WITTGENSTEINIAN (adj.)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” 

What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. 

Foreword by A. C. Grayling.- Philosophy: Showings: a double sestina by Christopher Norris.- Wittgenstein’s Ways by Nikolay Milkov.- Philosophy as education in thinking: Why getting the reader to think matters to Wittgenstein by Oskari Kuusela.- Wittgenstein’s grammar: through thick and thin by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock.- Playing Language Games by Beth Savickey.- Wittgenstein’s ‘Grammatical Naturalism’ by Jonathan Beale.- Wittgenstein’s ‘On Certainity’ as Pyrrhonism in Action by Duncan Pritchard.- In Quest of a Wittgensteinian Hinge Epistemology by Annalisa Coliva.- Paradigms and self-reference: what is the point of asserting paradoxical sentences? By Jakub Mácha.- “Life is very complicated”: Remarks on a Recurring Adjective by David R. Cerbone.- Wittgenstein on Truth by Paul Horwich.- Theoretical Sciences: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy: Re-orientating Science by Michael Nedo.- Showing in Wittgenstein’s ab-Notation by Gregory Landini.- Thinking in Spaces: a Characteristic of Wittgensteinian Philosophy by Pascal Zambito.- Foundations of Mathematics: From Hilbert and Wittgenstein to the Categorical Unity of Science by Yoshihiro Maruyama.- Wittgenstein on Physics by Chon Tejedor.- The Physics of Miniature Worlds by Susan Sterrett.- Wittgenstein’s Thought Experiments and Relativity Theory by Carlo Penco.- Wittgenstein’s solution to Einstein’s problem: Calibration across systems by Susan Edwards Mckie.- Quantum Physics and Cognitive Science from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Bohr’s Classicism, Chomsky’s Universalism, and Bell’s Contextualism by Yoshihiro Maruyama.- Can Robots Learn to Talk? by Lars Hertzberg.- Wittgenstein versus Zombies: An Investigation of our Mental Concepts by Edward  Witherspoon.- The Soul and the Painter’s Eye by Michel ter Hark.- Wittgenstein on Seeing As; some issues by Paul Snowdon.- Wittgenstein and an essay in formal biology by Nikolay Milkov.- The ecological economics revolution? Looking at economics from the vantage-point of Wittgenstein’s and Kuhn’s philosophies by Rupert Read.- MISC: Aesthetic Gestures: Elements of a Philosophy of Art in Frege and Wittgenstein by Nikolay Milkov.- The Lens of Architecture: Wittgenstein, Vision, Space, and Language by Nana Last.- Wittgenstein’s Torments of the Mind by Ilse Somavilla.