack is not fresh information, but an overview of the grammar of our expressions and the skill necessary to order the grammatical data in such a way as to make the problems evaporate. That is why an apt response to a great novel scientific discovery is, goodness me, who would have thought of that? Whereas the apt response to a great philosophical insight or philosophical clarification is, good grief, I should have thought of that. For a great philosophical insight is an insight into our own practices. It is not news from the transcendental times. It is not only the methods of the empirical sciences that mislead us when we're dealing with philosophical problems, it is also the advances in the sciences, both in the empirical sciences, like, say, theory of relativity or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and in the a priori sciences, like the invention of the predicate calculus or of transfinite number theory in mathematics. For each such advance throws up fresh conceptual problems that need to be tackled and fresh sources of conceptual confusion. We also misled by advances in technology, such as clockwork in the 17th century, which became a profoundly misleading model for the understanding of the physical universe on the one hand, and of physiology on the other. Similarly, the invention of the computer in the 20th century has been the source of profound conceptual confusions in philosophy of psychology and in cognitive neuroscience. And today in the 21st century we have AI. Finally, there are sources of conceptual confusion that lie in us. We have an admirable disposition to seek for maximal generality, which is immensely fruitful in the scientific endeavor, but in philosophy often leads us astray. For often particularity is the order of the day. We have a craving for unity and uniformity that is fruitful in scientific theorizing, but often misconceived in philosophy, where many concepts display a ramified motley with multiple centers of variation. For example, in the case of the concept of causation, the concept of thinking, the concept of belief, or the concept of consciousness. Since philosophy is not a cognitive discipline, its goal is not to discover new truths about the world on the model of physics, let alone about all possible worlds, the glories of metaphysics. It has both positive and negative aims. Positively, philosophy aims to attain an overview of a conceptual field, to arrange the grammatical data so that the manifold relations become perspicuous. Wittgenstein compares this task of philosophy to conceptual cartography. Negatively, philosophy aims to disentangle conceptual confusions, to destroy metaphysical illusions, to undermine mythologies of symbolism and of psychology, both within philosophy and within the sciences, empirical and a priori alike. It is, as it were, a cure for certain kinds of diseases of the understanding. Wittgenstein compares philosophy both to medical therapy and to psychoanalysis. Both comparisons are apt, but both can be misleading and have misled Wittgenstein commentators. To attain an overview in philosophy is to grasp the salient grammatical features of the problematic term and apprehend the relationships between its use and that of other expressions with which it might be wrongly conflated. Giving a synopsis of the use of an expression, describing its salient grammatical features, and rendering a surveyable account of the relevant conceptual relationships is a positive achievement. One who has an overview knows his way around in the grammar of the problematic expression and is in a position to clear up associated philosophical confusions. One point of striving for an overview is precisely to clear up philosophical difficulties, to make the troubles disappear. Another is to achieve a map of the terrain. It was natural, against this background of topographical metaphor, that Wittgenstein should have invoked the metaphor of logical or conceptual geography, a conceit that Royal was to make famous. In the early 1930s, he said to his pupils, one difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language, and geography is its grammar. We can walk about the country quite well, but when forced to make a map, we go wrong. To invoke an example of my late friend Bede Rundle, how many of us can articulate the difference in usage between nearly and almost, even though we use them impeccably? I'll explain the answer to that if anybody wants it later. The point of arranging the grammatical facts in a readily surveyable form is to dissolve philosophical problems and destroy philosophical illusions. This negative aspect is commonly given a metaphorical therapeutic characterization. The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notions of a sound, healthy human understanding. What a mathematician is inclined to say about the objectivity and reality of mathematical facts is not a philosophy of mathematics, but something for philosophical treatment. The philosopher treats a question like a disease. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods like different therapies. In philosophizing, we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important. The analogy is a good one, although one must not forget that it's only an analogy. Illness prevents our optimal functioning in daily life, but conceptual worries within philosophy, for example, about the existence of the external world or of other minds are idle. By contrast, conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience or in economics are anything but idle. The psychoanalytic analogy is also powerful. The philosopher transforms latent nonsense into patent nonsense, just as a psychoanalyst and a psychoanalyst transforms latent emotions into patent ones, for only when they are thus exposed can they be confronted. A primary activity of philosophers is to warn against wrong comparisons, wrong similes that are rooted in our forms of expression without our being altogether conscious of them. Wittgenstein's method here resembles the analysts. By making us aware of what was unconscious, he tries to render it harmless. Like the analyst, Wittgenstein encourages us to release suppressed qualms. Informing philosophers that they have misunderstood the nature of their investigations for the past two and a half thousand years was never likely to win immediate approval. Telling them that their subject is not even a cognitive discipline and that philosophers do not add to the sum of human knowledge about the world around them was sure to enrage them. Numerous misunderstandings ensued. Some critics thought that Wittgenstein had trivialized a profound subject. Others could not understand why a philosopher any more than a scientist should have the least concern with how the man on the Klappum