Chris Swoyer
We will spend the bulk of this course on a close reading of the first part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (along with related passages in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics). We will engage in a careful reading of the Investigations, taking it as it comes, on its own terms, aiming to approach the text with sympathy and charit, though not reverence.
This does not mean that its historical background is unimportant,
but it would be all too easy to spend most of the semester just on
background. We will begin with a quick overview of
Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I also recommend reading around
about Wittgenstein's Viennese background, e.g., Toulmin's and
Janiks' Wittgenstein's Vienna and portions of Ray Monk's
insightful biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of
Genius. A hypertext version of the Ogden translation of
the Tractatus, now superseded, but by no means always
inferior to the translation by Pears & McGuinness, is available
at:
http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/tlph.htmlNeglecting background does mean missing important things, but that's a reasonable price to pay for spending more time directly with the primary works. We also won't worry much about recent scholarly writings on Wittgenstein (though I will discuss them in passing, and you are encouraged to delve into them for your paper). In particular we will not read Saul Kripke's important work on Wittgenstein (``Kripkenstein'') or literature on the ``new Wittgenstein'' (by Cavell, Diamond, Conant, and others--we'll have our hands full with the old Wittgenstein).
There will be several short papers, a substantive final paper, and much discussion. We will read the first part of the Investigations and discuss it at an almost section by section level. Students will be expected to have read what's assigned and arrive with something to say (though not without puzzlements). The following books are on order (some may be available in (cheaper) used versions from Amazon.com, abebooks.com, etc.)