Footnotes
- (1)
- L.J.J. Wittgenstein, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung:
Kritische Edition, ed. by B.F. McGuinness and J. Schulte,
Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1989. Henceforth referred to as
`TLP'.
- (2)
- Wittgenstein uses the word `Seele'. As S.A. Kripke notes in his
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 49 and 127, `mind'
is often a better translation of this word than `soul' because it
has less religious and philosophical connotations. Since most
readers of the English version of the Tractatus will be accustomed
to the translation `soul', we will use the latter term.
- (3)
- For example, J. Hintikka, `On Wittgenstein's "Solipsism"',
Mind 67 (1958), 88-91, and M. Black, A Companion to
Wittgenstein's `Tractatus', Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell U.P., 1964,
p. 301.
- (4)
- K.J. Perszyk, `Tractatus 5.54-5.5422', Philosophia 17
(1987), 111-126, quotation from p. 117.
- (5)
- G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's
Tractatus, 4th ed., London, Hutchinson, 1971, p. 88. J.
Hintikka and B. Wolniewicz, personal communications, 1989.
- (6)
- P.M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion, 2nd ed., Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 62.
- (7)
- H. Sluga, `Subjectivity in the Tractatus', Synthese 56
(1983), 123-139, quotation from pp. 129-130.
- (8)
- Kripke, op. cit., p. 131.
- (9)
- J.O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis, Oxford, Blackwell,
1956, p. 133.
- (10)
- J. Rosenberg, `Intentionality and Self in the Tractatus',
Noûs 2 (1969), 341-358, quotation from
p. 342.
- (11)
- Letter to Russell dated 19.8.19, reprinted in L.J.J.
Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, edited by G.H. von Wright
and G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd ed., Oxford, Blackwell, 1979,
p. 131.
- (12)
- G.J.C. Lokhorst, `Ontology, Semantics and Philosophy of Mind in
Wittgenstein's Tractatus: a Formal Reconstruction',
Erkenntnis 29 (1988), 35-75, and `Truth-functionality and
Supervenience in the Tractatus', in P. Weingartner and G. Schurz,
eds., Reports of the 13th International
Wittgenstein-Symposium, Vienna, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky,
1989, 276-278.
- (13)
- O. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle
Untersuchung, Vienna and Leipzig, Braumüller, 1926, Part
II, Chaps. 6-9.
- (14)
- See, e.g., Sluga, op. cit. The remark in TLP 5.1362
that "`A knows that p is the case" is senseless when p is a
tautology' may also be an echo from Weininger. He wrote that a
tautology does not express knowledge and cannot be the object of an
act of thought (ibid., part II, ch. 7).
- (15)
- Notebooks, op. cit., p. 119.
- (16)
- Sluga, op. cit., pp. 129-130.
- (17)
- See, for example, A. Kenny, `Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of
Mind', in I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of
Wittgenstein, Oxford, Blackwell, 1981, 140-147.
- (18)
- L.J.J. Wittgenstein, Blue Book, pp. 73-74, in
The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford, Blackwell, 1958.
- (19)
- W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, New
York, Henry Holt, 1890, p. 365. In addition to `Ego', James
also uses the terms `Transcendental Subject' and `Self'.
- (20)
- The latter expressions come from the Blue Book,
op. cit., p. 47.
- (21)
- The expression `geometrical eye' comes from the Blue
Book, op. cit., pp. 63-64.
- (22)
- M.U. Coyne, `Eye, "I", and Mine: The Self of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus', Southern Journal of Philosophy 20, 1982,
313-323, quotation from p. 317.
- (23)
- Coyne (op. cit.) has no difficuly with TLP 5.632
because she regards the eye as the limit of the visual field and
the I as the limit of reality. We say that the eye and I are only
elements of these limits (namely, their vertices). We prefer our
own interpretation because we do not see how one can make sense of
Coyne's talk about the `shapes' of the visual field and reality if
these shapes are assumed to be bounded by points. How could a point
delimit a shape?
- (24)
- L.J.J. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. by R.
Rhees, Oxford, Blackwell, 1964, §71.
- (25)
- G.E. Moore, `Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930-33', in his
Philosophical Papers, London, Allen and Unwin, 1959,
252-324, quotation from p. 309. Wittgenstein may have got the
Lichtenberg quotation from Weininger, op. cit., part II,
ch. 7.
- (26)
- A similar critique applies to Dewan's proposal to regard the
mind as a virtual governor of the brain of the same type as the
virtual governors which are defined over grids of electrical
generators. The idea is useful in electrical engineering, but does
not have any explanatory value in the philosophy of mind. See E.M.
Dewan, `Consciousness as an Emergent Causal Agent in the Context of
Control System Theory', in G.G. Globus, G. Maxwell and I. Savodnik,
eds., Consciousness and the Brain: A Scientific and
Philosophical Inquiry, New York, Plenum Press, 1976,
181-198.
- (27)
- Compare Hintikka, op. cit. (1958).
- (28)
- `Ich kann mir nichts ausser meinem Denken denken; denn dadurch,
dass ich es denke, wird es ja mein Denken, und fällt unter die
unvermeidliche Gesetze desselben.' (`I can't think anything which
goes beyond my thinking; for the very fact that I am thinking it
turns it into my thinking, and makes it fall under the inevitable
laws of thinking.') Wittgenstein? No, J.G. Fichte, Die
Bestimmung des Menschen, Berlin, Voss, 1800, p. 157.
- (29)
- Hacker, op. cit., pp. 77-78.
- (30)
- Quoted without reference by J. Hadamard, The Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field, 2nd ed., Princeton, N.J.,
Princeton U.P., 1949, p. 68.
- (31)
- I am ignoring the philosophers who have proclaimed themselves
to be the philosophers of modern cognitive science (Fodor, Pylyshyn
and the like). First, cognitive scientists themselves are usually
bewildered by the claims these philosophers make on their behalf,
and secondly, this kind of philosophy is rapidly dying out anyway
(cf. the last footnote below).
- (32)
- A good account of Hertz's influence on the picture-theory may
be found in J. Griffin, Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism,
Oxford, Oxford U.P., 1964.
- (33)
- The `Boltzmann machine' is a device composed of simple elements
analogous to neurons whose collective behaviour is described by the
laws of statistical mechanics. It is able to make `dynamical
internal models' of the statistical structure of its environment
which exactly conform to the definition H. Hertz gave of such
models in his Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange
dargestellt, Leipzig, Barth, 1894. See, e.g., D.H. Ackley, G.E.
Hinton and T.J. Sejnowski, `A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann
machines', Cognitive Science 9, 1985, 147-169, repr. in J.A.
Anderson and E. Rosenfeld, eds., Neurocomputing: Foundations of
Research, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1988, 638-649. This
anthology contains many more examples of non-sentential
psychological models of a `Hertzian' kind.
Previous | Up | Next
gjclokhorst@gmail.com || July 17, 2015 || HTML 4.01 Strict