omnibus uses words, and couldn't see why the philosopher may not introduce his own special technical terminology, as all theorists may do and do. Seizing upon the remark that philosophy leaves everything as it is, many were horrified at this apparent declaration of the impotence of philosophy and its irrelevance to everything important. Philosophy of Wittgenstein wrote only states what everyone admits. What we find out in philosophy is trivial. It doesn't teach us new facts. Only science does that. Well, one may well ask, why do philosophy then? The subject seems to have been reduced to trivialities. But that is sorely mistaken. Philosophy has indeed lost its nimbus. It's not a sublime investigation into the essence of all things. But philosophy has lost neither its depth nor its importance. The depth lies in the confusions which it is the task of philosophy to eradicate, and the importance lies in their significance in philosophy, in science, and in daily life. The confusions are deep precisely because, quote, their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language. The problems of philosophy are mischaracterized as pseudo-problems. They are perfectly genuine problems, puzzling questions, matters for inquiry, difficulties, only not empirical or theoretical ones. They are problems that need to be dissolved. They are indeed deep, but not deep problems about a special subject matter, such as the logical structure of the world or ontological commitments. The idea that philosophy is impotent, a mere idle amusement, was far removed from Wittgenstein's mind and diametrically opposed to his conception of philosophy. The remark that philosophy leaves everything as it is was misinterpreted. In context, it says that philosophy leaves grammar as it is, that it's not the task of philosophy to reform language, to produce an ideal language, as Frege had thought in producing his concept script, and Russell had supposed in constructing the syntactical language of Principia Mathematica. This is not an admission of the impotence or pointlessness of philosophy. Indeed, in a profound sense, Wittgenstein is the first to give philosophers an adequate warrant to interfere in the sciences. For just because the philosopher, as he's put it, is not a citizen of any community of ideas, he has the right to criticize members of communities of ideas when they transgress the bounds of sense. Although philosophy can no longer aspire to be the queen of the sciences, she remains the tribunal of sense, that is, the systematic critic of conceptual confusion. It's not the task of the philosopher to interfere with the proofs of mathematicians, but what mathematicians say about their proofs is grist for philosophical mills. Far from leaving mathematics as it is, good philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein wrote, will have the same effect on the growth of mathematics as sunlight has on the growth of potato shoots. In a dark cellar they grow yards long. Similarly, he wrote, in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. And the eradication of such confusions is one task of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology. Because Wittgenstein stressed that the problems of philosophy are grammatical, it seemed to some of his reason, his readers, that he was claiming that philosophy is about language, that he was arguing that philosophy is a branch of linguistics, or is merely about words, or that it canonizes the ordinary use of words. This too is misconceived. The problems of philosophy concern not what is actually the case, that's the province of science, but what logically can be the case, that is, what it makes sense to say. And what it makes sense to say is determined by the rules of grammar. But that doesn't make philosophy more about the rules of grammar than it is about the nature, the a priori nature of thinking, imagination, consciousness, self-consciousness, memory, and so forth. For after all, it is grammar that tells us what kind of object anything is. That's a quotation. Nor does it mean that Wittgenstein wanted to talk only about words. That he clarified in a remark about imagination, which I shall read to you from the investigations 370. One ought to ask not what images are, or what goes on when one imagines something, but how the word imagination is used. But that doesn't mean that I want to talk only about words, for the question of what imagination essentially is, is as much about the word imagination as my question. And I'm only saying that the question is not to be clarified, either for the person who does the imagination, does the imagining, nor for anyone else, by pointing, nor yet by a description of some process. The first question also asks for a clarification of a word, but it makes us expect the wrong kind of answer. The first kind of question being that one asks what goes on when one imagines something. It is correct that grammatical misunderstandings and misuses of words are a source of philosophical confusions, but as argued, they are not the only sources. Moreover, there's nothing trivial about language and its uses, or about the confusions into which we're led through our failure to have an overview of a problematic domain of grammar. We are the kinds of creatures we are because we possess a language. Our distinctive capacities, for example, our rationality, our knowledge of good and evil, and our possession of a conscience, our self-consciousness, our capacity for apprehension of necessary truths, are all functions of the fact that we are language using creatures. There is no merely about the grammatical problems that concern philosophy, nor are the problems inconsequential. They are deep and pervasive, anything but trivial. Philosophy may have lost its halo, but it has found a vocation. Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations are unlike those of a philologist. The rules that interest him are the very kind the linguist ignores. For example, that I know that I'm in pain is either mere emphasis or philosopher's nonsense. Or that I don't know what I want, unlike I don't know what he wants, is an expression of indecision, not of ignorance. And that the expression to the north of cannot be affixed to the referring expression the North Pole. Wittgenstein is concerned with grammatical rules only in those domains in which people are tempted to transgress them. He is interested in ordinary language, by contrast with the technical language of the sciences and of mathematics, only to the extent that the problems he's dealing with arise in respect of matters expressed in ordinary language. But when he's discussing, in his philosophy of mathematics, mathematics, when he's discussing transfinite arithmetic or Dedekin cuts, his concern was not with ordinary language, but with the technical language of mathematics and mathematicians. Did he hold that one may not introduce technical terminology in philosophy? Well, he certainly didn't think there was any deep need for it. The tractatus had been rich in technical terms, but as he subsequently realized, that's not really necessary. He placed no prohibition on the introduction of new terms, and indeed did introduce a few himself, for example, family resemblance concepts, language games, and the term genuine duration by contrast with ordinary duration. But he felt no need for many such terms. Why did he think that we must slavishly follow ordinary use? Why are scientists at liberty to use terms in a new sense which doesn't conform to the usage of a man on the Clapham omnibus while the philosopher is prohibited from so doing? The questions are misleading. It's true that Newton's use of force or power deviates from that of the ordinary speaker. But Newton was constructing a theory. His redefinitions of terms had a theoretical warrant, and were not likely to get confused with the ordinary extra-theoretical uses of these terms. Had his theory proved wrong or useless, the terminological innovations and extensions would have been rejected together with the false theory, as indeed occurred with Stahl's theory of combustion and the concept of phlogiston. In philosophy, by contrast, we are not concerned with constructing theories, but with dissolving conceptual problems that involve confusions in the use of terms. So it's those terms we must investigate and not replace them by others which would merely evade the difficulty. This is nicely exemplified by Carnap's method of explications, in which puzzles about heat and cold are replaced by the scalar concept of temperature, which merely brushes the difficulty under the carpet and doesn't resolve it. A friend of mine once said you go to Carnap. To ask how birds fly, and he presents you with a blueprint for an aeroplane. Wittgenstein is not slavishly following ordinary use, but carefully investigating it and clarifying those aspects of the grammar of the terms that are giving trouble. Wittgenstein has been accused of a Philistine defense of common sense. This is wrong. He insisted that there is no common sense answer to philosophical problems. Philosophical problems do not arise for common sense. The common sense answer to Zeno's puzzle, how can Achilles possibly overtake the tortoise? Is by putting one foot down after the other. And that will help no one. But such answers, if offered by a philosopher, merely make fun of the question. Or rather, what needs to be done is to find the sources of the confusions that lead intelligent people to be baffled by Zeno's paradox, or to become bewitched, as Augustine was about how we can possibly do something we all constantly do, namely measure time. Or to think that objects cannot exist unperceived, as Barclay thought, that their essay is perkippy, or that we can never really know what someone else is thinking or feeling, or that the mind must be identical with the brain. It is here, in the entanglement in the web of language, that the real philosophical problems lie. The investigations offers us philosophy without illusions. There is no promise of wonderful treasures to be won, only the promise of learning one's way around. The magic hasn't vanished, for there is magic, white magic in dispelling of the black magic of metaphysics. If past philosophy took us into Aladdin's cave to show us golden jewelry inlaid with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, the task of philosophy grown to maturity, is to take these false treasures into the cold light of day and show that they are nothing but rusting iron and old stones. In philosophy, there cannot be progress in the sense in which there is in the empirical sciences. That is, accumulation of knowledge and attainment of more powerful explanatory theories. But there is progress insofar as a clearer distinctions are drawn. Conceptual affinities and differences are definitively identified, conceptual connections are rendered explicit and confusions dissolved. However, the progress may appear greater than it is. A conceptual field may be partially illuminated for one generation only to be cast into the shadow again. Innovations occur, both technical and theoretical. For example, the invention of computer, the computer, or the invention of function theoretic logic by Fregan. New scientific theories are introduced, such as quantum mechanics or relativity theory. These may cast long shadows over conceptual articulations previously clarified, requiring old ground to be traversed afresh from a new angle. For example, the need to clarify yet again the concept of mind in response to the temptation to conceive of the mind on a computational model. Unlike the scientists, sciences, there may also be regress in philosophy. The sciences are hierarchical. They build upon antecedently acquired knowledge and confirmed theory. Their ever-advancing theories are put to the test by experiment and into practice by resultant technologies. The form of science is progress. Philosophy, by contrast, is flat. It yields no knowledge of the world and has no application other than the dissolution of nonsense. Its distinctions can be lost from sight. Methods of clarification may fall into disuse, and the skills they require may vanish. Conceptual confusions may be cured for one generation, but the virus may mutate and reappear in an even more virulent form. And so a new cure must be found, appropriately adjusted to the mutation and host. The work of philosophy has no end. The ground has to be ploughed over again and again. Knowledge, empirical knowledge, can be transmitted from one generation to another. But understanding, philosophical understanding, has to be achieved afresh by each generation. That is why Wittgenstein wrote ironically, I read philosophers are no nearer the meaning of reality than Plato got. What a curious situation. How extraordinary in that case that Plato could get that far at all. Or that we were not able to get farther. Was it because Plato was so clever? Unquote. Rather, those persistent philosophical problems about truth or existence or identity or possibility are deeply rooted in our languages. As long as there is a verb like to be, which appears to function like to eat or to drink, as long as there is a phrase such as to be true, which seems akin to the phrase to be blue, as long as we speak of time passing and of the flow of time, we shall continue to bump up against the same difficulties and get entangled in similar knots. And each generation will have to disentangle them de novo. Each generation must roll its own. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_13 50:27

