ABSTRACT Drawing on Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough and Philosophical Grammar , it is shown that, from a hermeneutic perspective, the Middle Wittgenstein, develops a fluid model of understanding which supposes a fixable meaning of any given text. In this context, to understand a text (intransitively) means to (imaginatively) play the language games that are textually constituted; it thus amounts to a hermeneutics of imaginative participation . The stronger emphasis on representation, interpretation, and aspect also shifts what can be reconstructed from Wittgenstein's later writings from a hermeneutic perspective. In particular, §§ 60–63, 90, and 130 suggest a model of textual understanding that can be understood as an analytic hermeneutics . This analytic hermeneutics will belong to those language games that have other language games as their content; hence, it will be a second‐order language game.
ABSTRACT In this article, it is argued that action from duty has special moral worth on Kant's account because (i) it is an instance of good willing, and (ii) the good will is the only unconditional good. This is used to argue, contrary to various commentators, that Kant's doctrine of moral worth is central, not only to Kantian ethics, but to any deontological ethics. It is suggested that, if this is correct, then there are grounds for taking the first line of part I of the Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals to be the long‐debated, unenumerated first proposition in the deduction of the Formula of Universal Law.
ABSTRACT The article presents the history of Georg Henrik von Wright's well‐known biographical sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which first appeared in English in 1955 and was later included in Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir . It will be shown that von Wright, during the years 1954–1984, published as many as six versions of the biographical sketch, the first of which was in Swedish. The revisions he made over a period of 30 years closely mirror his increasing knowledge of Wittgenstein's Nachlass during his work as one of Wittgenstein's literary executors and principal editors of the posthumously published books. The article also discusses von Wright's special contributions to the picture of Wittgenstein, where features such as the literary quality of Wittgenstein's writings and the difficulties entailed by Wittgenstein's dominating person and thought are central.
ABSTRACT Engaging with how different generations of philosophers carry the formative influence of their teachers, I expose difficulties Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment humanism created for his philosophy coming to terms with the Holocaust, even with his more generous sense of the mythical and non‐rational. I contrast this with Alasdair MacIntyre's sustained criticisms of liberalism and his anti‐capitalism as part of his critique of Enlightenment rationalism. In After Virtue and later, he develops his Thomistic Aristotelianism, showing how morality is historically and culturally woven into the fabric of communities, organised also, as he later acknowledges, through class, race, ethnic and colonial relations of power and violence. Analytic moral philosophy too often cuts morality off from its roots in history and tradition, thus limiting our visions of ourselves as ethical humans.
