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Throwing Away the Ladder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Cora Diamond
Cora Diamond
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

Whether one is reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus or his later writings, one must be struck by his insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses; or by his suggestion that it cannot be done, that it is only through some confusion one is in about what one is doing that one could take oneself to be putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses at all. I think that there is almost nothing in Wittgenstein which is of value and which can be grasped if it is pulled away from that view of philosophy. But that view of philosophy is itself something that has to be seen first in the Tractatus if it is to be understood in its later forms, and in the Tractatus it is inseparable from what is central there, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 243 , January 1988 , pp. 5 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

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References

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2 Hans Sluga also touches briefly on the point; see Sluga, , Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 144.Google Scholar

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