Titles and Abstracts

William Agay, (U. Paul Valéry, Montpellier)

Ingeborg Bachmann’s Conception and Mediation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the 1950s: Towards a Poetics of Silence

Between the Vienna Circle’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the 1920s and 1930s and Anscombe’s famous introduction in 1959, there existed in Vienna a largely forgotten yet important and influential heterodox reception: that of Ingeborg Bachmann. Known today as a major writer and poet of the second half of the twentieth century, she was a philosopher whose work was deeply shaped by her reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Being central in th

development of her thought as well as her later literary works, she actively introduced the Tractatus to a broader public and advocated for the publication of Wittgenstein’s works to Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp-Verlag.

In the wake of the Tractatus and Carnap’s logical analysis targeting Heidegger as a paragon of metaphysics, she wrote in the late 1940s a dissertation under the supervision of another Vienna Circle protagonist, Viktor Kraft, entitled “A Critical Assessment of Martin Heidegger's Existential Philosophy” (published in 1950). While in her academic writing she used the Tractatus as a tool to critique the existentialist jargon of Heidegger, it also influenced her conception of the world and of literature. She deliberately chose not to remain within the confines of strictly analytic and philosophical commentary of Wittgenstein, but instead, to innerve her poetry and prose from what she learned from it.

In the 1950s, she wrote several radiophonic essays, one of which is dedicated to Wittgenstein in order to publicize his thought and her conception of it: “The Sayable and the Unsayable – The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein” (1953), among other writings. Her conception of Wittgenstein can be summarized as an ethical reappropriation of the Tractatus logical boundaries within literature. She viewed the delimitation of the “sayable” as a form of linguistic asceticism designed to safeguard the “unsayable” as the proper territory for poetry. In this heterodox reading, Wittgenstein’s thought opens a poetics of silence where the act of writing carries a moral responsibility to “cleanse” language in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ultimately, the same linguistic rigor she once demanded of Heidegger was internalized as a foundational principle of her own poetic ethics, bridging the gap between the technical philosopher and the writer.This paper aims mainly at presenting the characteristics of Bachmann’s singular conception of the Tractatus, underlining the oppositions as well as some convergences with Anscombe’s. I will highlight Bachmann’s importance in the reception of Wittgenstein in literary spheres such as in the Group 47, and her role regarding the German edition of Wittgenstein in the 1960s.

Guillaume Fréchette (Université de Genève)

The Tractatus in Kakanien

The reception of the Tractatus in Kakanien, i.e. on the territory that once was the Austrian Empire, is generally understood as a chapter of the history of the Vienna Circle. While it is true that the Vienna Circle found much of its inspiration in Wittgenstein and the Tractatus, this particular reception is only one among numerous early receptions of the work. In this talk, I focus on these alternative receptions, suggesting an alternative diagnosis to Anscombe’s.  

Lassi Jakola (University of Helsinki)

G. H. von Wright’s Tractatus-scholarship before Tractatus-scholarship

”It has often struck me that W’s Tractatus is at one and the same time a very well-known and an almost unknown book. It enjoys perhaps a greater reputation than any other single work in philosophy from this century. But I believe it is right to say that it is not very widely studied and that its ideas have been largely misunderstood.” (G. H. von Wright’s seminar notes on TLP, 1954.)

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) was Wittgenstein’s immediate follower as professor at Cambridge and, along with Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees, an editor and publisher of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Even though he never published a commentary on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), he was, throughout his philosophical career, deeply immersed in the study of Wittgenstein’s early treatise.[1] In this talk, I focus on von Wright’s early work on TLP, which extends from his early short article “Logistisk filosofi” (1938) via the book Den Logiska Empirismen (1941) to mid-1950s, when he gave two seminar courses on TLP in the USA (1954 and 1958).

The first part of the talk gives an overview of von Wright’s developing view of the Tractatus from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Von Wright was a student of Eino Kaila (1890–1958), who introduced the ideas of the Vienna Circle to Finnish philosophy – and was the first Finnish philosopher to discuss in print the basic ideas of TLP. Thus, it not surprising that von Wright’s earliest publications (1938) situate TLP in the context of logical positivism. From 1939 on, however, von Wright’s personal contacts with Wittgenstein and his growing familiarity with Wittgenstein’s later work (e.g. the Blue book), introduce new dimensions to his reading. This is evident, e.g., in the 1941 book Den Logiska Empirismen, in which Wittgenstein’s therapeutic view of philosophy is contrasted with the constructivist tendences of the Vienna Circle.

In the second part of the talk, I focus on two hitherto unknown sets of notes (each ca 80 pages) for seminar courses on the Tractatus, given in 1954 and 1958 at Cornell University.[2] These sets of notes are historically of interest, as they represent serious scholarly engagement with TLP that predates historically the first commentaries by Anscombe (1959) and Stenius (1960).[3] Even though they certainly do not cover all of TLP, they contain discussions of important sections of the book. While the 1954 seminar focuses on Wittgenstein’s idea of linguistic presentation as a picture (the so-called ‘picture-theory of language’) and the 1958 series revisits this topic, the latter has extensive parts on Wittgenstein’s view of logical truth. Both notes also address the showing / saying distinction, which has aroused much discussion in later reception. In my talk, I present some characteristic passages from von Wright’s notes and compare them with Anscombe’s analysis. I also refer to select passages in the correspondence between von Wright and Anscombe that contain discussions of passages in TLP, concerning, e.g., Wittgenstein’s views of certainty and solipsism. I also address the question, why von Wright abandoned his work on TLP in the early 1960s

[1] Besides, he edited and published Notebooks 1914–1917 (1961), The Prototractatus (1971), and an essay on the history of composition of the Tractatus (in von Wright 1981). His last paper on TLP is from 2001.

