1. The concepts of human nature, natural human reactions and interests, and human natural history are pervasive in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. The idea that our language-games rest on ‘very general facts of nature’ (PI, PPF §365), or that if certain things were different from what they are ‘our normal language-games would thereby lose their point’ (PI §142), is an important theme of his later work. The notions of form of life and language-game, and the emphasis on our everyday practice, our education and training, and the application of linguistic techniques all serve to draw the reader's attention to ‘the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language’ (PI §108), to our life with language, to language as it is woven in with a multitude of human activities. The emphasis on description, on attention to particular cases, on coming to command a clear view of our use of expressions, and the suspicion of abstraction and idealization are fundamental to the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophical method. In all these ways, and for all these reasons, Wittgenstein's later philosophy gives a strong impression of embodying some form of philosophical naturalism: it is concerned not with questions of justification or with foundations but with a realistic understanding of what we do. However, the questions of exactly what form Wittgenstein's naturalism takes, and of exactly what role it plays in his philosophy, are not easy to answer. Yet the issue is central for the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work. It is, for example, key to the interpretation of his remarks on rule-following and his treatment of psychological concepts, the topics I will focus on in this chapter.

2. Exploiting the naturalistic strand in the later philosophy has been central to attempts to reply to Kripke's claim that Wittgenstein's work contains the ingredients for the construction of a sceptical argument whose conclusion is that there are no facts about meaning, that there is nothing that makes the attribution of meaning, either to oneself or to another, true.

The Cold War, unlike the very hot war that preceded it, first emerged as an imaginary conflict. There were no tank battles, aerial bombings, formal declarations of war, or direct military clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reversing the more conventional understanding of causality—from the concrete event to its representation—assumptions about the existence of a state of war between the two countries intensified ideological and military confrontation in the late 1940s, transforming the Cold War from an imagined event (an iron curtain that never existed except as a metaphor in Churchill's mind) into a seemingly objective reality (“Eastern Europe,” NATO, and the Warsaw Pact) and turning former allies into nuclear-armed enemies poised for war.

The terrifying next step to direct military confrontation was nearly complete when both superpowers fought proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and faced off over Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis. The history of the space program seemed to be a direct result of that confrontation, initiated in October 1957 by Sputnik and driving both sides to go higher and further into the cosmos as a way to measure political, technological, and, above all, military superiority. The military implications of rocket technology—that launching a satellite, dog, or person into space also proved the ability to heave an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) against your enemy—was not lost on anyone. However, what could be imagined as an expression of military superiority could also be unimagined, thereby reducing the potential for military confrontation.

This chapter examines the use of joint space technology programs to imagine an alternative to war. It focuses on the political history of the first major collaborative space engineering project between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in July 1975. While ASTP marked the transition from the space race to the age of space collaboration, it also built upon earlier precedents of cooperation. These efforts (admittedly half-hearted at times) grew out of broader scientific exchanges and cooperation between the two superpowers since the late 1950s, which had been conceived as a way to reduce tensions and create bridges across ideology. Both sides claimed that their space programs served the interests of scientific progress and world peace, and this was more than mere political smokescreen.

1. One of the central claims in Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits is that ‘knowing is a state of mind’ (Williamson 2002: 21). He writes:

The view that Williamson here expresses appears to be the direct opposite of the one expressed by Wittgenstein in the following remarks from OC:

There is, however, a question whether in claiming that knowing is a mental state Williamson is affirming the view that Wittgenstein is denying when he asserts that it is not one. The apparent opposition is real only if what Williamson is claiming about knowing in calling it a mental state is what Wittgenstein means to deny in claiming it is not. And until we know what each of them means in claiming, or denying, that knowing is a mental state, the conclusion that they are disagreeing about the truth of a single thesis is premature. In this chapter, I want to look more carefully at what each of the above claims amounts to and thereby try to clarify the extent, if any, to which Williamson and Wittgenstein are in disagreement.

2. One of the things that Williamson means to assert in claiming that knowing is a mental state is that the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief is incorrect.

William Blake's wish to be read as a philosopher in his early works is expressed in numerous ways. His main enemies were not other poets or visual artists but the natural philosophers Emanuel Swedenborg, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. In his earliest manuscript, An Island in the Moon (c.1784–85), Blake self-identifies as Quid the Cynic, and much of the work satirizes philosophical positions; similarly, Blake's first illuminated works are not poetry but the philosophical tractates There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788), which attack Lockean empiricism and Newtonian deism. And on the title page of his 1788 edition of John Caspar Lavater's Aphorisms on Man, Blake drew a heart around his own name and that of the philosopher, and further linked himself to Lavater within the book, writing, “we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect springing from poverty.” Blake took it for granted that he would be recognized as a philosopher, and his poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with questions pertinent to eighteenth-century natural philosophy, which, preceding the “sciences” as we currently designate them, concerned the study of nature and the physical universe.

