The Method of the Tractatus

A few years ago, a group of American philosophers, Cora\ud Diamond and James Conant among them, suggested a\ud resolute, or radical reading of Wittgenstein"s Tractatus.\ud These two authors claim that the Tractatus has a body,\ud and a frame. Wittgenstein minded the frame seriously,\ud whereas all the remaining propositions of the Tractatus,\ud which belong to its body, are written tongue in cheek. To\ud the frame of the work belong the Preface, §§3.32–3.326,\ud 4–4.003, 4.111–4.112 and 6.53–6.54. In it Wittgenstein\ud gave meta-theoretical instructions how to treat the rest of\ud the book. The main idea of the frame is expressed in §\ud 6.54 which reads: "My propositions serve as elucidations in\ud the following way: anyone who understands me eventually\ud recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them\ud – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to\ud speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.).�\ud This was the real message of the Tractatus

The Independent Churches and Proselytism in the Balkans

The emergence of the new churches in the Balkans is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is mainly connected with the Evangelical wing of Protestantism. Apart from the Congregationalist missions within the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century including the Methodists and to a much smaller extent, the Baptists and the Pentecostals., and their spinoffs, mainly resulting from geopolitical shifts post-World War I, most of the Evangelical missionary endeavors on the territory of Former Yugoslavia began after the fall of Communism, These aspects are the focus of my essay, although some of the conclusions are also applicable to the Protestant communities with longer historical presence in the region

Russell’s Second Philosophy of Time (1899–1913)

Russell’s second philosophy of time (1899–1913), which will be the subject of this paper, is of special interest for two reasons. (1) It was basic to his New Philosophy, later called the “philosophy of logical atomism”. In fact, this philosophy didn’t initially emerge in the period of 1914– 1919, as many interpreters (e.g. A. J. Ayer) suggest, but with the introduction of Russell’s second philosophy of time (and space). The importance of Russell’s second philosophy of time for his early and middle philosophy can be seen from the fact that it survived the dramatic changes in his philosophy of August–December 1900, and of July 1905. There is of course no surprise about this point: it served as their fundament. (2) Russell’s second philosophy of time is a locus classicus of all so called B-theories of time which define it in terms of the relations of before, after and simultaneous between events or moments. 20th century philosophy; absolute theory of time; theory of time; order; relation; relationist theory of time; B-serie

Hermann Lotze and Franz Brentano

The task of this paper is to show that Franz Brentano was not a solitary figure who advanced his philosophy in complete isolation from other contemporary philosophers in Germany, as some Neo-Brentanists have claimed over the last 30–40 years. He developed his philosophical psychology in the context of his time—in particular, under the influence of Hermann Lotze

The Joint Philosophical Program of Russell and Wittgenstein (March–November 1912) and its Downfall

After finishing Principia Mathematica in 1910, Russell concentrated his efforts in questions of epistemology. In �Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description� (1911), and The Problems of Philosophy (written in 1911 but published in 1912), Ch. III, he developed the epistemological implications of his logic in detail. At that time, Russell accepted that whereas we are acquainted with sense-data, we know physical objects by description only. More precisely, we logically infer that there are physical objects from the sense-data we are acquainted with. In 1911 Russell believed that this understanding is much more coherent than any competing philosophy of matter, for example, from solipsism, according to which there are no physical objects at all or from naive realism, according to which we directly apprehend material objects

Russell’s Conception of Propositional Attitudes in Relation to Pragmatism

The conventional wisdom has it that between 1905 and 1919 Russell was critical to pragmatism. In particular, in two essays written in 1908–9, he sharply attacked the pragmatist theory of truth, emphasizing that truth is not relative to human practice. In fact, however, Russell was much more indebted to the pragmatists, in particular to William James, as usually believed. For example, he borrowed from James two key concepts of his new epistemology: sense-data, and the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Reasonable explanation of this is that, historically, Russell’s logical realism and James’s pragmatism have the same roots—the German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). In this paper we are going to explore the fact that in 1905, under Lotze’s influence, Russell married propositions with beliefs. A few years later this step also made Russell prone to embrace the theory of truth-making that has its roots in James. In contrast to the concept of sense-data and to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, however, the understanding that we believe propositions—and not, for example, simply grasp them—was in tension with Russell’s Principle of Extensionality, according to which propositions can be logically connected with other propositions only as truth-functions. The point is that when we judge a mind-relation (for example, a relation of belief) to a proposition, the latter cannot be determined as true or false. The two most talented pupils of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ramsey, severely criticized the central place propositional attitudes play in Russell’s logic. Wittgenstein analyzed “A believes that p” to “ ‘p’ says p” (5.542). Ramsey criticized Russell’s beliefs in propositions the other way round: He stressed that belief is an ambiguous term that can be interpreted for the better in the sense of pragmatism. Prima facie surprisingly, he maintained that his “pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell.” (1927: 51

The Latest Frege

Many authors believe that the manuscripts Frege wrote in 1924–1925 are not theoretically of interest. They are rather a product of his emotional despair and theoretical dead-end which he reached in the last years of his life. Such is also the judgement of Michael Dummett delivered in his seminal book Frege: Philosophy of Language. According to Dummett, “the few fragmentary writings of Frege’s final period—1919–1925—are not of high quality: they are interesting chiefly as showing that Frege did, at least at the very end of his life, acknowledge the failure of the logicist programme” (Dummett 1981, p. 664). In this paper we will try to show that the widely accepted negative assessment of Frege’s latest writings is due to a lack of understanding of their true idea. In fact, the change in Fre-ge’s mind in the last two or three years of his life was result of long deliberations on a severe tension in his founding intuitions. The change itself made his logico-philosophical project more coherent and, thus, is of utmost theoretical importance

The Composition of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus": An Interpretative Study

When Wittgenstein started writing the Tractatus in June 1915, he was convinced that he was producing a theory. Accordingly, he chose a theoretical style of expressing his thought. Wittgenstein abandoned this stance only at the end of his work of composing the book. He realized that what he is producing in not a theory but a manual for improving our language and thinking. Unfortunately, it was too late to change the architecture and the style of the book: Wittgenstein simply had no time to do that. This drawback makes the Tractatus notoriously difficult to understand and is apparently the major factor that caused the so called “Tractarian Wars”