So I'm struggling with the idea that philosophy doesn't have a subject matter. Because one of the things that I find myself saying all the time in trying to explain what philosophy is in the context of the Royal Institute is that it's not just about imparting thinking skills. It's got a content. Am I wrong?

SPEAKER_07 50:49

No, you're not. I said it doesn't have a subject matter in the sense in which the sciences do. It doesn't have a subject matter which yields empirical knowledge of the world. So you're perfectly correct. It it does have a, you could say its subject matter is conceptual clarification with the elucidation of concepts and a whole host of things that I mentioned, and that's perfectly correct. But it doesn't have the subject matter in the sense in which the sciences do, and so it's not progressive in the sense that science is progressive. It doesn't build upon the achievements of past philosophers to get ever greater and better generalizations as the scientists do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13 51:31

Thank you. You said at the very end that as long as there's a verb to be that looks like the verb to eat, and so forth, as long as language has certain features, we're going to fall into confusion, and so we'll need philosophy to dig us out of these holes. Somebody might say, oh, this sounds like a it's heading in the direction of rather unwittgensteinian thought, because there might be an improved language which would not tempt us into these confusions. Do you think there could be a language that was improved in that way, or do you think that it is somehow endemic to the whole business of linguistic communication that there are always traps of this sort to fall into?

SPEAKER_07 52:19

I think the latter. Attempts to devise uh an improved language were made by both Freger and Russell. Um all it did was produce an artificial language that nobody can use, and it produced a whole battery of new philosophical confusions, which has taken us the best part of a century to eradicate, and many people who like to spatter their pages with formulae from the predicate calculus are not even aware of. So I don't think that the production of logical languages which are allegedly perfect is likely to get us anywhere. I think it lies in the nature of language as such, and of the nature of human communication. They're going to be forms of words which look as if they're akin, although they're used very differently, and forms of words which look different but are used in exactly the same way. And I think it does lie in the nature of human communication.

SPEAKER_13 53:12

Thank you. Um if one said the task of philosophy is to undo confusions sown by misunderstandings of ordinary language, isn't that a philosophical proposition which has a truth value and so might count as an example, as a counterexample of the thesis that it's not a cognitive discipline?

SPEAKER_07 53:46

I mean, it is perfectly true that if you study Wittgenstein, you learnt a great deal that you didn't know before. Good. And it would be foolish to deny that, and I don't think he would have suggested that that's wrong. Uh but what you don't learn are general truths about the empirical world on the model of the sciences. And metaphysics is not a superscience which discovers truths about the necessary structure of all possible worlds. Um I think he he also made a remark which I think is wrong when he said that philosophy occurs when language is idling. I think that may be true of what philosophers have to say about philosophy. But when cognitive neurosciences talk about the nature of the brain and the relationship between the brain and the mind and the brain and behavior, there is uh that's not language idling, that's language hard at work. And I spent about ten years of my life writing in order to disabuse cognitive neurosciences of the absurdities into which they sink. And I think the same task could be done for economics, indeed, should be done by economics. Economics is a so-called science, I don't think it's a science at all myself, but it's a it purports to be a science which indeed governs our lives, and it's desperately in need of conceptual criticism and the disentangling of conceptual confusions. That's got that's not language idling, that's language hard at work.

SPEAKER_13 55:20

Great, thank you very much. Over to you for your questions. Yes, on the end there. Wait for the microphone to reach you, please.

SPEAKER_07 56:11

Um, first of all, uh in those days, every teacher uh uh used corporal punishment. There was nothing special about Wittgenstein. That was what was done in those days at schools, particularly in Austria and in the relatively primitive villages in Lower Austria in the Alps. Um that's got nothing strange about it. Uh if I'm not much mistaken, and this is just a biographical fact, if it is a fact, and I'm I'm not particularly qualified to answer, but I think his awful sense of guilt stemmed from the fact that when he he he did slap a child who went home uh and sometime later his ears started to bleed. The parents went to the police, complained against Wittgenstein, and when the police accosted him, uh he lied about what he'd done. And I think it was that he felt so guilty about. Uh and he could never quite get over that guilt. But I'm not I'm not a biographer, and I'm not altogether sure.

SPEAKER_14 57:23

I see you too. Go on.

SPEAKER_06 57:30

Thank thank you so much. Could you please do the nearly and almost for us?

