Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. The young Karl Marx writes that ‘the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it’. Beauty happens in this difficult gulf between hand and eye, between eye and ear. This essay approaches the problem of beauty through the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith enacts the taking place of the artwork in the duplications it urges on us, as beauty ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes expression; but in the ground that lies between On Beauty and Howards End, this essay looks for a kind of critical language and a kind of political institution in which the idea of beauty might find expression.

It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

Chapter 4 looks at the more recent (and largely negative) concept of ‘perfectionism’ and, specifically (and with some reservations), at the distinction between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism within socio-psychology. This chapter looks critically at a recent ethical discussion by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics of cosmetic procedures designed to give people a ‘perfect body,’ but also notes that some form of obsessive perfectionism seems to be a feature of artistic, sporting and even moral genius. It offers human examples of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, including Steve Jobs, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the theatre producer Peter Brook, and concludes that perfectionism can be both dysfunctional and functional.

Truth and content are theoretically prior in Frege to the act of judgment. Wittgenstein takes the opposite view, maintaining that truth is fundamentally correctness in judgment and that a content is fundamentally something to be judged. At Tractatus 4.063, Wittgenstein gives an argument against the Fregean position. Judgment can aim internally at truth, Wittgenstein holds, only if it is internal to truth that it is correctness in judgment.

This chapter discusses Wittgenstein’s remarks on mathematics in sections 6.02–6.031 and 6.2–6.241. These remarks are limited to arithmetic, with definitions of the natural numbers (6.02) and of multiplication (6.241). In the first part, we discuss Wittgenstein’s criticism of the theory of types involved in Russell’s rival ‘logicist’ account, with specific criticisms of Russell’s axioms of infinity (5.535) and reducibility (6.1232). The second part presents Wittgenstein’s positive account of natural numbers in terms of ‘repeated applications of an operation’ (based on his remarks on operations at 5.2–5.254) and of arithmetical calculations. Limited parallels with the lambda calculus are brought to the fore, while explanations that presuppose a scheme of primitive recursion are criticized. The third section discusses related philosophical remarks about the centrality of the ‘method of substitution’ (6.24), arithmetical equations as ‘pseudo-propositions’ (6.241 & 6.2), and the claim that the identity of the two sides of an equation is merely perceived, not assertable (6.2322). Looking ahead, the fourth and final part discusses briefly Wittgenstein’s reasons for abandoning this approach in the early ‘middle period’.

This Introduction provides summaries of the chapters of the book and briefly discusses some of the main obstacles we encounter when we attempt to engage with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

In this chapter, I interpret section 6.361 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – containing Wittgenstein’s second reference to Heinrich Hertz in the book – in the context of the nearby framing remarks concerning the ‘law of causality’. Attention to the relevant details of Hertz’s work sheds light on a number of Wittgenstein’s remarks about mechanics in the 6.3s and, in particular, explains Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘What can be described can happen too, and what the law of causality is meant to exclude cannot even be described’ (6.362). For Wittgenstein, to describe events in causal terms is to describe them via an appeal to temporal and spatial asymmetries. However, no alternative is available: a description that did not appeal to such asymmetries would not be a description of anything. According to the Tractatus, descriptions are recognized as causal when they are embedded in a unified theoretical framework, but causal powers, understood as relations of material necessity, do not exist.

A decade before becoming famous for his prose narratives, W.G. Sebald worked on two film projects that remained unrealized in his lifetime and have not yet been extensively studied. These intended films were to focus on the lives of two philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but Sebald only tangentially engages with their philosophical work. Instead, the film scripts consist of biographical sketches and, in the case of the Wittgenstein project, images. A closer look at these two projects reveals Sebald in a transitional phase in his development from academic to literary author. The works bear similarities to the style and themes for which he later became known: intertextuality, the pitfalls of human progress, and death. The Wittgenstein project also marks a starting point for Sebald’s interest in characters who bear a resemblance to the philosopher, which would persist throughout his literary career.

W. V. Quine is famous for insisting that translation is indeterminate and Ludwig Wittgenstein widely believed, not least by Quine himself, to have been committed to the same view of translation. Taking Quine at his word, I explore why he would think those conversant with the later Wittgensteins remarks on meaning would take the argument about translation in Word and Object in stride. I argue that Quine and Wittgenstein are, for all their differences, reasonably regarded as battling a commonly held philosophical conception of the determinateness of translation. As I read Quine, he had it right when in later work he emphasized that he should be understood as mounting an argument against propositions, and he – and Wittgenstein – are on much firmer ground than usually supposed. Also in an Afterword I point out that Rudolf Carnap, arguably Wittgensteins most important successor and Quines most important predecessor, largely agreed with the argument I attribute to Quine and Wittgenstein in the body of the text, his reservations about many of their views notwithstanding.

