Wittgenstein's private language : grammar, nonsense, and imagination in Philosophical investigations, §§ 243-315 / Stephen Mulhall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mulhall, Stephen, 1962- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Philosophische Untersuchungen--English.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951--Language.

Philosophy, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (148 pages)

Other Title:

Grammar, nonsense, and imagination in Philosophical investigations, §§ 243-315

Grammar, nonsense, and imagination in Philosophical investigations, sections 243-315

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The author offers a new way of interpreting one of the most famous and contested texts in modern philosophy. He sheds new light on a central controversy concerning Wittgenstein's early work by showing its relevance to a proper understanding of the later work.

Stephen Mulhall presents a detailed critical commentary on sections 243-315 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: the famous remarks on 'private language'. In so doing, he makes detailed use of Stanley Cavell's interpretations of these remarks; and relates disputes about how to interpret this aspect of Wittgenstein's later philosophy to a recent, highly influential controversy about how to interpret Wittgenstein's early text, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by drawing and testing out a distinction between resolute and substantial understandings of the related notions of grammar, nonsense and the imagination. The book is concerned throughout to elucidate Wittgenstein's philosophical method, and to establish the importance of the form or style of his writing to the proper application of this method.

Contents:

Introduction: Wittgenstein's aesthetics of austerity

Wittgenstein's monologuists (§243)

A child is crying (§§244-5)

Wittgenstein's cloud: of unknowing (§246)

Privacy, patience and pictures: first methodological interlude (§§248, 251-2)

Cavell's Corsican brothers (§253)

Wittgenstein's semi-colon: second methodological interlude (§255)

Wittgenstein's diarist: three readings (§258)

Excursus: Cavell's Mezuzah

Wittgenstein's gift (of grammatical imagination): pots and dolls, stones and flies (§§268-9)

The human manometer (§270)

Coda: Wittgenstein's beetle (§293).

Notes:

Originally published: London: Clarendon, 2007.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [144]-145) and index.

ISBN:

0-19-152605-3

1-280-84572-4

9786610845729

1-4356-2134-4

0-19-920854-9

1-282-05341-8

9786612053412

0-19-156521-0

OCLC:

922954242