To download this Course Description, click here.
7th Wittgenstein Summer School
Kirchberg am Wechsel, Lower Austria
August 5 – 8, 2013
Course Description
I. Who should read this document?
If you are planning to attend the 7th Wittgenstein summer school, please read through this document.
II. Website
The website for this year’s meeting of the summer school is http://185-242.blogspot.co.uk or http://185-242.blogspot.com or http://185-242.blogspot.de
The password for entering or moving around from one page of this website to another is this:
1004
On this website, you will find the following documents:
- A schedule of the summer school
- A syllabus for the summer school
- A list of readings
- Cora Diamond’s discussion notes
- A list of participants
Please briefly look through all of these documents before reading on in this document!
III. Schedule and format of the workshop
The workshop is divided up into fourteen sessions, each of which is 90 minutes long. These sessions will meet at the times specified on the schedule and will cover the sections of Philosophical Investigations specified in the syllabus. The language of the seminar will be English. However, all readings will be made available in German in those cases in which German is the original language of the text.
Our plan is to have the two instructors speak jointly at the beginning of each session, introducing those sections of Philosophical Investigations, and raising some questions about them, followed by some open discussion of those sections and questions.
The first and last sessions will be devoted to an introductory overview and a final discussion of the material. The other sessions will each take up a handful of sections, with Cora Diamond and Jim Conant occasionally switching off as the primary introducer of the session.
IV. Readings and background readings
On the “Readings” page of the website you will find under the heading of “Primary Readings”, along with an original German version of the text, two different translations of the main sections on rule following in the Investigations: the earlier Anscombe translation and the more recent Hacker/Schulte translation. These will be our primary texts for the seminar. It is helpful to work with more than one translation in order to bring out some of the difficulty of rendering Wittgenstein’s thought into another language. We have also included a document on the website which provides an overview of the manner in which the later translation modifies the earlier one. Though our primary aim is to understand these sections and not to worry about finer points of translation, occasionally we will find that attending to the latter can assist us in our primary aim.
In the second half of this part of the readings section of the website, under the heading “Background Readings from Primary Sources,” you will find some other texts by Frege and Wittgenstein. These will occasionally be drawn into the discussion in order to allow us to consider questions regarding the manner in which Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy evolved over time. The instructors will presuppose some familiarity on the part of the participants of the seminar with this material as well.
In the next section of this page of the website, we have recommended background readings from the secondary literature on Wittgenstein on rule following. This is followed by a section with material from and on Saul Kripke’s reading of these sections of Philosophical Investigations.
In the fourth section of this page of the website, under the heading “Some useful additional background resources”, there are collected a number of further materials that may be of interest to participants.
With regard to all of the secondary readings to be found here, the point of making them available in this readily accessible way is not to suggest that they present some definitive or even preferred account of Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic at hand. On the contrary, many of them have been selected precisely, first, because they present a particularly lucid presentation of an influential reading (which can serve as a useful foil against which to measure the adequacy of alternative readings), and, second, because they will allow us to have a common background against which to measure our own attempts to make sense of these sections.
