Stephen Law

My paper on Crispin Wright's take on Wittgenstein's private language argument is online here is anyone is interested. Wright's version is not well-known, decades old, and pretty obscure. But anyway here's my try at refuting it, for what it's worth.

Giles Fraser has been explaining over at the Guardian why Wittgenstein appeals so strongly to some religious types (like Sam Norton, I suppose - what do you think Sam?). Here is part 1 of his three part essay. Back in the early 80's, I spend many an afternoon in a cramped and stuffy office in King's College, London, with an informally gathered group of mostly graduate students, going through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations paragraph by paragraph, line by line. It was often terribly slow going. We might ponder two or three sentences for a couple of weeks, coming back to the same point several times. It felt a bit like Bible study. Some might have wondered how much was being achieved in this group or what the point of it all was. But for me it was absorbing, thrilling, adventurous. My eyes were opened and my life was changed. The professor at the centre of this little group was the genial Texan philosopher Norman Malcolm, a lifelong friend of Wittgenstein and one ...

I am running a week on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations for Oxford University Depart. of Continuing Education. 12th-19th July. Details available here . There are lots of excellent courses available. Go here .

Saturday March 1, 2003 The Guardian The Philosopher's Dog by Raimond Gaita 224pp, Routledge, £14.99 What are minds, exactly? Most of us, when first confronted with this question, find ourselves quickly drawn to a traditional philosophical picture. The picture represents the mind as a sort of private room: a hidden inner sanctum within which our mental lives are played out and to which others are necessarily denied access. Because these inner rooms are hermetically sealed off from each other, the only clue as to what's going on inside the mind of another must be provided by their outward behaviour. Of course, this picture of the mind, once it gets a grip on our thinking, leads to all sorts of puzzles. If all I can have access to is the outward behaviour of other people, then how do I know that they have minds? How can I be sure that they aren't mindless zombies? And do animals have minds? If they do, then what are animal minds like? How does the world seem from inside the ...

My paper Five Private Language Arguments is available here . Comments welcome. It provides a fairly clear explanation of five different private language arguments that philosophers have supposed Wittgenstein offers in PI 258. I intended it to function as a good introduction to the whole private language argument topic. If I ever get round to writing a book on the Philosophical Investigations , it will form part of that book. Incidentally, the clearest intro to the Investigations is still Marie's McGinn's (though I don't agree with McGinn on e.g. the private language argument - see my paper). I have just ordered Block's How to Read Wittgenstein - will let you know what I think.