Today, Blake is first recognized as a poet, but poetry was for him a way of philosophizing, as it was for other Romantic writers. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley declared that the difference between prose and poetry was misleading, and that Plato and Francis Bacon were essentially poets. Drawing from William Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Shelley proclaimed the synthesizing powers of the imagination as fundamental to moral virtue, and he wrote that poetry is an epistemological tool that yields as much, if not more, insight into human experience as science, philosophy and religion.

1. In PI, PPF, section x, Wittgenstein discusses what is known as ‘Moore's paradox’. Wittgenstein heard G. E. Moore present the paradox in a paper he gave to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in 1944, and he expresses great excitement at Moore's observations in a letter he wrote to Moore after the meeting. The paradox concerns the first-person present indicative use of the verb ‘to believe’. Moore observes that although it may, for example, be true that it is raining and I do not believe that it is raining, it is absurd for me to say ‘It is raining but I do not believe that it is.’ For Moore, the paradox arises insofar as there may be truths about me which I cannot, without absurdity, assert. How is this to be explained?

Moore's own suggestion for how to resolve the paradox is to recognize that we need to distinguish between what someone asserts and what he implies in asserting it. Someone who asserts ‘It is raining’ does not thereby assert that he believes it is raining, but his asserting it does indeed imply that he believes it. It is, according to Moore, because someone who asserts that it is raining implies that he believes that it is, that it is absurd for him to go on and assert that he does not believe it.

Wittgenstein clearly believes that Moore's paradox reveals something important about the way the concept of belief functions. However, his reflections quickly lead him to formulate what he sees as the real paradox in a different way from Moore. Moore focuses on the fact that there is something which may be true of me – it may be true that p and I don't believe that p – but which cannot, without absurdity, be asserted by me. Wittgenstein's reformulation of the paradox, by contrast, directs our attention to the fact that ‘I believe that this is the case’ appears to be used differently in the language-game of assertion and the language-game of supposing. He writes:

1. Violence on Display

A “show.” Of “violence.” A “show” first of all because violence has an outward appearance and form; it has been enacted, the soldiers playing their parts, striking the ghost with their “partisans” (spears), performing violence. But second, a “show,” a mere show, because this act of violence has no effect. The object, the ghost, it turns out, is “invulnerable.” The soldiers stab at mere air. Nevertheless, these ineffectual motions are “malicious,” expressing an intent to do harm, to seize the ghost against its will and even insult the ghost's rank, its majesty: for in the early modern period, moral agents, including law enforcers, were supposed to be respecters of persons. Violence itself could be measured against the status of the person it targeted, as well as the status of the person doing the targeting. Not just any violence but a violence of a certain kind, deployed in a certain kind of scene, using certain form of technology, a certain kind of pretext and certain types of characters, with certain varieties of motives and values, are all in question here, and both the characters themselves and we spectators are thrown into its midst, challenged to make sense of it.

Violence and its showing in a dual sense, then, is what we are faced with: first because violence can come with a show, a kind of performance; and second because the show of violence, once observed, is itself symbolically and morally visible, legible, decipherable and for that reason disputable too. The violence is viewed; an aggressive doing of right or wrong by way of force is caused to be observed, the character of the people involved is caused to be observed and we spectators are encouraged to respond to violence hermeneutically—that is, to interpret what is in front of us, with all the knowledge, tools of analysis, moral sentiments and emotional resources at our command.

Since the European invasion of the American continent in the fifteenth century, Latin America has been constructed as a space of monstrosity, of radical Otherness. Columbus projected on the continent and its inhabitants’ European medieval images of Cynocephalus and cyclops, asserting that there were present in the recently “discovered” territories. In addition, he coined the word and the idea of the American cannibal, a phantasm that still haunts the imaginary of the Caribbean. As stated by scholar Carlos Jáuregui, “since the first encounters, Europeans reported cannibals all over the place, creating a sort of semantic affinity between cannibalism and America. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the New World was culturally, religiously, and geographically constructed as some sort of Canibalia” (14, my translation). Despite the centuries that passed between Columbus's assumptions and fantasies and the present, the American continent (mainly from the Rio Grande downwards) is still considered in many respects a Canibalia. That is, Latin America continues to be regarded from the outside as a chaotic, less developed space (or “in development” for the most progressive), where nature runs rampant (and therefore, the only possible form of tourism is ecotourism), and inhabited by poor masses of monstrous behavior (e.g., imagined as all drug traffickers, pickpockets, swindlers, etc.) We just have to remember the depictions of Mexican immigrants, and Mexico, given by former president Trump in his 2016 campaign: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Scott). Despite the widespread rejection of Trump's statements in much of the U.S. and international media, images of Latin America as a violent, disorderly, sexually primitive, and even monstrous space remain prevalent both in the United States and in Europe.

