Wittgensteinian Thomism (WT) proposes a post-Wittgensteinian reading of Aquinas based on the presence of genuine affinities between them in philosophical anthropology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, action theory, and ethics. While this proposal has been historically fruitful in the works of Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, and Herbert McCabe, there is a significant difficulty in the prima facie incompatibility in the respective attitudes towards metaphysics between Wittgenstein and Aquinas. This calls into question the very coherence of the WT proposal. Against (...) this objection, I will argue that WT is a coherent proposal which can harmonize these seemingly incompatible attitudes towards metaphysics by showing that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical observations do not necessarily exclude metaphysics but provides a guide towards it. I will argue that rather than being opposed, grammar and metaphysics are concomitantly joined in Wittgenstein’s later remarks. If this reading of Wittgenstein surmounts that proposed by Hacker, then the incoherence objection to WT simply fails. (shrink)

This article proposes to recontextualize Tractarian ethics within the anthropological frame that develops through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar to the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractarian vision of absolute value, ethical propositions as nonsense, and the transcendentality of ethics seems incapable of being instantiated within the particulars that surround human action. This difficulty is resolved by showing that the Tractarian theme of the coextension of ethics and language (and of ethics and life) combined with Wittgenstein’s later ideas of language-games, rule-following, and forms of (...) life instantiates Tractarian ethics within this later anthropological frame. (shrink)

Abstract: Scepticism has only two moves to make and each is indefensible.

The Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions proposed in [8] leads naturally to numerical integrators of the Schrödinger equation on comoving grids. As yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In honour of Detlef Dürr, we report on a further development of the MIW approach to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom and provide a numerical proof of concept for ground states in 2d. The latter (...) is part of a systematic numerical study [22] that includes also 1d ground and excited states. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study. (shrink)

Scepticism does not argue that no one knows to avoid self-referential refutation. It falls back to arguing that no one knows that anyone knows, hence simply that no one knows, in accordance with the principle Kp iff KKp. This principle, however, is not available to the sceptic. He is stuck with -KKp without access to -Kp. The sceptic is thus no threat to the sort of knowledge that like Moore we all claim to have.

The existence of objects external to the mind is a proof-condition for the type of object demonstration Moore provided in his famous lecture. Affirming the existence of objects external to the mind is just a way of saying that one person can show (present, demonstrate) something to another to prove it is so, to prove it exists, Demonstrations like that are conclusive and immune to scepticism.

