Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought

ISBN-13: 9783030775520 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Aloisia Moser

Opis

This book explores the idea that there is a certain performativity of thought connecting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On this view, we make judgments and use propositions because we presuppose that our thinking is about something, and that our propositions have sense. Kant’s requirement of an a priori connection between intuitions and concepts is akin to Wittgenstein’s idea of the general propositional form as sharing a form with the world.  Aloisia Moser argues that Kant speaks about acts of the mind, not about static categories. Furthermore, she elucidates the Tractatus’ logical form as a projection method that turns into a so-called ‘zero method’, whereby propositions are merely the scaffolding of the world. In so doing, Moser connects Kantian reflective judgment to Wittgensteinian rule-following. She thereby presents an account of performativity centering neither on theories nor methods, but on the application enacting them in the first place.  

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Kant’s Acts of the Mind and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method

Part I Kant and the “I Think” as the Facticity of Thought

2. A Connection Between Thought and Thing A Priori.

3. Judging as Connecting Thought and Thing

4. Synthesis and Bringing the Manifold of Intuition into an Image

Part II Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory as a Method of Projection

5. The Form of the Proposition

6. Projection Method

7. Logic Degree Zero

Part III Kant’s Schematizing and Wittgenstein’s Picturing or Projecting as Performativity

8. Kant, Synthesis, and Schema

9. Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Use

10. Performativity and the Act of Thinking

11. Conclusion

O autorze

Aloisia Moser is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Catholic Private University in Linz, Austria

Blurb

This book explores the idea that there is a certain performativity of thought connecting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On this view, we make judgments and use propositions because we presuppose that our thinking is about something, and that our propositions have sense. Kant’s requirement of an a priori connection between intuitions and concepts is akin to Wittgenstein’s idea of the general propositional form as sharing a form with the world.  

Aloisia Moser argues that Kant speaks about acts of the mind, not about static categories. Furthermore, she elucidates the Tractatus’ logical form as a projection method that turns into a so-called ‘zero method’, whereby propositions are merely the scaffolding of the world. In so doing, Moser connects Kantian reflective judgment to Wittgensteinian rule-following. She thereby presents an account of performativity centering neither on theories nor methods, but on the application enacting them in the first place.  

Aloisia Moser is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Catholic Private University in Linz, Austria.