Wittgenstein on ethics: Working through Lebensformen

  • Juliet Floyd Boston University, United States of America
  • Kurt Wischin Universidad de Granada, Spain
Keywords: Ethics, Forms of Life, Lebenswelt, Normativity, Turing, Wittgenstein

Abstract

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics cannot be located in an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse, true or false. At the same time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose, and his attitude was not that of the emotivist. The trajectory of this conception of the normativity of philosophy as it developed in his subsequent thought is traced. It is explained that and how the notion of a ‘form of life’ (Lebensform) emerged only in his later thought, in 1937, earmarking a significant step forward in his philosophical method. We argue that the concept of Lebensform represents a way of domesticating logic itself, the very idea of a claim or reason, supplementing the idea of a ‘language game’, which it deepens. Lebensform is contrasted with the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt through a reading of the notions of ‘I’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ as they were treated in the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. Finally, the notion of Lebensform is shown to have replaced the notion of culture (Kultur) in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s spring 1937 ‘domestication’ of the nature of logic is shown to have been fully consonant with the idea that he was influenced by his reading Alan Turing’s 1936/1937 paper, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’.

Author Biographies

Juliet Floyd, Boston University, United States of America

Juliet Floyd began her career in 1990 teaching at the City College of New York and CUNY (1992), where she became the assistant executive director of the graduate program. She moved to Boston University in 1995 as Visiting Assistant Professor, joining the Philosophy Department there as Associate Professor the following year. She has been Professor of Philosophy in Boston since 2006. After obtaining a Philosophy B.A. at Wellesley College with Highest Honors and studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1978–1982), she earned her Philosophy MA (“Kant’s Sensus Communis: Regulative and Constitutive”, 1984) and PhD (“The Rule of the Mathematical: Wittgenstein’s Later Discussions”, 1990) at Harvard University. Her research revolves, among other topics, around the History and Development of Analytic and Twentieth Century Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Philosophy of Language, Formal and Traditional Epistemology, Theories of Truth, Modern Philosophy (Kant), Aesthetics, Wittgenstein, Pragmatism, History and Philosophy of Science, especially Logic and Mathematics and Philosophy of Emerging Computational Technologies. She has been awarded numerous Fellowships and Major Grants and authored two recent books, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics, Cambridge Element in Philosophy of Mathematics (2021, online) and (with Felix Mühlhölzer) Wittgenstein’s Annotations to Hardy’s Course of Pure Mathematics: A Non-Extensionalist Understanding of the Real Numbers (Springer, 2021). She has also edited several volumes, including (with S. Shieh) Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth–Century Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001), (with J. E. Katz) Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application (Oxford University Press, 2016), and (with A. Bokulich) Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing – Turing 100, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Vol. 324 (Springer Verlag, 2017). She contributed with chapters to more than fifty books and published numerous articles in a wide variety of philosophical Journals.

Kurt Wischin, Universidad de Granada, Spain

Kurt Wischin is editor and editorial secretary of Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin. His first contact with academic philosophy dates from the early 1970s at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Viena. He is a MA in Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the UNAM in Mexico City and is currently CPhil at the International School for Postgraduate Studies of the University of Granada, Spain. He has published several articles, collaborated with chapters to books and participated in national and international conferences.

References

Cavell, Stanley (2005). «Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of an Encounter». En: Contending with Stanley Cavell, editado por. S. Cavell y R. B. Goodman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–198.

Floyd, Juliet (2010). «On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Logic and Mathematics». En: Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect Seeing, editado por. V. Krebs, y W. Day. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 314–337.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921/1981). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). [Traducción por C. K. Ogden, International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Primera edición en alemán en Annalen der Naturphilosophie, editado por Wilhelm Ostwald, 14, 1921: 12262. Reimpresión, segunda impresión con algunas pocas correcciones, 1931. Republicado 1981.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1951/2009). Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical Investigations. Traducción por G.E.M Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker y Joachim Schulte. 4a. edición revisada, Chichester, West Sussex, UK/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Segunda parte, «Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment» (FPF), conocida anteriormente como «Parte II» (IF). Manuscritos de esta obra en: Ludwig Wittgenstein (2001). Philosophische Untersuchungen: Kritisch-Genetische Edition., editado por J. Schulte, H. Nyman, E. von Savigny, G.H. von Wright (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001). Las referencias a manuscritos y números de página a los manuscritos del legado de Wittgenstein se refieren a: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1999). The Published Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Bergen Electronic Edition. Intelex Corporation, Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1965). «A Lecture on Ethics». The Philosophical Review 74, (enero de 1965): pp. 3–12. Lecture from 1929. Reimpresión en Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions, pp. 36–44.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969). Preliminary Studies for the «Philosophical Investigations»: Generalmente conocido como El cuaderno azul y El cuaderno marrón, 2nd ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Revisión en Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969). Das Blaue Buch, Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (Das Braune Buch). Traducción de The Blue Book y ampliación y edición de The Brown Book revisión (MS 115). Traducción por Petra von Morstein. Editado por Rush Rhees. Vol. 5 de Wittgenstein Werkausgabe. 8 vols. Frankfurt am Main/Oxford: Suhrkamp/Basil Blackwell. El manuscrito está disponible también en The Published Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Bergen Electronic Edition.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993). «Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough». En: Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed James C. Klagge y Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 118–55.

Published
2021-09-30
How to Cite
[1]
Floyd, J. and Wischin, K. 2021. Wittgenstein on ethics: Working through Lebensformen. Disputatio. 10, 18 (Sep. 2021), 109-131. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5548166.

Most read articles by the same author(s)

1 2 > >>