The concepts of joint probability as implied by the Copenhagen and realist interpretations of quantum mechanics are examined in relation to (a) the rules for manipulation of probabilistic quantities, and (b) the role of the Bell inequalities in assessing the completeness of standard quantum theory. Proponents of completeness of the Copenhagen interpretation are required to accept a modification of the classical laws of probability to provide a mechanism for complementarity. A new formulation of the locality postulate is given, not involving (...) factorizability or conditional probabilities, which clarifies the role of locality in the derivation of the Bell inequalities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On Dialogue: An Essay in Free ThoughtMichael L. HallOn Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought, by Robert Grudin; ix & 228 pp. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996, $23.95.In the fifth chapter of his recent book Robert Grudin touched on a question that had been vexing me since I began reading On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought. There, amongst his ruminations on the “Social Channels of Free (...) Thought,” Grudin recalls a luncheon celebration for his first trade book during [End Page 181] which one of the executives asked him: “Where in the bookstore would you display this book for sale?” In the four years it had taken him to write the book, Grudin had not given that question a moment’s thought. But it startled him into the realization that books are commodities that must be marketed; as a result he found himself confronting a powerful truth, “that money, like water, flows in channels, and that projects that ignore these channels are likely to come up dry.” More to the point: “These market channels give the American book industry, and hence current American literature, their overall shape. They largely dictate what will be written and read and what will not” (pp. 82–83).Grudin had not only anticipated my question, his response was a practical demonstration of the need for dialogic thinking, for a greater array of choices, questions and answers. I had been looking at On Dialogue from a kind of market perspective, or worse, an academic market perspective. Was it philosophy? Was it literature? Was it both, or neither? I was following the same familiar channels, but Grudin was telling me, quite explicitly, that my approach was unnecessarily limiting. Were I to employ, instead, the method of Renaissance copia that Grudin recommends as a propaedeutic to dialogic thinking, I would quickly discover that On Dialogue is certainly philosophy, and literary criticism, and that it partakes of the history of ideas, dabbles in personal memoir, and takes up theories of interpretation, and education, and creative writing, as well as various forms of psychotherapy, journalism, political theory, and economics.Grudin is obviously at home in the realm of literary criticism. His deft uses of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and of Henry James’s Daisy Miller advance his discussion of dialogic thinking, while at the same time offering focused interpretations of these works. And his examination of the Renaissance rhetorical practice of copia provides a stunning example of the way Grudin grounds his presentations in history and makes connections to other disciplines, thus extending the reach of his arguments. For instance, his reading of Plato’s Parmenides as a “Dialogue of the One and the Many” transforms Plato from an advocate of dialectic to a practitioner of dialogue: “The deep message of Plato’s Parmenides is that wholeness and fragmentation—the One and the Many—are valuable only as joint parameters. They cannot be objects of choice, because they are the nature of choice: they establish the playing field on which choices can be made” (p. 191).If all this makes On Dialogue sound like a congeries, in some respects it is, except that the force of Grudin’s discussion of “dialogic thinking” carries through the entire book and makes the whole cohere in a way that satisfies even when some of the parts occasionally begin to bewilder. His title may call to mind the 1980s literary critical trend spun off by the English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981), but Grudin’s notions about dialogue are grounded more in Plato, Martin Buber and Hans-Georg Gadamer than in Bakhtin. His sense of dialogue is personal and transformative as much [End Page 182] as it is critical and interpretive. In fact, Grudin’s subtitle is no throwaway. His dialogic demonstrations, as they find their literary form, are the offspring of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, as well as being firmly grounded in the writing of other Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Rabelais. In a book as multifarious as this, there will be many interesting (and a few not so interesting) loose ends. Grudin acknowledges this in chapters that sometimes end with a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virgil and the ModernsMichael L. HallVirgil and the Moderns, by Theodore Ziolkowski; xv & 274 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, $35.00.Theodore Ziolkowski’s Virgil and the Moderns is a wonderful book. Everyone interested in modern literature and the western cultural heritage should read it. Ziolkowski does much more than tell us about Virgil and his influence on modern authors and readers; he traces the Latin poet’s appeal from (...) the nineteenth century forward, focusing on different national trends and responses to the Roman past. His book is a veritable education in modern literature and cultural history.In the introductory chapter Ziolkowski situates Virgil in the twentieth century, with references to the Virgilian epigraph on the title page of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the Virgilian motto to the first volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934). Ziolkowski concentrates attention, in fact, on the appeal to Roman history in many early twentieth-century historians, and he explores the various European and American reactions to the bimillennial celebrations in 1930 of Virgil’s birth. Like the Bible, the Roman past seems to speak directly to a great variety of points of view: “Roman history, properly comprehended in its broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today, but indeed for all times”; thus opined the author of Mein Kampf.Ziolkowski’s second chapter, “The Ideological Lives,” begins by observing that “every biography is ideological” and quoting Duane Reed Stuart’s comment that “Every age has tended to fashion a Virgil after its own image.” Ziolkowski tests this proposition against the many “modern” biographies of Virgil that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during the bimillennial celebrations. In Italy he finds Virgil described as “a Latin nationalist with conservative messages for the present on government and agriculture”; in France he discovers “a protofascist emerging from the bohemian life of the rive gauche of ancient Rome”; in Germany he encounters “an agrarian anima naturaliter christiana destined to become Father of the West in opposition to the rise of Nazism”; and in Latin America he sees that Virgil has become “an apostle of peace among the pagans with the providential mission to serve the generations as a pedagogue for Christ.”In the five chapters that follow, Ziolkowski shows that these various versions of Virgil’s life and influence resulted in a similar diversity of literary manifestations. In Europe, each country found a Virgil suited to its own preoccupations and prejudices. A rich and indeed overwhelming curriculum in modern literature could be constructed from the authors and texts Ziolkowski discusses in these brief surveys of works influenced by Virgil’s poetry. But although he is a deft literary critic, Ziolkowski goes further, to trace biographical and cultural influences. We discover, for example, that Gide was obsessed with the Eclogues, that it was the Georgics that Mr. Carmichael “liked to lie awake a little reading” in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and that Joe Paterno’s first and most enduring hero [End Page 175] was Virgil’s Aeneas, “to whom he was introduced by his high school Latin teacher at Brooklyn Prep.”I confess that my favorite parts of the book were the chapters on Virgil in Britain and the “New World.” I thought I was a pretty good student of the classics and of British and American literature, but I am ashamed to admit how much I learned from Ziolkowski’s discussions of Virgil’s influence on Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Cyril Connolly, on Willa Cather and Robert Frost, on Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell. Ziolkowski is a treasure, and he has given us a rare treat in this very thoughtful study of the way our cultural inheritance is passed on and reaffirmed. As he himself remarks in the book’s final sentences on the ties that bind us to Virgil and our common past: “This reaffirmation, attained at the cost of great spiritual engagement by our intellectual predecessors, we neglect today at our peril.”Michael L. HallAlexandria, VirginiaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)