Peter M. Sullivan

On Trying to be Resolute: A Response to Kremer on the Tractatus

A way of reading the Tractatus has been proposed which, according to its advocates, is importantly novel and essentially distinct from anything to be found in the work of such previously influential students of the book as Anscombe, Stenius, Hacker or Pears. The point of difference is differently described, but the currently most used description seems to be Goldfarb’s term ‘resolution’ – hence one speaks of ‘the (or a) resolute reading’. I’ll shortly ask what resolution is. For now, it is enough that it aims to give full weight to the penultimate section of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein declares his propositions to be nonsense, where giving full weight to that declaration involves not hearing it as allowing that those (strictly speaking) ‘nonsensical’ propositions might have another (more important) kind of ‘sense’. In that same section Wittgenstein explains that these nonsense propositions, while devoid of meaning, have a use: to make the kind of use of them that their author intends – and so to understand him (not them) – requires recognizing that they are nonsense; and through that recognition one ‘surmounts’ these propositions, and is led ‘to see the world aright’. So there is a point to (Wittgenstein’s having written) all this nonsense. What point? This is the question addressed by Michael Kremer in ‘The purpose of Tractarian nonsense’.1 The question is a real and pressing one. After all, unless we have some fairly richly developed answers to the questions, what Wittgenstein’s aims were in writing the book, and how his words might be effective in serving those aims, we just don’t have a reading of the book; and so unless there are resolute answers to those questions, there is no resolute reading. Kremer thus deserves credit for confronting the question, and further for recognizing the inadequacy or radical incompleteness of some earlier resolute suggestions (pp. 46–7). For instance, one prominent idea has been that by recognizing Wittgenstein’s propositions as nonsense we are freed from the grip of the kinds of philosophical concerns that led to their production, and that it was Wittgenstein’s intention in writing the book to promote this liberation. But for that suggestion to amount to a reading, it needs to be spelled out what those concerns are, how exactly the attempt to cater to them falls into nonsense, why this collapse into nonsense is characteristic of the motivating concerns rather than of just this one attempt to cater to them, how realizing that is supposed to

Frege's Logic

The German mathematician, logician and philosopher, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, was born in Wismar on the Baltic on November 8, 1848. Freges major publications represent three stages in the project that occupied the core of his working life. Subsequently termed “logicism,” this project aimed to demonstrate that the laws of arithmetic are analytic and consequently a priori or in Freges later formulation that arithmetic is a branch of logic and need not borrow any ground of proof whatever from either experience or intuition. This chapter focuses on Freges logical achievement, rather than with the fate of logicism. It focuses mainly on Begriffsschrift, in which that logical achievement is already made, later works being drawn upon principally to illuminate themes present in, though not made explicit in, that work. The chapter briefly considers a development distinctive of his later work, his influential distinction between sense and reference.