Nonsense and the Ineffable: Re-reading the Ethical Standpoint in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Authors

  • Géza Kállay Lorand Eötvös University

Keywords:

20th century philosophy, Wittgenstein Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, perspective, third and first person, logical form, sense of reality

Abstract

The paper examines the ethical standpoint of the Tractatus as it has been reconstructed by Cora Diamond (“the austere view”) and gives an account of some of the criticism this reconstruction has received in the work of P. M. S. Hacker and Meredith Williams (“the standard view”). The second half of the paper tries to argue that the austere and the standard views rather complement each other if we recognize “two I’-s” in the Tractatus and if it is supposed that there is a “3rd person” and “1st person” perspective which are both voiced on its pages.

Author Biography

Géza Kállay, Lorand Eötvös University

Géza Kállay is Professor of English Literature at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest, where he teaches English drama, Shakespeare, and literary theory. He also teaches literature and philosophy at IES, Vienna. He defended his PhD at the University of Leuven in 1996. With Fulbright grants, he studied, under the sponsorship of Stanley Cavell, at Harvard University in 1995, while in 2004-05 he was visiting professor of literature and philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published seven books in Hungarian, and over seventy articles in Hungarian and English on Shakespeare, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and analytic philosophy.

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Vol. 1 No. 1 (2012): Volume 1 / Number 1 (Aug 2012), A. Pichler, S. Säätelä, Y. Neuman (eds.)

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