Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy

`Philosophy', wrote Wittgenstein, `simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.' The author of this book takes seriously Wittgenstein's description of what he was doing, and bring out the importance of his philosophy to long-standing problems about language, knowledge, the mind, and philosophy itself. Common misunderstandings of Wittgenstein are exposed and there is a detailed examination of the celebrated `private language' argument.

Politics & Social Sciences

Oswald Hanfling

Philosophy

Macmillan

<p>A.J. Ayer 1910-1989Ayer is best remembered for Language, Truth and Logic (1936), which introduced British and American readers to the logical positivism of the Vienna circle. Hanfling shows in this introduction to Ayer's work how he turned this philosophy into a form of British empiricism in the tradition of Hume.According to Ayer, philosophy is an activity of analysts. Metaphysical truths can be neither established nor refuted by philosophical enquiry: they are meaningless. In support of this claim, he deployed his 'principle of verifiability'. But he found it difficult to refine the principle 'in such a way as to find a middle ground between [an] over-strict requirement' which would disqualify perfectly ordinary statements as meaningless, and 'the over-indulgent licensing of gibberish' - including that of metaphysics.</p>

Ayer: Analysing what we mean (The great philosophers)

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Philosophy and Ordinary Language

Taylor&Francis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oswald Hanfling. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Oswald Hanfling