[2] The notes are preserved in von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki and are currently being edited for publication in electronic format.

[3] Interestingly, von Wright’s seminars were visited by notable philosophers of the time, e.g. Max Black and Norman Malcom, who were later to work intensively on the Tractatus (see von Wright 2001, 198).

Marcobello Giulia (Università di Torino)

The first extensive discussion' of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Popper as a Reader of Wittgenstein.

My aim in this talk is to highlight some aspects of the little-known reception of the Tractatus in The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge that Popper claims to be “the first extensive discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which can almost be called the bible of the most modern form of positivism” (67). He began to write it in 1930, and he worked on it while exchanging his ideas with some members of the Vienna Circle (Feigl, Carnap, Schlick, Frank, Hahn and Neurath). Although in 1933 Schlick and Frank accepted the book for the publication, it remained unpublished until 1979 due to its length. Eventually, in 1934, he published the renowned The Logic of Scientific Discovery that he wrongly considered a merely shortened version of the previous book. In elaborating his theory of knowledge, Popper is deeply indebted to his confrontation with Wittgenstein’s thought. While this is evident in The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, very few traces remain in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In the former Popper highlights the following aspects of the Tractatus:

1. According to Popper, for Wittgenstein demarcation is the only fundamental problem of the theory of (scientific) knowledge, and the criterion of sense is also the criterion for demarcating science from metaphysics. This interpretation would lead one to consider Wittgenstein a philosopher of science; it thus constitutes a misleading reception of the Tractatus, based on two misunderstandings. Firstly, Popper’s criterion of demarcation is methodological, whereas Wittgenstein’s is semantic. Secondly, Popper argues that Wittgenstein considers the laws of nature as pseudo-propositions that do not represent any state of affairs, because the laws of nature or universal empirical statements are not verifiable. As a result, there are no universal states of affairs either.

2. For Popper, Wittgenstein is a dogmatic rationalist because he states that “outside logic everything is accidental” (6.3 TLP) and consequently maintains that there are no law-like regularities, no universal states of affairs. This statement “would therefore be the only natural law, the only universal empirical statement; it would be a synthetic a priori judgement” (621). This is the crucial point of his confrontation with Wittgenstein, as Popper aims to exclude rationalism (synthetic a priori judgements) from his theory of knowledge.

3. Popper sees Wittgenstein as an anti-metaphysician who “much like Kant (“philosophy can never be learned ... we can at most learn to philosophise”), although more radically, [...] declares that philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (738). Even if Popper insightfully points out the analogy between Kant’s meta philosophy and Wittgenstein’s, his conception of the anti-metaphysical view (the absolute independence of science from philosophy) appears overly strict even within the Tractatus.

To sum up: reconsidering Popper’s early discussion of the Tractatus offers another perspective on its pre-Anscombe receptions and makes us rethink Wittgenstein’s form of rationalism and meta-philosophy.

Pravesh Jung Golay (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay)  

Wittgenstein in India: The Pre-Anscombe Phase

This expository paper outlines the philosophical engagements of G. N. Mathrani with Wittgensteinian philosophy in India during the late 1930s. Having encountered Wittgensteinian philosophy during his Cambridge years, where he was a student under John Wisdom, Mathrani stands out as the first, within the Indian philosophical scene, to adapt and integrate Wittgensteinian ideas into his own philosophical framework. Like Anscombe, though much before her, Mathrani treats Wittgenstein on his own terms without the baggage of his philosophical lineage. Though writing during the pre-Anscombe phase of Wittgensteinian scholarship, Mathrani’s adaptation of Wittgenstein nevertheless evades the then hegemonic positioning of Wittgensteinian thought within the frame of British empiricism while adopting Wittgenstein’s emphatic insistence on the import of understanding the nature of language. Consequently, following Wittgenstein, Mathrani takes the task of unravelling the nature of propositions as the primary responsibility of the philosopher. It is this aspect of Mathrani’s engagement with Wittgenstein that makes his scholarship particularly relevant in the specific context of this conference.

However, Mathrani’s philosophical framework was also deeply informed by the works of John Wisdom, who was both a passionate advocate and a critic of Wittgensteinian philosophy in the pre-Anscombe phase of Wittgensteinian scholarship. It is from Wisdom that Mathrani, contra Wittgenstein, derives his passion and commitment to argue for the legitimacy of metaphysics and religion. This paper thus explicates the peculiar adaptation of Wittgensteinian philosophy fused with the philosophical insights from Wisdom by Mathrani during the pre-Anscombe phase to legitimize metaphysical and spiritual propositions. In doing so, it additionally highlights Wisdom’s own engagement with Wittgenstein during the pre-Anscombe phase of Wittgensteinian scholarship.

Georg Schiemer (University of Vienna)

Carnap’s "radical formalism" in his Neue Grundlegung der Logik (1929)

In the talk, I will investigate Rudolf Carnap’s "radical formalism“ developed in his unpublished manuscript Neue Grundlegung der Logik of 1929. Carnap's position can be understood as an attempt to combine Hilbert’s instrumental formalism outlined in his writings on the foundations of mathematics from the 1920s with a Wittgensteinian approach to the tautological character of logic based on the Tractatus (cf. Awodey & Carus 2007). The talk will outline Carnap’s main philosophical thesis of the 1929 manuscript and discuss its limitations.