These misrepresentations have been (and are) recognized by Latin American scholars, writers, and artists, who have approached them in various ways. On one side are those who have firmly rejected these representations and reflected them, transforming the colonial/imperial power into a monster as well. One of the most important examples of this positioning in Latin America was the Cuban politician and revolutionary José Martí, who in an 1895 letter to his friend Manuel Mercado wrote, “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”

1. If I were required, quite unreasonably, to say in a few sentences what I had learned from Peter Winch, I would, perhaps, begin my answer with the words: a certain way of reading Wittgenstein. Winch explored ideas encapsulated in remarks such as ‘In the beginning was the deed’ and ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul’ in a richer and more illuminating way than has any other philosopher, and I include in the phrase ‘any other philosopher’ Wittgenstein himself. For Winch developed these strands in Wittgenstein's thinking in a way that brings out the ethical involvement, at the most fundamental level, of areas of our thought that philosophers have traditionally discussed in complete abstraction from that dimension. The idea that we can ‘do the metaphysics first and deal with later, or leave to others, the ethics’ is one that still dominates English-language philosophy: to its great impoverishment. I, for one, am enormously indebted to Peter Winch for his showing another way of doing philosophy: a way that restores to philosophy a kind of importance that it has lost in the hands of many contemporary philosophers.

The way in which, in Winch's work, ethical considerations lie at the heart of philosophy is inseparable from the place that he gives to the idea that ‘In the beginning was the deed’. But there are, I think, potential confusions lurking here. I will not be particularly concerned with the question of whether the confusions are Wittgenstein’s, Winch's or simply some (at least one!) of Winch's readers. But I do want to suggest that confusions here may contribute to a sense that we have a clear understanding of the distinction between ‘philosophical’ and other forms of discussion. That sense is, I believe, reflected in the confidence of Winch's judgement in his paper ‘Moral Integrity’ that ‘philosophy can no more show a man what he should attach importance to than geometry can show a man where he should stand’. The confusions also, I will suggest, contribute to the pressure many have felt towards idealism, or towards seeing idealist tendencies in Wittgenstein. I will begin with the latter point: noting ways in which an emphasis on the primacy of action may generate idealist pressures. I will return, towards the end of my essay, to the former point.

1. Rhees writes, ‘Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of language, or the possibility of understanding. And in that way it is concerned with the possibility of discourse.’ It is important to be clear what Rhees does not mean by this. His suggestion is not that philosophy is concerned with ‘the conditions of the possibility of discourse’. We are tempted to think that one of the aims of philosophy is to investigate something – the nature of language perhaps – on which our speaking with each other depends. Many philosophers have seen their central task in that way, and many have taken this to be one of Wittgenstein's concerns. Rhees's opposition to the view is seen in remarks such as the following: ‘The language – what you understand when you understand the language – is not something apart from understanding people and speaking with them. Something which makes that possible’ (277). Sharing a language with another is not what makes discussion between us possible. Sharing a language is nothing other than being able to speak with them.

‘You cannot say that it is because they have a common life that they are able to engage in conversation.’ You cannot say this, I take it, because their ‘common life’ is not something independent of the fact that they are able to engage in conversation. And we face the same problem if it is suggested that an agreement in our use of individual words is a condition of our being able to speak to each other with understanding. For if we take seriously the idea that in speaking of an individual's use of a word we are speaking of particular utterances, in particular contexts, into which it enters, we will not suppose that we can characterise my use of a word independently of the ways in which the word enters into my linguistic exchanges with others. I respond to your ‘Can we move him now?’ with ‘He's still in dreadful pain’; to your ‘Where is he going to sit?’ with ‘There are more chairs next door’, and so on. A characterisation of me as using a certain word in a particular way will make reference to my interactions with others into which the word enters.

1. Wittgenstein writes, ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language.’ My question is: what is a language, and what is its importance to the idea of understanding what someone has said? I want to address this question while keeping firmly in mind Wittgenstein's insistence that ‘We are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not about some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm’. I believe that it is astonishingly difficult to take that insistence seriously. Rush Rhees is addressing this difficulty when he writes, ‘If the language is not everything that is said by those who speak it, it may be natural to think of it as a set of rules.’ His suggestion that this is a temptation to resist is my topic in this essay.

2. There is substantial disagreement on how we are to read the ‘rule following considerations’ and, linked with that, substantial disagreement over what truth is to be found in them. Something that is, I believe, sufficiently widely shared to be labelled ‘the standard reading’ goes something like this:

Before turning to doubts about whether this is either true to Wittgenstein or a line of thought we should endorse two preliminary comments are in order.

There is an obvious and uncontroversial sense in which my understanding what another has said is dependent on a background of past use.