Reviews for Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty

The average rating for Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-30 00:00:00 Fred Hill "I said at the beginning of this book that a persuasive case can be made for regarding Wittgenstein as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and perhaps as the greatest Western philosopher since Kant. If he had not written On Certainty this assessment would still stand. But for anyone who has carefully worked through this work there can be little doubt about the support it adds to this evaluation. Both its critical and positive achievements are of the highest order. In the former respect we can say that one of Wittgenstein's greatest contributions to philosophy is to have shown the self-defeating nature of radical scepticism, why it cannot even get off the ground. In developing this insight his grasp of scepticism is palpably more profound than Moore's. Moore presupposes that the sceptic's doubts make sense and can be answered by asserting that he (Moore) knows this or that p with certainty. But Wittgenstein's understanding is deeper. He shows that what the sceptic wishes to say cannot be said without violating the constraints that would make the question sensible. No such answer as Moore wishes to provide is thus possible or needed. Scepticism is not merely mistaken, as Moore thinks; it is, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, conceptually aberrant. When to this achievement is added the development of a new method, the descriptions of the ways that conceptual models exercise their ineluctable grips upon thinkers, and accurate characterizations of our everyday linguistic uses, we are'and have been throughout this study'in the presence of genius".

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-07 00:00:00 Nanette Veysey My favorite secondary source in philosophy.