This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian themes that appeared between 1996 and 2019. It is divided into three parts, with a common trajectory laid out in a substantial introduction. The first part links meaning, necessity and normativity. It defends and modifies Wittgenstein’s claim that the idea of a ‘grammatical rule’ holds the key to understanding linguistic meaning and its connection to necessary truth. The second part elucidates the connections between meaning, concepts and thought in Wittgenstein and beyond. It shows how he laid the grounds for a sound understanding of four contested issues—radical interpretation, concepts, nonsense and animal minds. The third part provides a qualified defence of Wittgenstein’s controversial idea that philosophical problems are conceptual, and thereby rooted in confusions concerning the meanings of and semantic relations between linguistic expressions. Against irrationalist interpretations, it demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s method is argumentative rather than therapeutic. The collection as a whole makes a powerful case for an analytic perspective on Wittgenstein. The essays bring out the abiding relevance of Wittgenstein’s reflections to contemporary debates on central topics such as the role of normativity, the foundations of linguistic meaning, the nature of concepts, the possibility of animal thought, and the proper methods of philosophy.

This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein originally published between 1996 and 2019, with a new introduction. The essays defend and develop a central Wittgensteinian idea: 'grammatical rules' for the use of expressions hold the key to understanding linguistic meaning, as well as its connections to necessary propositions, conceptual thought, and the nature of philosophy.

Wittgenstein and Normative Inquiry examines the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and religion. It analyzes the intellectual contexts which shaped Wittgenstein's normative thought, traces his influences, and presents contemporary uses of his philosophy in normative fields. The chapters focus on the nature of normative inquiry. Together, they present a Wittgensteinian approach to normative inquiry, which, while broad and contested, stands in contrast to dominant deductive approaches. Arguing to normative conclusions by showing family resemblances, drawing analogies, using persuasion, appealing to naturalist arguments, authors and Wittgensteinians discussed by them expand our notion of normative inquiry.

Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is one of the most celebrated and important books in philosophy of language and mind of the past forty years. It generated an avalanche of responses from the moment it was published and has revolutionized the way in which we think about meaning, intentionality, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It introduced a series of questions that had never been raised before concerning, most prominently, the normativity of meaning and the prospects for a reductionist account of meaning. This volume of new essays reassesses the continuing influence of Kripke's book and demonstrates that many of the issues first raised by Kripke, both exegetical and philosophical, remain as thought-provoking and as relevant as they were when he first introduced them.

This book, bringing together contributions by forty-five authors from fourteen countries, represents mostly new material from both emerging and seasoned scholars in the field of philosophy of education. Topics range widely both within and across the four parts of the book: Wittgenstein’s biography and style as an educator and philosopher, illustrating the pedagogical dimensions of his early and late philosophy; Wittgenstein’s thought and methods in relation to other philosophers such as Cavell, Dewey, Foucault, Hegel and the Buddha; contrasting investigations of training in relation to initiation into forms of life, emotions, mathematics and the arts (dance, poetry, film, and drama), including questions from theory of mind (nativism vs. initiation into social practices), neuroscience, primate studies, constructivism and relativity; and the role of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in religious studies and moral philosophy, as well as their profound impact on his own life. This collection explores Wittgenstein not so much as a philosopher who provides a method for teaching or analyzing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is essentially pedagogical: he provides pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, questions and wrong answers, experiments and so on, as a means of shifting our thinking, or of helping us escape the pictures that hold us captive.

What is the enduring legacy of Wittgenstein's philosophy? With chapters by leading Wittgenstein scholars, this examines the place of Wittgenstein's philosophy in Twentieth century European philosophy.

Simo Knuuttila was an influential philosopher, theologian, and historian of philosophy who conducted research on a variety of topics including modalities, emotions, perception, and change in different historical periods, from Ancient to Modern. His contribution to the study of modalities and emotions was groundbreaking and trendsetting with a lasting impact on the area. In this volume, a group of international scholars – all of whom worked directly with Knuuttila – elaborate on some of those topics, trying to understand the core interpretative ideas, the polemical aspects, and how to develop those interpretations in different authors and/or conceptual frameworks. The result is an unique volume that presents a broad range of perspectives on key topics in the history of philosophy in the last decades, both influenced and challenging the interpretations advocated by Knuuttila.

What is racism? is a timely question that is hotly contested in the philosophy of race. Yet disagreement about racism’s nature does not begin in philosophy, but in the sociopolitical domain. Alberto G. Urquidez argues that philosophers of race have failed to pay sufficient attention to the practical considerations that prompt the question “What is racism?” Most theorists assume that “racism” signifies a language-independent phenomenon that needs to be “discovered” by the relevant science or “uncovered” by close scrutiny of everyday usage of this term. (Re-)Defining Racism challenges this metaphysical paradigm. Urquidez develops a Wittgenstein-inspired framework that illuminates the use of terms like “definition,” “meaning,” “explanation of meaning,” and “disagreement,” for the analysis of contested normative concepts. These elucidations reveal that providing a definition of “racism” amounts to recommending a form of moral representation—a rule for the correct use of “racism.” As definitional recommendations must be justified on pragmatic grounds, Urquidez takes as a starting point for justification the interests of racism's historical victims.

In this provocatively compelling new book, Michael Luntley offers a revolutionary reading of the opening section of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations Critically engages with the most recent exegetical literature on Wittgenstein and other state-of-the-art philosophical work Encourages the re-incorporation of Wittgenstein studies into the mainstream philosophical conversation Has profound consequences for how we go on to read the rest of Wittgenstein’s major work Makes a significant contribution not only to the literature on Wittgenstein, but also to studies in philosophy of language