Some scholars suggest a puzzle presents itself in Ludwig Wittgenstein's final words in the mismatch between what Norman Malcolm describes as a ‘fiercely unhappy’ life and Wittgenstein's expression of that life as ‘wonderful’. Ronald L. Hall attempts to overcome the apparent puzzle by retranslating Wittgenstein's final words into an expression of an awakening to the wonder inherent in reality. Beth Savickey argues that Hall's approach is a philosophical abstraction that diminishes the significance of friendship in Wittgenstein's life and that these (...) friendships are what made Wittgenstein's life ‘wonderful’. I argue that Hall's and Savickey's accounts of wonder and friendship go wrong as attempts to explain away the apparent puzzle of Wittgenstein's final words. Drawing on remarks from Raimond Gaita, I argue that both aspects can be incorporated into a dissolution of the apparent puzzle if Wittgenstein's final words are heard in the register of an expression of gratitude from a perspective of his life as a whole sub specie aeterni. (shrink)

This paper challenges a dualistic picture popularised by Nigel Pleasants at the centre of influential investigations into the possibility of Wittgensteinian forms of moral certainty. The dualistic picture takes it for granted that moral certainty concerns both a series of hinge propositions that are beyond doubt, make no sense to justify and cannot be expressed in ordinary discourse and a phenomenon that is only ever instantiated in our ways of acting. I consider tensions in this account as they relate to (...) ‘Murder is wrong’ as a moral hinge proposition by drawing on the life and lyrics of US hip‐hop artist Kendrick Lamar. My claim is that the Lamar example highlights important tensions in our relation to the wrongness of murder that many would understand to occur within the moral realm, but which are conceptually ruled out from dualistic accounts of moral certainty. The plausibility of the dualistic picture must therefore be reassessed. (shrink)

We relate recent accounts of Wittgenstein-inspired deep disagreement to polarised understandings of sex and gender, considering their strengths and limitations in clarifying clashes that may sometimes appear in our most intimate sexual relationships. Our starting point is a heated and deeply disruptive argument between a man and a woman in a heterosexual relationship, presented in the lyrics and music video for Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige’s song ‘We Cry Together’. We use this example to bring out some of the fixed (...) assumptions about the nature of deep disagreements, seen in Robert J. Fogelin’s account of forms of life, David M. Godden and William H. Brenner’s account of concept determination, Duncan Pritchard’s account of hinge commitments, and Victoria Lavorerio’s account of pictures. Though we find much of the discussion present in these accounts promising, we argue that none are able to grasp the messy, unpredictable, and constantly shifting nature of the (quite ordinary) disagreement in our example. This offers support to scholars who caution against making a priori claims about which topics (e.g. abortion) necessarily evoke deep disagreements, and suggests that we resist attempts to establish, a priori, what deep disagreements _must_ look like, and how they _must_ be resolved. This enables us to bring out the ways in which pig-headedness and self-righteousness, in our example, do not provide reasons to reject this particular disagreement as “genuinely” deep, but provide a picture of an emotional dynamic on which the depth of this particular deep moral disagreement seems to hinge. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 2, Page 220-223, April 2022.