Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths: (1 Jaakko Hintikka Selected Papers)

Frequently, a genuine understanding of a thinker's ideas is possible only by following them further than he did himself. Wittgenstein's Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus spoke in a similar context of one-and-a-half truths in contradistinction to half-truths. In this volume of essays, Jaakko Hintikka examines the two grand visions concerning the interrelations of language, self and the world that guided Wittgenstein's thought at the different stages of his philosophical development. He seeks to show how one of them, the so-called picture theory of language, was in reality a combination of several independent assumptions, while the other, the idea of language-games as the vehicles of meaning, was the end product of an intriguing development. Hintikka asserts that many of Wittgenstein's best-known ideas can, and must, be understood as defences or rationalizations of his overall visions. In several essays, Wittgenstein's ideas are illuminated through comparisons with other philosophers, including Russell, Husserl and Carnap.

Table of Contents:
1. An Impatient Man and His Papers. 2. An Anatomy of Wittgenstein's Picture Theory. 3. The Idea of Phenomenology in Wittgenstein and Husserl. 4. Die Wende der Philosophie: Wittgenstein's New Logic of 1928. 5. (with Merrill B. Hintikka) Wittgenstein's annus mirabilis: 1929. 6. Ludwig's Apple Tree: On the Philosophical Relations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. 7. The Original Sinn of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics. 8. (with Merrill B. Hintikka) Ludwig Looks at the Necker Cube: The Problem of `Seeing As' as a Clue to Wittgenstein's Philosophy. 9. Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Immediate Experience. 10. Wittgenstein and the Problem of Phenomenology. 11. Wittgenstein on Being and Time. 12. Language-Games. 13. (with Merrill B. Hintikka) Wittgenstein: Some Perspectives on the Development of His Thought. 14. Rules, Games and Experiences: Wittgenstein's Discussion of Rule-Following in the Light of His Development. 15. (with Merrill B. Hintikka) Different Language Games in Wittgenstein. 16. (with Merrill B. Hintikka) Wittgenstein and "the Universal Language" of Painting.

About the Author :
Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.