Marco Bastianelli: Oltre i limiti del linguaggio. Il kantismo nel "Tractatus" di Wittgenstein (2008)

Posing the question of the limits of human reason, Kant has traced the path of modern philosophy. Wittgenstein has reformulated this problem in terms of an enquiry concerning the limits of language. This linguistic perspective is not a mere re-formulation of the kantian question, but it opens important questions to contemporary thought. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein traces the limits of language from the inside of language itself; in this way he puts a questione which, in kantian philosophy, remained uninvestigated, i.e. that concerning the self-reference of transcendental method, and, consequently, its overcoming. But it doesn't mean that this enquiry has no results, because the tendency to go beyond the limits of language is the sign of the ethical meaning of philosophical investigation: Wittgenstein is also able to bring to light that the possibility of knowledge itself has its roots into the original question concerning the sense of human life, because man is open to the world since from the beginning. It is also possibile to speak of the transcendental as the original being open beyond the limits of language.

Table of contents:

Foreword

I. Introduction: Representation and the transcendental

1. About knowledge as representation of reality

2. Transcendental philosophy and the "closed world of representation"

3. Excaping the "closed world of representation"

II. Kant in Wittgenstein's cultural background

1. A deep influence

2. Russell and Kant in the "Tractatus"

3. Boltzmann and Hertz: kantism in Physics

4. Schopenhauer

5. Frege and the rehabilitation of analytic judgement

6. Mauthner's critique of language

III From the critique of reason to the critique of language

1. Kantism in the Tractatus

2. WIttgenstein and the problem of limits

3. Transcendental arguments

4. From the nature og thought to the structure of language

IV. The logic of representation

1. "We picture facts to ourselves"

2. Logical picture and transcendental scheme

3. The general form of proposition

4. The boundaries of the logical space and the structure of reality

5. The ontology of the Tractatus

6. The logic of the Tractatus is transcendental?

V. The subject as a limit of the world

1. The problem of subjectivity

2. Propositional attitudes: empirical subject and metaphysical subject

3. The tentation of solipsism

4. Russell's solution

5. The subjetc in the Tractatus and kantian transcendental subject

6. The metaphysical subject and the truth of solipsism

VI. Conclusion: beyond the limits of language

1. "Throwing the ladder": the method of the Tractatus

2. The limits of the austere view of nonsense

3. The "frame of the book": giving a sense to nonsense

4. Towards an open representation of reality

Literature

1. Works by Wittgenstein

2. Works on Wittgenstein

3. Works on kantism in the Tractatus

Index

The author Marco Bastianellli (Perugia - Italy, 1976) has a post-doc scholarship in Philosophy at the University of Perugia, Italy.