This book explores the interrelated concepts of representation and grammar in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein was obsessed with the problem of the nature of language and the relationship between language and the world. His intellectual journey, one of the most compelling in twentieth century thought, is the detailed adventure told by Gordon Hunnings in The World and Language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. This book surveys Wittgenstein’s elucidation of how the world is represented in language, including the posthumously published material of his middle period. Early in his career, Wittgenstein’s answer to the problem explored the representational connection between language and the world through the analogy of propositions as logical pictures of facts. Later, his mature answer elucidated the concept of the world as a construction of logical grammar. Hunnings shows how these shifting images of reality reflected in language also mirror the changes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Language, Reality, and Transcendence deals with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein by delving into language, grammar, rule, self, world, culture, and value. Wittgenstein has given a comprehensive philosophy of man and the world and has dealt with the destiny of man by outlining the moral and the spiritual goals of human life. In this work, the nature of Wittgenstein's transcendent metaphysics of man and the ultimate reality has been outlined.

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities.

This first of two volumes brings together invited papers of the 32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium. The relation between language and the world was undoubtedly a major issue in Wittgenstein's philosophical oeuvre. This volume provides substantial contributions on various aspects of Wittgenstein's writings such as the philosophy of mathematics, the problem of rule following, or the relation between meaning and use.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality.

This first of two volumes brings together invited papers of the 32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg/W. (Austria), 2009). The relation between language and the world was undoubtedly one if not the central issue in Wittgenstein’s whole philosophical oeuvre. His one hundred and twentieth birthday provided an occasion for foregrounding this aspect of his work. A special workshop was dedicated to new aspects of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. In this volume Frank Cioffi, Peter Hacker, Ian Hacking, Roy Harris, Lars Hertzberg, Jaakko Hintikka, Marie McGinn, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Hans Sluga among others provide substantial contributions on various aspects of Wittgenstein’s writings such as the philosophy of mathematics, the problem of rule following or the relation between meaning and use.

In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.

Rush Rhees, a close friend of Wittgenstein and a major interpreter of his work, shows how Wittgenstein's On Certainty concerns logic, language, and reality – topics that occupied Wittgenstein since early in his career. Authoritative interpretation of Wittgenstein's last great work, On Certainty, by one of his closest friends. Debunks misconceptions about Wittgenstein's On Certainty and shows that it is an essay on logic. Exposes the continuity in Wittgenstein's thought, and the radical character of his conclusions. Contains a substantial and illuminating afterword discussing current scholarship surrounding On Certainty, and its relationship to Rhees's work on this subject.