SPEAKER_07 57:35

Yes, I forgot about that. This the example isn't is is is not a philosophical example, but it exemplifies a very interesting philosophical fact, namely that we use words with absolute precision, but when asked to describe their use, fall into the greatest of difficulties. And the example is from my dear and much missed friend, Piet Rundle. Uh we use the word nearly, we use the word almost perfectly well. None of us would say there isn't almost enough sugar in the coffee. There isn't nearly enough sugar in the coffee. Uh they behave differently under negation. That's the difference. But none of us can say that without I mean I've asked, I imagine, audiences that must sum up to about two thousands over the last 30 years. I've used Ab's example. And nobody's come up without simple points. We use the word nearly, we use the word almost impeccably, but when asked to compare the uses, we can't do it, or to describe the uses, we can't do it. And that nicely exemplifies a problem in philosophy, because we come to terrible grief in trying to articulate the relationship between the mind and the brain. And we make the most god-awful hash of it. But nevertheless, by and large, in ordinary discourse, I've changed my mind, I've made up my mind. We don't say I've changed my brain and I've made up my brain. So we use them perfectly innocuously, unless there's some back seepage of philosophy in into discourse. But generally we use them perfectly adequately without being able to describe the similarities and differences between them. And that's what Beat had in mind.

SPEAKER_02 59:30

Now at the front, Hugo, you had a question.

SPEAKER_10 59:41

And I wonder if you would like to tell us one or two concepts in AI that could do with a bit of clarification.

SPEAKER_07 59:53

I I'm I can't say anything very useful. I don't know enough about it, but I can say one or two things, which may be a little bit helpful. I mean, it's rightly called artificial intelligence. It's no more a form of intelligence than monopoly money is a form of money. Uh it's a colossal probability calculus. Um there's been quite a lot of discussion, including by the inventors of AI, as to at what point shall this bizarre program be a conscious being? And the answer is at no point. It's never going to be a conscious being, for the simple reason that consciousness is a feature of biological life. Moreover, uh it's not a thinking, I mean, the artificial intelligence program doesn't think anything. It doesn't think anything because it doesn't apprehend the fact that certain premises entail a certain conclusion. Now, to apprehend that a premise entails a conclusion is to see the first as a warrant for the second. That's not something that a machine, a probabilistic machine, can do. As it were, that's a, if you like, a rule-governed, a normative insight on behalf of human beings who understand how to use logical inference of various kinds. The apprehension of a warrant is not within the bounds of artificial intelligence. It's a highly, highly complex probabilistic machine which is not conscious and never will be, and doesn't think and never will. But I don't know enough about the topic.

SPEAKER_13 1:01:37

Stephen, yeah.

SPEAKER_11 1:01:42

Thank you. Um early in your lecture, you suggested that somewhere around the 1970s, um the um uh approach of Wittgenstein that you've been so brilliantly describing waned. That was the rather striking word that you used. Um I don't know whether you meant by that that he his uh that his uh way of philosophizing waned in your view, I suspect not, but I think you were probably describing um some rather more general attitude towards him. Um and if I'm right about that, um what was the change that took place, at least in general attitudes? In what way did philosophizing differ? I'm only asking for a brief explanation, but in what way did it differ from the 1970s onwards?

SPEAKER_07 1:02:36

Yes. Well, uh there are of course many different factors at play here. Uh, one was that America began to dominate philosophy. Um up until about the 1970s, the uh old-style philosophy of uh in Oxford survived. Uh then you had the impact of Davidson and subsequently of Putnam and then of Kripke. And those three managed to cast a long shadow of anything that Wittgenstein did. All of them rejected Wittgenstein or grotesquely misunderstood him. In the meantime, in Oxford, you had Christopher Peacock, who by and large was totally unintelligible. You had Michael Dummit, who had an immense proselytizing zeal, and a very, very abstract vision, which rarely made contact with any linguistic reality. It was quite extraordinary. But he was a very charismatic personality, and he brushed Wittgenstein aside as a waste of time. As it were, Wittgenstein was acceptable only insofar as Wittgenstein agreed with Frege, and if he didn't agree with Frege, then Wittgenstein was wrong. In fact, Wittgenstein's criticisms of Frege are already given in the Tractatus, and they're totally devastating. Dammit understood nothing about them. It was rather depressing to learn that Dummit described the way he wrote his famous review of the remarks on the foundations of mathematics by Wittgenstein. And he boasted about this because he said he was asked to review the book. So his review, it's about 25 pages long, was immensely influential because people couldn't make head or tail of the remarks on the foundations of mathematics. It's a very difficult book. Its originality is staggering but difficult to understand. So Dammit said he read through the book, and every time he tried to write a review of it, the review, what he was writing just disintegrated. So he put the book in the drawer for three months, and then without looking at it again, he sat down and wrote a review, and then he put in some references. And that's a very odd way to write reviews. And unfortunately, the review was hugely influential, and people said things like, because Wittgenstein spends most of his time talking about two and two is four, or twenty five squared is six hundred and twenty-five, he said, Well, Wittgenstein thinks that the only thing mathematics is good for is shopping, is doing a shopping. Totally ignorant of the fact that Wittgenstein had said that one possible title for his book on mathematics, which he never finished, is beginning arithmetic. Because he thought the deepest problems already arise in propositions like 25 squared is 625. But sometimes he engaged with really problems in really advanced mathematics, such as Dedekin Cup's and Skolem's theorem, and he was perfectly willing, and transfinite arithmetic, he was perfectly willing to engage with that where it interested him and caught his attention.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

Thank you for the lecture, Professor Hacker. Uh I wonder if you can help me out understanding the remark on imagination. And the question is this so if philosophy is not only about words, which I agree on that, in what sense can we say that conceptual description helps us understand the nature, for example, of numbers, imagination, the mind? Are you thinking of something uh similar to uh the descriptive metaphysics we find in Strossen?

