Beyond The Tractatus Wars

Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in the UK.Matthew A. Lavery is Director of the Learning Center at Adelphi University in the US.

• 1. Das Überwinden: Anti-Metaphysical Readings of the Tractatus Warren Goldfarb 2. Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder: On “Therapeutic” Readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Roger M. White 3. Throwing the Baby Out: A Reply to Roger White James Conant and Ed Dain 4. Context, Compositionality, and Nonsense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Silver Bronzo 5. Toward a Useful Jacobinism: A Response to Bronzo Matthew A. Lavery 6. The Dialectic of Interpretations: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Oskari Kuusela 7. The Possibility of a Resolutely Resolute Reading of the Tractatus Rupert Read and Rob Deans 8. Synthesizing Without Concepts Peter Sullivan 9. Response to Sullivan A.W. Moore

"Interest in Wittgenstein’s early book may reflect a commitment, not to scholarship in a narrow sense, but to tracing the history of analytic philosophy with an eye to better understanding our present philosophical moment. This is how the Tractatus figures in this collection. Currently, the most suggestive and productive interpretative divide is – to use the received jargon – between those readers who do and those who do not approach the book "resolutely." Read and Lavery bring together a set of insightful and rewarding essays falling on both sides of this divide. The result is that we are invited to think about the competing merits of two strikingly different exegetical strategies and, at the same time, to grapple with two strikingly different images of what it means to inherit the analytic tradition and philosophize today." --Alice Crary, The New School University"Wars are rarely in order, and the Tractatus is no exception. Nevertheless, the program of the last 20 years to re-read the book 'resolutely' has generated all kinds of philosophy, much of it of very high caliber. This volume of essays illuminates some of the heat, and sheds needed light on future prospects for a better understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy." --Juliet Floyd, Boston University