The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk

(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)

by

Michel ter Hark (University of Groningen)

on

'Wittgenstein on the Necker cube: shifting aspects between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.'

Tuesday, 22 March, 2010, 4.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412

ABSTRACT

This talk is about the relation between a very specific remark in the Tractatus, 5.5432 about seeing an ambiguous 3D cube, and Wittgenstein's later writings on aspect seeing. In my talk I argue in the first place that a sound reading of 5.5432 does not commit Wittgenstein to a form of (sense datum) realism, as e.g. Hintikka supposes. Instead I argue that at 5.5432 Wittgenstein applies his theory of the proposition to dissolve problems in the theory of perceptual judgements in a way analogous to his critique of Russell's theory of judgement. In the second part of my lecture I try to explain why Wittgenstein was so much interested in this and related phenomena. The answer to this question will reveal a 'therapeutic' or 'antimetaphysical' interest. There is something about such phenomena that in particular triggers the philosophical mind to hypostatise 'objects' which serve to explain them. Finally, I argue that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein himself succumbed to this explanatorily illusion and that this is part of the motive of his later writings on the subject.