SPEAKER_07 1:06:45

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.

SPEAKER_12 1:06:49

Is it are you thinking of something similar to descriptive metaphysics in Strausson?

SPEAKER_07 1:06:55

Uh no, Straussen's distinction between descriptive metaphysics and revisionary metaphysics occurs in the one and a half page introduction to individuals. Uh that was written at the last moment, and the book was already ready to go to the press, and the edit the editor, the desk editor of the press said, couldn't you write an introduction? And he wrote this down very hastily. A little while later he went to a famous conference between uh British philosophers and French philosophers at Wayomont. And there he said that he took back what he said because so-called prescriptive metaphysics is not a suggestion of an of an alternative conceptual scheme. It's just more confusions about our conceptual scheme. I mean, otherwise, if you really want prescriptive metaphysics, then the greatest prescriptive metaphysician would be somebody like Rudolf Khanner, who would hardly be the sort of person uh uh to be characterized as a metaphysician. Uh so I don't think that that distinction is a viable one in the first place.

SPEAKER_13 1:08:06

Okay, I can see several, so let's wake up work our way forwards. So you had did you have did you have a hand up? Oh, I'm sorry. Um okay, who else? So towards the yeah, right where you're standing now. Yes, that's it, and then we'll work forwards gradually.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:25

Uh many thanks for the time heard. Okay, cool. So um, would you know how and why Littgenstein concluded that uh that this conceptual confusion needs to be clarified? Would you know whether he observed that conceptual confusion that in the way of human advancement, some sort of creating disruption in the way human thing doing? Why did he put that conceptual confusion in need of being clarified through philosophy?

SPEAKER_07 1:09:06

Within philosophy, the need for conceptual confusion is the need to set philosophy in the path on the on the on the on the right path into an overview of our conceptual scheme and the elimination of philosophical confusions, that speaks for itself. The question, the further question would be, well, what about outside philosophy? And there's no doubt at all that since he worked a great deal in the last uh between 1945 and 1948 on philosophy of psychology, he thought that empirical psychology was desperately in need of conceptual clarification, that there were deep and terrible confusions in empirical psychology. Um it's very interesting, incidentally, that uh American cognitive scientists to this day will hold up William James's Principles of Philosophy as their great handbook. And they will say, you know, we haven't yet reached uh as far as the great William James. Uh Victor Stein did read William James's Principles of Psychology, 1890, very carefully indeed. He thought it was a wonderful handbook for philosophical confusions. There were more confusions there you could find anywhere else. It had the great merit that James wrote clearly. So his philosophical confusions can be disentangled. Some philosophers are so confused that the knots they try they tie are so complex that there's nothing you can do with them at all. That's not the case with James because everything is clearly laid out. And if you look at Richard Stein's uh remarks on philosophy of psychology, volumes one and two, uh, you'll find innumerable references, either explicit or implicit, to James. So that would be one obvious example. I spent about ten years of my life working on cognitive neuroscientists. If you ask why it is important to clarify that, it's very important to clarify that for both practical and theoretical reasons. I mean, a variety of total misunderstanding and misconceptions often lead to maltreatment of patients.

SPEAKER_14 1:11:12

That's not trivial.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:38

Is that something is that a point that you think of philosophy being sort of amongst the other? Or is that just another metaphor that doesn't quite work?

SPEAKER_07 1:11:50

Well, Wittgenstein certainly didn't think that what are generally known as the human sciences engage in similar patterns of reasoning and similar patterns of investigation as the natural sciences, such as paradigmatically, physics, astronomy, chemistry, or biology. He certainly thought that they were very, very different, and the forms of understanding are of a very different type. And he gave very good reasons why they're different. That where the one is concerned with causal connections and law-governed regularities, the other is concerned with connections of reasons or connections, emotional connections. So the reason for doing something may be your feelings, or it may be you have a very good reason for doing it, namely that such and such. There may be goal-directed, so teleology is an essential part of the human sciences. We are purposive goal-directed creatures, and we can't understand our behavior unless you understand it in teleological terms. But of course, there's a whole host of aspects of our behavior that can only be understood in causal terms. That's also true. But it doesn't mean that all our behavior can be understood in causal terms. Does that answer your question?

unknown 1:13:07

I think maybe.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:11

Yes, would you please go on?

