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Wittgenstein and Idealism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Bernard Williams
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Extract

Tractatus, 5.62 famously says: ‘… what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.’ The later part of this repeats what was said in summary at 5.6: ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. And the key to the problem ‘how much truth there is in solipsism’ has been provided by the reflections of TLP, 5.61.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 7: Understanding Wittgenstein , March 1973 , pp. 76 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1973

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References

page 77 note 1 Hacker, , p. 59.Google Scholar

page 80 note 1 This definition excludes Berkeley's completed theory from being an example of empirical idealism. Yet clearly Kant was right in distinguishing Berkeley's views from transcendental idealism. We need not, for the present purpose, pursue the important distinctions which are needed here.

page 82 note 1 I shall not try to discuss how that second fact is to be understood. For the closely related point that the ‘two languages’ version of phenomenalism is not neutral about reality, cf. Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia, pp. 60–1.Google Scholar

page 82 note 2 Cf. Moore's objection to what he supposed to be a consequence of egoism in ethics: Principia Ethica, p. 99.Google Scholar

page 86 note 1 The references to the theory, like the references to Whorf, just function as a stand-in or dummy in the argument. I do not go into the difficulties that surround such a theory, such as that of independently characterising its explanandum.

page 86 note 2 Language, Belief and Metaphysics, ed. Kiefer, and Munitz, (SUNY Press, 1970), p. 60.Google Scholar

page 90 note 1 Itself, of course, an idealist view, in what I earlier called the ‘explanatory’ sense of the term.

page 91 note 1 Kreisel, G., ‘Wittgenstein's Theory and Practice of Philosophy’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, xi (1960) pp. 238–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kreisel's own use of the point goes further than anything suggested here, and in a rather different direction.

page 93 note 1 See Dummett, M., ‘Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics’, Phil. Rev. (1959)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Philosophical Investigations, Critical Essays, ed. Pitcher, (New York: Doubleday, 1966).Google Scholar

page 93 note 2 ‘Knowledge and Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind’, Phil. Rev., lxxv (1966)Google Scholar, reprinted in Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973).Google Scholar