Exploring Certainty

Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought

By (author) Robert Greenleaf Brice

Publication date:

06 March 2014

Length of book:

132 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739175668

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty explores a myriad of new and important ideas regarding our notions of belief, knowledge, skepticism, and certainty. During the course of his exploration, Wittgenstein makes a fascinating new discovery about certitude, namely, that it is categorically distinct from knowledge. As his investigation advances, he recognizes that certainty must be non-propositional and non-ratiocinated; borne out not in the things we say, but in our actions, our deeds. Many philosophers working outside of epistemology recognized Wittgenstein's insights and determined that his work's abrupt end might serve as an excellent launching point for still further philosophical expeditions. In Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought, Robert Greenleaf Brice surveys some of this rich topography. Wittgenstein's writings serve as a point of departure for Brice's own ideas about certainty. He shows how Wittgenstein's rough and unpolished notion of certitude might be smoothed out and refined in a way to benefit studies of morality, aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of mathematics. Brice's work opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies concerning issues central to human knowledge and cognition.

Introduction: “Wide Fields of Thought”
Chapter 1: Common Sense Propositions: Moore and Wittgenstein
Chapter 2: Recognizing Targets
Chapter 3: Mistakes and Mental Disturbances: Pleasants, Wittgenstein, and Basic Moral Certainty
Chapter 4: “Aesthetic Scaffolding”: Hagberg and Wittgensteinian Certitude
Chapter 5: “Hinge Propositions,” Actional Certainty, and Religious Belief
Chapter 6: “The Whole Hurly-Burly”: Wittgenstein, Language, and Embodied Cognition
Chapter 7: The Peculiar Inexorability of Mathematics: Wittgenstein and Mathematical Certainty
Chapter 8: Exceeding A Different Scope: Wittgenstein’s Political Views
Chapter 9: “A Sketch of the Landscape”

This brief book of Wittgenstein's On Certainty lives up to its subtitle. The 'fields of thought' it covers are indeed wide; they include epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, religion, cognitive science, mathematics, psychotherapy and even Wittgenstein's political views. Brice successfully shows the broad reach of Wittgenstein's ideas... [This] interpretation is worth understanding, and Brice's book offers a concise introduction to it, as well as some interesting developments of it.