Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Persons, character and morality
- 2 Moral luck
- 3 Utilitarianism and moral self-indulgence
- 4 Politics and moral character
- 5 Conflicts of values
- 6 Justice as a virtue
- 7 Rawls and Pascal's wager
- 8 Internal and external reasons
- 9 Ought and moral obligation
- 10 Practical necessity
- 11 The truth in relativism
- 12 Wittgenstein and idealism
- 13 Another time, another place, another person
12 - Wittgenstein and idealism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Persons, character and morality
- 2 Moral luck
- 3 Utilitarianism and moral self-indulgence
- 4 Politics and moral character
- 5 Conflicts of values
- 6 Justice as a virtue
- 7 Rawls and Pascal's wager
- 8 Internal and external reasons
- 9 Ought and moral obligation
- 10 Practical necessity
- 11 The truth in relativism
- 12 Wittgenstein and idealism
- 13 Another time, another place, another person
Summary
Solipsism and the Tractatus
Tractatus 5.62 famously says: ‘what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.’ The later part of this repeats what was said in summary at 5.6: ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. And the key to the problem ‘how much truth there is in solipsism’ has been provided by the reflections of 5.61:
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also its limits.
So we cannot say in logic ‘the world has this in it, and this, but not that’.
For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well.
We cannot think what we cannot think; so we cannot think what we cannot say either.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moral LuckPhilosophical Papers 1973–1980, pp. 144 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981
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