Jacques Bouveresse

‘The darkness of this time’: Wittgenstein and the Modern World

In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations , written in 1945, Wittgenstein remarks that: ‘It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely’ (PI, viii). There was quite obviously no question for him of endeavouring to dissipate the darkness of the age itself, but at the most of introducing light into a small number of receptive minds, the existence of which he considered, moreover, as problematical. In a rough draft of the preface to the Philosophical Remarks that he wrote in 1930 he says: I realize … that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. (CV, 6)

Wittgenstein et la philosophie du langage

Comme le remarque Richardson, ‘c’est la limitation imposee a l’activite philosophique qui est la caracteristique de la philosophie de Wittgenstein que les philosophes contemporains ont le plus de difficultes a accepter’ (Richardson [1], p. 42). D’un bout a l’autre de son itineraire philosophique, Wittgenstein est reste convaincu que les problemes philosophiques resultent d’une incomprehension de la ‘logique de notre langage’ et doivent etre resolus (ou, plus exactement, elimines) non pas par des explications scientifiques ou pseudo-scientifiques, mais par une description correcte de cette logique. De ce point de vue, parler d’une ‘philosophie du langage’ de Wittgenstein est certainement trompeur; car son objectif n’etait manifestement pas de construire une theorie ou une philosophie du langage, mais uniquement de resoudre des problemes philosophiques en general, y compris des problemes de philosophie du langage, par une analyse du fonctionnement de nos expressions linguistiques qui ne presuppose pas, mais au contraire considere a priori comme un obstacle a surmonter, ce qu’on appelle habituellement une ‘philosophie du langage’ ou, plus generalement, ce que nous sommes tentes de dire sur le langage ‘quand nous philosophons’.

Raison et religion : en quoi consiste le désaccord et peut-il être traité de façon « rationnelle » ?

Une question cruciale qui se pose plus que jamais a propos de la religion (et du retour qu’elle est supposee connaitre en ce moment) est celle de savoir quelles raisons elle peut invoquer en faveur de ce qu’elle affirme. Pour un esprit rationnel, la croyance semble obeir a un principe « ethique » fondamental, qui enonce que la seule raison qu’il puisse y avoir de croire une proposition est la verite au moins probable de ce qu’elle affirme. Or une des objections les plus regulierement formulees contre la croyance religieuse est qu’elle est par nature incapable de satisfaire une exigence de cette sorte et ne peut etre justifiee que par des raisons (mauvaises) qui n’ont a peu pres rien a voir avec la question de savoir si elle est vraie ou non. C’est ce qu’affirment notamment des critiques de la religion aussi differents que Nietzsche, Freud et Bertrand Russell. Mais certains de ses defenseurs maintiennent bel et bien qu’elle est, elle aussi, parfaitement capable de respecter l’exigence en question, alors que d’autres considerent qu’elle ne peut pas ne pas reposer, pour une part essentielle, sur l’emotion et la passion, plutot que sur la raison. Cela montre a quel point le desaccord reste aujourd’hui complet, chez les croyants comme chez les incroyants, aussi bien sur la question de savoir si la religion a besoin de justifications rationnelles que sur celle de savoir ce qu’est exactement une justification rationnelle..

Études de philosophie du langage

Il est tout a fait possible que les attaques auxquelles a ete soumise, de divers cotes, la notion traditionnelle de signification, et l’apparition de toute une serie de doctrines ou de tendances que l’on pourrait regrouper sous la denomination generale commode de « scepticisme semantique » apparaissent, apres coup, comme ayant constitue l’un des evenements majeurs, pour ne pas dire l’evenement majeur, de la philosophie de la deuxieme moitie du vingtieme siecle. Par « scepticisme semantique », j’entends ici une attitude qui peut aller de la simple contestation de la possibilite de soumettre une notion comme celle de « signification » a un traitement theorique approprie a la negation pure et simple de l’existence de faits semantiques qu’il pourrait etre question d’expliquer a l’aide d’une theorie quelconque. Par ailleurs, il n’est que trop juste de remarquer que la periode recente s’est egalement distinguee, en contrepartie, par des formes non moins typiques de confiance exageree dans les possibilites que la theorie de la signification offre aujourd’hui a la philosophie – la plus remarquable d’entre elles etant representee par l’idee, dont Michael Dummett aura ete le defenseur le plus convaincu et le plus talentueux, que la theorie de la signification pourrait avoir accede depuis Frege au statut de nouveau paradigme de la philosophie premiere.

