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More About This Title Wittgenstein
English
Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind is the third volume of a four-volume analytical commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It consists of two parts. Part 1 is a sequence of fifteen essays that examine in detailall the major topics discussed in Philosophical Investigations §§243-427. These include the private language arguments, privacy, private ostensive definition, the nature of the mind, the inner and the outer, behaviour and behaviourism, thought, imagination, the self, consciousness, and criteria.
The first edition of this volume of essays was published in 1990 to widespread acclaim as a scholarly tour de force, providing a comprehensive survey of these themes, the history of their treatment in early modern and modern philosophy, the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas on these subjects from 1929 onwards, and an elaborate analysis of his definitive arguments in the Investigations.
The new second edition has been thoroughly revised by the author and features four new essays. These include a survey of the evolution of the private language arguments in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre and their role within the developing argument of the Investigations, a comprehensive essay on private ownership of experience and its pitfalls, a detailed examination and defense of Wittgenstein’s repudiation of subjective knowledge of one’s experience, and an overview of the achievement and importance of the private language arguments. New objections to Wittgenstein’s arguments are examined—and found wanting—and new materials from the Nachlass that were not known to exist in 1990 have been incorporated into the text of these essays. All references have been adjusted to the revised fourth edition of the Investigations, but previous pagination in the first and second editions has been retained in parentheses.
These revisions bring the book up to the high standard of the extensively revised editions of Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (2005) and Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (2009). They ensure that this survey of Wittgenstein's private language arguments and of his accounts of thought, imagination, consciousness, the self, and criteria will remain the essential reference work on the Investigations for the foreseeable future.
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Note to the second edition: Part I: Essays
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Part I: Essays
Abbreviations
I Introduction to the private language arguments
1. The Augustinian conception of language and Wittgenstein’s early commitments
2. The place of the private language arguments in the Philosophical Investigations
3. The Great Tradition and its long shadow
4. From grammatical trivialities to metaphysical mysteries
5. The dialectic of the mental
II Only I can have
1. The traditional picture and its predicaments
2. Private ownership
3. Dispelling conceptual illusions and confusions
III Only I can know
1. The roots of the problem
2. Wittgenstein’s response to the classical conception
3. Wittgenstein’s sketchy account of knowledge
4. The cognitive network: connective analysis
5. A different route: the functions of the verb ‘to know’
6. The temptations of the received view resisted
7. Further objections rebutted
IV Private ostensive definition
1. A ‘private’ language
2. Names, ostensive definition and samples – a reminder
3. The vocabulary of a private language
4. Idle wheels
V Men, minds and machines
1. Human beings, their parts and their bodies
2. The mind
3. Only in the stream of life …
4. Homunculi and brains
5. Can machines think?
VI Avowals and descriptions
1. Descriptions of subjective experience
2. Descriptions
3. Natural expression
4. A spectrum of cases
VII Behaviour and behaviourism
1. Behaviourism in psychology and philosophy
2. Wittgenstein: first reactions
3. Crypto-behaviourism?
4. Body and behaviour
VIII Knowledge of other minds: the inner and the outer
1. Semi-solipsism
2. Inside and outside
3. The indeterminacy of the mental
IX An overview of the achievements of the private language arguments
1. An overview
2. Fundamental insights
3. Fidelity to philosophical methodology
4. Consequences and confusions
X Thinking: methodological muddles and categorial confusions
1. Thinking: a muddle elevated to a mystery
2. Methodological clarifications
3. Activities of the mind
4. Processes in the mind
XI Thinking: the soul of language
1. The strategic role of the argument
2. The dual-process conception
3. Thought, language and the mastery of linguistic skills
4. Making a radical break
XII Images and the imagination
1. Landmarks
2. Seeing, imagining and mental images
3. Images and pictures
4. Visual images and visual impressions
5. Imagination, intention and the will
XIII I and my self
1. Historical antecedents
2. ‘The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious’
3. The eliminability of the word ‘I’
4. ‘“I” does not refer to a person’
XIV The world of consciousness
1. The world as consciousness
2. The gulf between consciousness and body
3. The certainty of consciousness
XV Criteria
1. Symptoms and hypotheses
2. Symptoms and criteria
3. Further problems about criteria
4. Evidence, knowledge and certainty.
Index
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“In the exegesis of Wittgenstein, Peter Hacker’s work is pre-eminent. This revised edition of Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind shows him capable of surpassing even himself. Through the deepening of his own understanding and appreciation of Wittgenstein’s arguments comes a deepening of the reader’s. The result is exhilarating.”
Professor Adrian Moore, University of Oxford
“The Baker/Hacker commentary remains by far the most important and most impressive scholarly work on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. This revised edition of Hacker's Volume 3 incorporates some illuminating new material in the exegetical part and contains four excellent new essays on the private language argument. Required reading for anyone seriously interested in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind.”
Professor Severin Schroeder, University of Reading
