Showing, the Medium Voice, and the Unity of the Tractatus

Philosophical Topics 42 (2):201-262 (2014)
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Abstract

In this essay, I take up James Conant and Cora Diamond’s suggestion that “to take the difference between saying and showing deeply enough is not to give up on showing but to give up on picturing it as a ‘what’ ”. I try to establish that the Tractatus’s talk of “showing” is more coherent than is usually appreciated, that it is indeed a key to the internal unity of the book, and that it positively helps us to work our way into the practice of philosophy, which its author understood as a practice of logical clarification. Thus, it is not a stretch of latent nonsense whose sole function is to conjure up an illusion of sense for the sake of displaying its disintegration. While Wittgenstein’s concept of showing is not meant to “make up for” the impossibility of saying certain things, neither does it stand in need of being “redeemed.” Whether or not it is to prove ultimately coherent, the Tractatus’s talk of “showing,” I shall argue, is certainly not to be “thrown away” in the name of the Tractarian conception of logic, for the simple reason that it essentially belongs with it.

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Citations of this work

Tba.Juliet Floyd - 2016 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (2):7-89.
Wittgenstein's Reductio.Gilad Nir - 2022 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 10 (3).
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Modal Moments: Transpositions of the Tractatus in Wittgenstein’s Later Work.Juliet Floyd - 2022 - Revue Internationale de Philosophie 300 (2):125-146.

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