SPEAKER_13 1:13:13

Go on, have another go.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:15

I I guess I'm just curious if there's a way to understand philosophy and belonging in the arts. Um we've got criticism of what um yet not building on sort of past um accomplishments directly, but we can sort of learn technique, which can improve our skills. It seems like it has a bit of a home there, but it's been hinted at by your differentiation of it from the sciences, but you don't sort of come up to say it, so I'm curious to your own.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:48

But there would be analogies between the arts and and uh and philosophy, certainly, but also disanalogies. So one could sit down and draw up half a dozen comparisons which are analogical, which are indeed an analogical, and half a dozen where they're disanalogies.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:15

Um methodological anthropology and complex on the clinical problems rather than the political problems.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:04

I I quite agree with you. I think I mean I don't maybe you're doing it, but somebody could write a very interesting book on the similarities and then again the differences, but uh undoubtedly similarities uh I quite agree.

SPEAKER_13 1:15:19

Yes, one way back.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:22

Thank you very much. Talking about concept and clarification of concept and you manage and economics, and it's something that uh interests me a lot. So we're falling out of this club. And in the world we live right now in the clarification of concept of economics, or money is what is potential. And I'm just wondering if you had a little about the concepts of economics and money, and uh, if you're not aware of um uh thermodynamic economics and so on.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:58

Well, uh last time I studied economics was about 60 odd years ago, um, and I can't say I remember a great deal. So what I have to say is just touching the surface. But basically, uh, in order to do economics as it's done in the modern era, it does depend upon the ability to reduce all valuations to a single dimension. Otherwise, you can't engage in the various marginalist economic calculations that go back to the well they go back to Benson, but they were picked up by Marshall and uh then uh uh uh further theorists. Um and and and lie at the base of national income accounting and and and the various ways in which you evaluate uh the economic the economic prosperity of a country. And I suppose I'm as an outsider deeply sceptical about the rectitude of the thought that you can reduce the evaluation of economics to one single parameter. So if that's correct, then then the the whole picture of the economic situation of the b of of a nation is totally distorted by econom by economists. And it's quite interesting just to listen to them on the radio, which I occasionally do, as everybody else has to, uh, and they talk about the economy as if it they rarefy the economy. This will be good for the economy, this will be bad for the economy. The economy isn't a kind of entity, it's human beings living together in society, and it's the effects on society. I think in an amateurish sort of way, that probably one disaster was the disappearance of political economy as it was practiced in the late 19th century, and its replacement by marginalist economics. And I think that was a profound loss, which ought to be regained, but I have no idea whether it's at all likely.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:13

Yeah, Stephen, have another go.

SPEAKER_11 1:18:18

Thank you. I've I've got another historical question, um, and going back to the 1920s, which you were asked about a few moments ago, and can I ask you about logical positivism? I I had until this evening I I had rather assumed that that was very much a precursor to Wittgenstein, or to rather to um to the to the phase of Wittgenstein that you've been talking about. But I wonder whether you might be prepared to agree that the logical positivists in their analysis of language, I mean they may have been doing it much more crudely than Wittgenstein, but actually they were focusing on language in the same way that he did, perhaps in a more sophisticated way.

SPEAKER_07 1:19:04

Um yes and no, let me explain. Um I would conjecture that logical positivism or logical empiricism uh is the most influential philosophical movement of the 20th century, particularly because a large number of the members of the Vienna Circle fled to America with the rise of Nazism, totally transformed American philosophy. Um and uh and there are more philosophers in America than in the sum of tot some total of philosophers in the history of the subject, so to speak, from Thales onwards. Um enormously influential movement. Uh logical positivism was parasitic on Wittgenstein. Um the Vienna Circle spent two whole years, if I remember correctly, 1927 and 1929, reading the Tractatus line by line. Some of them agreed with it, some of them disagreed with most of them. I mean, Neurat was the great disagreer. Uh uh, of course, uh Schlick thought the Tractatus was the greatest book in logic ever written. Um the principle of verification was something they read into the Tractatus, although it's not actually there. But Wittgenstein himself toyed with the principle of verification very briefly in 1929 in conversations with Weismann and with Schlick, uh, and those conversations were duly transmitted to the to the Wielerkreis, to the Vienna Circle. So they picked up the principle of verif verification uh uh from Wittgenstein, um, whereas he abandoned it after a few uh a few months, he decided no, it doesn't work, and he dropped it. Uh so he too there was very influential indeed. Um It it it it doesn't work. The question of how a proposition is verified is a good question to ask of some types of propositions, but not of others. And it's very important that there are whole ranges of propositions, the meaning of which is not elucidated by asking how they can be verified. I suppose the most prominent case would be first-person present-tenth psychological propositions like I've got a headache, or I intend going to Oxford later tomorrow, or um uh I'm going to I'm going to be very upset if such and such. Uh these have no verification at all. And that's something that needs complex explanation, which Wittgenstein offers.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:57

Right at the back, please.

