Links to scintillating excogitations, largely Wittgensteinian

Rose Rand, who was born in Lemberg and moved to Austria, where she was a member of the Vienna Circle, and fled to England in 1939 with Susan Stebbing's help.

From the BBC: Raymond Tallis and Ray Monk on Wittgenstein (it starts about 57 seconds into the audio file). From the BBC in 2003, Melvyn Bragg interviews Monk, Barry Smith, and Marie McGinn about Wittgenstein.

Arthur W. Collins reviews Paul Horwich's book Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy.

Andrew Lugg reviews Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation (ed. Sullivan & Potter).

Matthew Frost's notes on his continuing project of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Duncan Richter's two posts about Tractarian elucidation.

Reshef Agam-Segal on 'thinking and willing subjects in the Tractatus'.

Philip Cartwright on propositional form.

From last March, Lars Hertzberg on talking (non)sense about nonsense (good comment thread), and a follow-up (with further interesting comments).

Duncan Richter's two posts about Wittgenstein on 'good'.

Gavin Kitching on Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences.

'Why on earth is it so difficult to describe the Contents of my Consciousness?'

A. C. Grayling on 'Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty'.

Henrik Lagerlund's 'Science and Reason', Part 1 ('Rationality of Modern Science') and Part 2 ('Pessimism and the Myth of Progress') -- lots on G. H. von Wright.

From Siris -- 'In Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy'.

Last May and June, SOH-Dan put up several posts on Dummett's Frege, McDowell on cog-sci, and Sebastian Rödl on Kant's first analogy.

MWQ quotes a lengthy passage from Steven Tester's new translation of Lichtenberg. The quoted passage focuses on Lichtenberg's philosophy of mind. Here's one of my favourite passages from Lichtenberg; it's about the mind-body relation and seems to anticipate Ryle's 'ghost in the machine':

Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now [that] we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body’s fragile frame. (G. C. Lichtenberg, c. 1776; trans. R. J. Hollingdale)

The Stanford Encyclopedia finally has entries for Moritz Schlick and Heinrich Rickert. Still no entries for Sir William Hamilton, Wilhelm Windelband (who influenced not only Rickert and Max Weber but also Samuel Beckett), Georg Simmel, Susan Stebbing, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap (!), Ruth Barcan Marcus (!), William Dray, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley (though they're of course referred to in other entries). I don't mean this to be any strong criticism of the editors, who have likely already commissioned entries for many of the above-named figures. I know that the editors have launched an initiative to give more coverage to female philosophers.

Philosopher's Zone interviews Simon Blackburn about human nature; and Hubert Dreyfus and David Deutsch on AI. Here's Blackburn's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture (also available here).
 

Quotations that relate an old philosophical point

Here's a quotation from Frederick Beiser's The German Historicist Tradition:

To illustrate his point, he [Max Weber] asks us to suppose that psychology has advanced so far that it is possible to assess the precise neurological causes behind the reasoning of a mathematical theorem; that never suffices to determine whether or not that theorem is true .... Why? Because there is a fundamental distinction in principle between determining causes and assessing validity, which no amount of causal explanation will ever surmount. (Beiser, p. 542)

I thought this was Frege's anti-psychologism. But I've just looked at a paper by R. Lanier Anderson, who, in the course of tracing anti-psychologism's neo-Kantian roots, distinguishes between two kinds of anti-psychologism. Anderson credits Lotze and Windelband with developing the above variety, which he contrasts with Frege's. Anderson says:

The earliest clear occurrence I have found of "psychologism" in the now familiar pejorative sense is Windelband’s "Kritische oder genetische Methode?" published in Präludien (1884). But even though the word "Psychologismus" was not common before the 1880s, the basic ideas behind the charge of a psychologistic fallacy became increasingly widespread through the 1870s. One of the most widely influential early sources for the emerging antipsychologistic camp was the 1874 Logik by Windelband’s teacher, Hermann Lotze. (Anderson, "Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13:2 [2005]: 287-323 [at 293-4])

 Here's how Anderson characterizes Frege's anti-psychologism:

Frege makes it a "fundamental principle . . . always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective" ... and he famously quips that "number is no whit more an object of psychology or a product of mental processes than, let us say, the North Sea is" .... Frege does sometimes insist that logical laws, unlike psychological laws, serve as a normative standard for thinking, but for him, that point always depends on a more fundamental claim that logic treats objective, mind-independent laws of an abstract character, not facts about the subjective psychology of reasoners. (Anderson, p. 295)

A similar anti-psychologistic point may be made in connection with ethics. E.g., here's H. Allen Orr in a review of one of E. O. Wilson's books:

When Wilson "predicts," for example, that ethical phenomena will also turn out to be neural, it's unclear what interesting conclusion he thinks follows from this fact. Have we here "reduced" ethics to biology? Anyone who's tempted to answer yes should consider one further "prediction": Mathematical thoughts will also involve neurons. You're free, of course, to conclude that ethical truths are just biology but only at the considerable risk of arriving at the same conclusion about "2 + 2 = 4". (H. Allen Orr, 'The Big Picture', review of E. O. Wilson's Consilience, Boston Review, Oct/Nov, 1998)

One sees variations on these anti-psychologistic points in Massimo Pigliucci's and Bill Vallicella's objections to Lawrence Krauss's latest bit of a priori dogmatizing.