Why I am so very unFrench, and other essays

For those like myself, who found the politico-philosophical terrorism beginning its reign at the beginning of the 1960s intolerable, analytic philosophy in contrast could not but offer the comforting image of what a democratic philosophical community should be: civilized and tolerant, where all citizens equally must offer arguments and be willing to listen to and discuss possible objections. This sort of community was the last thing we could hope to ask for in the philosophical milieu of that time. It goes without saying that our conception of analytic philosophy then owed much to idealization and naivety. But I’m still convinced today that for someone who holds democracy to be of the highest importance (even more important than philosophy itself), the scientific community and its methods should continue to offer an example from which philosophy might draw inspiration. It is an example, in any case, that philosophy should not allow itself to ignore, as happens most of the time in France. While reading very closely Paul Valery, Rudolf Carnap and Nietzsche as well as Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams and Michael Dummett, Jacques Bouveresse opens up his own way through philosophy. As an ironical rationalist, whose eye has been educated by a longstanding familiarity with Robert Musil’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works, he is certainly not a so-called “French philosopher”, but neither exactly an analytic one. The five essays collected here have been written between 1982 and 2006.

Wittgenstein, von Wright and the Myth of Progress

The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called progress a ‘standpoint that looks like movement’ and a ‘mobile decoration’: a politically useful slogan devoid of content. Despite his tendency to think in the revolutionary mode of the tabula rasa, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a cultural conservative, sceptical of progress. He shares this pessimistic scepticism with some, but not all, of the early twentieth-century Viennese writers he read enthusiastically (strong sceptics include Kraus but not Robert Musil). It would, however, be too simple to claim that Wittgenstein did not believe in the possibility of progress. Rather, he thought it mistaken to confuse progress with continued movement in one direction. Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgensteins student and successor at Cambridge, has discussed the ‘myth of progress’ in Wittgenstinian terms; the relevance of these analyses of progress in contemporary political discourse is examined.

Logical Syntax, Quasi-Syntax, and Philosophy

In his book, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap (1991), Alberto Coffa suggests that the Carnapian principle of tolerance, as it is defended in Logical Syntax of Language, has a major weakness. The weakness is constituted by the link the principle has with the complete rejection of what can be called ‘the factuality of meaning’. For the representatives of that position, there can be nothing factual about meaning, there can be meaning only by convention, and then there can be truth in virtue of meaning, but there cannot be truth about meaning and about the conditions of meaningfulness and meaninglessness in general. ‘The worst side of the principle [of tolerance] embodies’, says Coffa, ‘the semantic conventionalism that we have just encountered in Reichenbach and Popper, the idea that in matters of meaning there is nothing interesting to discover and everything to decide upon’ (Coffa 1991, p. 320).

Le Réel et Son Ombre: La Théorie Wittgensteinienne de la Possibilité

Wittgenstein repeatedly criticised the idea of certain “shadowy beings” which we believe to be necessary to relate two radically different things which apparently cannot be put directly in contact with each other, like thought and what it represents, sentence and what verifies it, desire and what realizes it, expectation and what satisfies it, etc. Wittgenstein tried to show that we are brought no nearer to the goal by the interposition of intermediary entities of that kind. In the case of a declarative sentence, the shadowy being must be a possibility which is expressed by the sentence and can be or not be realized. If the sentence is true, the possibility is supplanted by the corresponding fact; and if it is false, the only reality we have is so to speak the shadow, the possibility itself. One of the most fundamental theses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is that all possibility (at least “logical” or “grammatical” possibility, as he calls it) must be contained in language, and not between language and reality, in and intermediary realm of possibilities, and that it is all of the same kind and on the same level. To say that something is possible is simply to say that an expression has sense; and to say that it is impossible is not to say that the expression represents an impossible sense, as if we had first to consider a possible sense and then to exclude it as unreal or absurd, but simply that it has no use and does not belong to language. An important consequence of that is that, for Wittgenstein, there are no degrees of impossibility, no impossibilities that could be deeper and more radical than others. We cannot distinguish between a nonsense which makes (or at least could make) sense and a nonsense which does not. As Wittgenstein says, “what we exclude has no semblance of sense”, it is not thinkable and does not have to be thought in some way in order to be excluded. What we exclude is always a use and not, so to speak, a possibility which turns out to be impossible.