SPEAKER_14 1:22:04

Uh hi.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:05

Um I recently read a biography of Frank Ramsey, uh, and it was interesting uh within that biography the extent to which the writer thought that Ramsey had quite an influence on the sort of transition of Wittgenstein's thinking. I just wondered if you could give any more detail or thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:27

Uh well Ramsey visited Wittgenstein twice on visits to Vienna, once specifically when he wanted to write the famous review of the Tractatus, which is a very fine review and is critical of some of the arguments of the Tractatus in a very important way. The second time was a less successful visit. And then Ramsey sponsored Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929, and slightly absurdly uh was appointed his supervisor because he needed to have a doctorate in order to be able to teach. And I'm sure you know the famous story of the examination, they appointed Russell and Moore as his uh as his uh examiners, Ramsey having been his supervisor, and he was able to submit the tractatus as his thesis. And you know, they chatted amicably for 20 minutes, and then Russell said to Moore, Well, I suppose we'd better ask some questions, which they did. And after ten minutes, Wittgenstein jumped up, clapped them both on the shoulders, and said, Oh, never mind, you'll never understand. And I think Moore famously wrote that it was his own subjective view that the Tractatus was a work of genius, but be that as it may, it was up to the standards of the Cambridge D film, or PhD. Um Wittgenstein enjoyed talking to Ramsay, and he did talk to him extensively in the one year, 1929 to 1930, when he returned to Cambridge. Uh the preface to the investigations talks about two years. His memory was confusing him because Wittgenstein went to Cambridge in January 1929, and Ramsay died in January 1930. So it's only one year. But they did enjoy a lot of conversations, they did conduct a lot of conversations together, and I think those conversations may have helped Wittgenstein in shaking himself free of the ideas in the Tractatus. On the other hand, Ramsay himself, as a philosopher, was not very good. And the remarks he has to make about philosophy and the nature of philosophy, particularly the remarks about belief and the nature of believing and thinking, are hopelessly defective. He was a brilliant economist and a brilliant mathematician. But then again, in mathematics, it was interesting that he wanted to rehabilitate Principia Mathematica, to do, as it were, a further elaboration of Principia Mathematica escape from the paradoxes and the theory of types. And Wittgenstein once said that Ramsay thought that he, Wittgenstein, was a Bolshevik in mathematics, because he wanted to uproot the whole quest for the foundations of mathematics, whereas Ramsey wanted to pursue it further. So I don't think Ramsey, good critic as he was, and a good conversant for Wittgenstein as he was, uh, had a significant uh contribution to make to philosophy.

SPEAKER_13 1:25:56

Let's try and fit in two more questions there and in the front. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:00

Thank you for your lecture. Yeah, you spoke about the delimitation of philosophy by Bittestein. And what do you think is uh metaphysics, classic metaphysics in this, if it's changed also from tractatus to investig uh to further world like philosophical investigations?

unknown 1:26:15

Sorry, I didn't understand.

SPEAKER_13 1:26:17

Sorry, did you can you say that again?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:18

I didn't about the view of Bittestain about the metaphysics, classic metaphysics in the tractatus or aftermath.

SPEAKER_13 1:26:27

What are the contrasting views of metaphysics in the tractatus and in the investigations?

SPEAKER_07 1:26:32

Oh goodness. The tractators is a book of ineffable metaphysics. The ineffability bit obviously appealed to this uh slightly hysterical young genius. Um but um the general claim is that you can't say but only show truths of metaphysics, and all the sentences of the Tractatus are in a deep sense a transgression of the rules of logical syntax of language, but the ordinary propositions on analysis will display, will show the underlying metaphysical truths, namely that the world consists of facts, that facts consists of objects, that there are simple objects, and simple objects enter into concatenation to constitute facts, and so on and so forth. It's a complex metaphysics and ontology. That's all an illusion. There aren't any logically simple objects, as he argues in the Tractatus, in the investigations. The terms simple and complex are not absolute terms, they're relative terms. And for any kind of entity, any kind of noun or predicate, if you're going to say it's a simple so and so, it's a complex so and so, you have to in advance lay down criteria of simplicity and complexity for that particular kind of entity. And in many cases we don't have we haven't laid down any criteria. I mean w what's what are the criteria for something to be, I don't know, a simple law floorboard as opposed to a complex floorboard, or a a simple colour as opposed to a complex colour. We don't have any criteria. We can lay criteria down, but they have to be stipulated. He hadn't seen that in the Tractatus. He thought that simple and complex were absolute terms. It was a complete mistake to think that the world consists of facts, not of things. Facts aren't in the world, nor are they anywhere else. Talk about facts is a way of talking about what is the case, what has been established. So it was a mistake to say the world consists of facts, and what he should have said was statements about bits and pieces of the world consist of statements of facts, namely statements that are indisputable, statements from which you needn't argue to, but you can argue from. But facts aren't in the world. I mean the fact that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 didn't cease to be a fact after in 1067, and wasn't, it's not the case that it wasn't yet a fact in 1065. And moreover, it's not to be found in Hastings and never was to be found in Hastings. It's simply a way of talking about what is the case. Does that help? I mean, there's a lot more. I mean, he has endless and detailed criticisms of the famous picture theory of meaning, which he came to realize was that was a complete misunderstanding and misapprehension. But that's a very complex question.

SPEAKER_13 1:29:44

And that brings us to time, I'm afraid. So apologies to those of you who had questions and didn't get the opportunity to ask them. Thank you very much to those of you who did ask questions. But thanks above all to Peter for a fascinating lecture.