Tractatus 5.1362 (reloaded)

  • Diego Marconi University of Turin, Italy
  • Kurt Wischin University of Granada, Spain
Keywords: Inference, Facts, Necessity, Free Will, Predictability

Abstract

At Tractatus 5.1362 Wittgenstein discusses free will; the paragraph is essentially anticipated in the Notebooks, 27.4.15. Very few commentators paid any attention to Wittgenstein's discussion; the few who did disagree on both the structure and the cogency of Wittgenstein's argument. I offer a new reconstruction, on which 5.1362 is not an argument for freedom of the will but an argument for its first sentence, namely “The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing [now] actions that still lie in the future".  In a final section, I compare 5.1362 with Wittgenstein's much later (mid-Forties) lecture on the freedom of the will , as reported by Yorick Smythies in 1989.

Author Biographies

Diego Marconi, University of Turin, Italy

Diego Marconi, (Emeritus, Laurea in Filosofia, Torino 1969; PhD, Philosophy, Pittsburgh 1979) was professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Torino until 2017. He previously taught at the University of Cagliari and the University of Eastern Piedmont. He also gave logic and philosophy courses at Pittsburgh, Geneva, Barcelona and the University of the Basque Country. During his graduate studies he was a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund (1974-76). At Eastern Piedmont he headed the Humanities Dept. (1997-2001), the philosophy curriculum (1992-95), the communication science curriculum (2001-03), and the Doctoral Program in Philosophy of language (1994-2004) In Torino he has been Chair of the advanced curriculum in Philosophy (2007-09). Until recently he was a member of the Research Observatory of the University of Torino. He is or was a Senior Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh (1983), NATO-CNR Fellow (1987), Chercheur Associé at CREA (now the Centre Jean Nicod; 1996), Invited Research Scholar at the University of California at Irvine (2004), Visiting scholar at Oxford (2010) and Barcelona (2010). He was President of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy (1996-98) and belongs to the Boards of several Italian academic institutions. He was among the founders of the European Society of Analytic Philosophy (1990), being a member of the Society's first Steering Committee. He was a member of the Philosophy panel of ERIH (2005-06). He has been (2011-13) the coordinator of the subpanel of Philosophy of the Italian Evaluation Agency (ANVUR). He belongs to the Editorial Board of several journals (Dialectica, Mind & Society, Eur. J. of Philosophy, Eur. J. for Philosophy of Science, Revue philosophique de Louvain, and others). He was or is a referee for those journals and many others, for the University of Padova and Venice, and for Columbia UP and Oxford UP. He was editor in chief of Dizionario Palazzi-Folena della lingua italiana (with C. Marello, 1986-92) and the 2nd edition of Enciclopedia Garzanti di Filosofia (with M. Ferraris, 1993). He is a member of the Torino Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. In 2013 he was awarded the Medal for Philosophy of the Italian Society of Neuroethics.

Kurt Wischin, University of Granada, Spain

Kurt Wischin es miembro de FiloLab UGR Unidad de Excelencia de la Universidad de Granada, España. Doctorando [≈ CPhil] en Filosofía en la Universidad de Granada. Su primer contacto formativo con la filosofía académica se produjo en Viena durante la década de 1970. Obtuvo una licenciatura en Filosofía en la Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro y una Maestría en Filosofía en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Su trabajo en filosofía toma como punto de partida la filosofía de Wittgenstein, en particular tal como se condensa en Investigaciones filosóficas. Sus actividades de investigación actuales se centran en los años fundacionales de la filosofía contemporánea de la lógica y el lenguaje, poniendo especial énfasis en el desarrollo de la doctrina de Frege y su influencia en la formación del Tractatus, así como en la filosofía analítica en general temprana. Ha publicado diversos artículos, capítulos de libro, traducciones y reseñas académicas.

References

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Published
2022-12-31
How to Cite
[1]
Marconi, D. and Wischin, K. 2022. Tractatus 5.1362 (reloaded). Disputatio. 11, 23 (Dec. 2022), 287-307. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7964128.