Wallace’s reputation as an author naturally outstrips his renown as a philosopher, but Wallace himself wrote that he saw philosophy and fiction as different arms of a single gesture. Among the strains of philosophy with which he dealt directly was determinism. Indeed, his undergraduate philosophy thesis on this subject was published as a stand-alone text in 2010, under the title Fate, Time and Language. This chapter introduces the concepts with which Wallace grapples in this work, as well as tracing the structural persistence of the theme of determinism through his writing. The chapter also argues that Wallace was an accomplished technical philosopher in his own right, but that the strict form of philosophical writing did not lend itself to his tendency toward literal illustrations of complex concepts. In this respect, the chapter argues for Wallace as a literary philosopher in the vein of Wallace Stevens, seeing the creative work as a form of philosophy in itself.

Chapter 3, “Sense and Sensibility and Suffering,” begins from the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the problem of other minds. Wittgenstein, like Adam Smith, positions suffering and pain as the paradigmatic experiences in discussion of other minds. (Austin’s paradigmatic feeling is anger.) This chapter deploys a flattened point of view in terms of what it means to be “insensible,” particularly in relation to the non-human paper and ink fictional characters in an “early” Austen novel. It also provides close reading of Sense and Sensibility through a Cavellian exploration of the philosophical problems of skepticism and acknowledgment. Cavell presents his own reading of late Wittgenstein as one of an intimate frustration with the workings of criteria. Such an experience models a necessarily and potentially productive frustration that modern novel readers often report with the main character/trait pairings of Sense and Sensibility. The chapter promotes the interest of otherwise flat writing as modeling forms of resiliency. These critical practices are especially vital to reading Austen’s fiction before her great success in writing novels of inwardness.

In this chapter, Sanford Levinson examines the practice and implication of appending amendments to the end of the Constitution and inquires how many times the Constitution has amended. The presumptively correct answer number of amendments, at present, is twenty-seven, but those are only textual amendments to the Constitution. “How many times has the United States Constitution been amended” generates what Wittgenstein well described as “mental cramps.” His own belief was that one could cure these cramps by dissolving many traditional questions of philosophy. We could do the same if we adopted a truly minimalist understanding of “constitutionalism” that allowed, for example, anyone designated as the Ruler to rule by absolute discretion. One might proffer this as a variant of Hobbesian constitutionalism, whereby the sovereign people, realizing that nothing else can in fact guarantee them the security they yearn for, delegate their powers to an all-powerful Leviathan. An alternative is what has come to be identified as “liberal constitutionalism,” with the attached meaning of governments that are established through institutions created (and limited) by the constitution itself.

In investigating Being and the Nothing, Heidegger finds himself committed to inconsistent theses. The rational response to this conundrum would seem to be revising his commitments, but Heidegger explores a different option: retaining the inconsistent theses and rejecting the principle of noncontradiction instead. While such a stance would be anathema to most philosophers, it appears to align him with dialetheism, or the view that there can be true contradictions, whose most prominent advocate is Graham Priest. This chapter compares Heidegger’s questioning of the principle of noncontradiction and Priest’s arguments for revising traditional logic. It finds that, despite the superficial resemblance in their aims, Heidegger and Priest have fundamentally opposed conceptions of the status of logic vis-à-vis metaphysics. Heidegger’s conception of logic is actually much closer to Wittgenstein’s, especially as interpreted by Stanley Cavell. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger stress that "attunements" enable us to communicate with one another, and they regard logic as a distillation of the structures within which we make sense. This comparison allows us to understand the importance of anxiety within Heidegger’s thought: According to him, anxiety is an experience that so alters our attunements and their associated logic that we can intelligibly philosophize about Being.

What role does ordinary-language philosophy play in the defence of common-sense beliefs? J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to sceptical challenges to common-sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. This chapter compares Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions and shows that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. It then examines Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated with Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defences of common-sense beliefs are compatible with ordinary-language philosophy.

In his 1925 paper ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, G. E. Moore set out his ‘Common Sense view of the World’ as a series of ‘truisms’ about himself and the world. Moore then claims (1) that our common-sense truisms are largely true, and (2) that we know that our common-sense truisms are largely true. In his writings Moore defends (1) against philosophers who argue that common sense is no guide to the nature of reality by distinguishing between the ordinary meaning of his common-sense truisms (which is unproblematic) and their analysis (which is often doubtful). He defends (2) against sceptics by arguing that the assessment of claims to knowledge has to respect the framework of deep common-sense beliefs which shape our evidence. This chapter argues that Moore’s defence of (1) is not persuasive but that the defence of (2) includes important contributions to epistemology.