Wittgenstein: Two Philosophers in One

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who taught and worked at Cambridge between 1912 and 1947. He is regarded as one of the leading philosophers of the 20th Century, noted for having adopted two very different philosophical stances in his time. Wittgenstein worked primarily in logic and the philosophy of language with an especial focus on language and the world, and secondarily in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of religion. Mark will present a linguist's 'take' on his career and consider questions about language, thought and reality from Wittgenstein's two phases, referred to as W1 and W2.

W1 was concerned with the logical relationships between propositions and the world; W2 held that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given 'language-game'. Can we really grasp the nature of reality in some kind of objective way as W1 claimed? Or do our linguistic structures determine thought, including our view of the structure of 'reality' and thus we cannot grasp the nature of reality in an objective way as W2 argued?

BIO: Mark Newbrook is from England. He took a BA (Hons) in Classics (including ancient and modern philosophy, and general and historical linguistics) at Oxford, then an MA and a PhD in Linguistics at Reading University. From 1982 to 2003 he was a lecturer and researcher in Linguistics in Singapore, Hong Kong, Perth (WA) and Melbourne. He has worked in various sub-fields of linguistics, recently mainly on skeptical linguistics. Among his many publications he authored Strange Linguistics (2013), the first ever book-length critical survey work on fringe ideas about language.

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