My aim will be to describe and assess Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical view of why philosophy ought not to be in conducted in the traditional way, how it should instead be done, and what can be accomplished by pursuing it properly. I will be especially concerned with the questions: (1) of how this view is related to his conception of ‘meaning’ as use’, (2) of whether it is self-defeatingly ‘theoretical’, (3) of how it evolved from his earlier (Tractatus) position, and (4) of whether his departures from that position were sufficiently radical.

Professor Paul Horwich (BA Oxford 1966, MA Yale 1969, PhD Cornell 1974) will be speaking on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at the invitation of the Linguistics and Philosophy Group.  His talk is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities research and the UCSC Philosophy Department.  Prof. Horwich’s principle contributions to the field have been a probabilistic account of scientific methodology, a unified explanation of temporally asymmetric phenomena, a deflationary conception of truth, and a naturalistic use-theory of meaning. He has received fellowship support for his work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (73-95), University College London (95-00), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (00-05). He has also given courses at UCLA, the CNRS Institute d’Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences et Technique, the University of Sydney, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Tokyo. His main present project is a monograph on Wittgenstein’s meta-philosophy.