11th Workshop

11th Nagoya Meta-Philosophy Workshop

Date: 15:00 to 17:30pm, Sep 5, 2020 (Time zone in Tokyo (GMT+9) )

Venue: Zoom

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvdOmgpjgsGteEf_Ji4aAa_IgKDqXFNZjh

15:00 to 16:00pm (including Q & A)

"Cambridge Analysis and Orthology: A History of Analytic Methodology"

Masashi Kasaki (Nagoya University)

Abstract: One of the earliest appearances of the term "analytic philosophy" is in J. Wisdom (1930) and (1931), where he divides Bentham's methods of definition into interpretation and analysis, and compares the latter with the method of analysis espoused in the group of Cambridge philosophers including G. E. Moore, B. Russell, S. Stebbeing, and Widsom himself—the group often referred to as Cambridge Analysis today. For Cambridge analysists, the primarily object of analysis is facts, and the method of analysis is fitting for metaphysics. Not all Cambridge philosophers and their colleagues joined in the movement of analytic philosophy that Cambridge Analysis initiated. Indeed, C. K. Ogden, I. E. Richards, and L. W. Lockhart crafted a different method of analysis, the primary object of which is the meaning of language. The group of those philosophers, which M. Black (1931) refers to as Orthologists, has it that people tend to misuse language and such misuse often leads to metaphysical illusions. Ogden and Lockhart criticize Wisdom (1930) and (1931) on the ground that Cambridge Analysis ignores the meaning of language. This talk investigates the dialectic between Cambridge Analysis and Orthology and reveals a forgotten history of analytic methodology: In England, the so-called linguistic turn was first taken by Orthologists rather than analytic philosophers.

16:05 to 17:05pm (including Q & A)

"The Logical and the Natural: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Causal Theories"

Shunichi Takagi (University College London)

Abstract: The objective of this talk is to elucidate what Wittgenstein took his logical standpoint of the Tractatus to be in contradistinction to a kind of naturalistic account of thoughts. For this purpose, we shall consider his criticism of causal theories of meaning advanced in the early 30s, during which time Wittgenstein still retained his Tractarian view in its essentials. Causal theories were developed by Russell, Ogden and Richards in the early 20s, and these authors believed that their theories could replace the account of thoughts in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein, by contrast, dismissed these theories in 1923, but roughly one year after his return to Cambridge in 1929 he started to intensively examine these views. Overall, his complaint was that Russell, Ogden and Richards believed that they had explained the nature of understanding in terms of psychological processes. On Wittgenstein’s view, however, such psychological processes are only external to what it is to understand a proposition and, in so far as we are concerned with what is essential to understanding, its nature cannot be explained and can only be described. Thus, I shall suggest that Wittgenstein’s critique of causal theories give us a clue to understanding his central contention in the Tractatus that the logical form is not representable.

17:05 to 17:30pm

Discussion