Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty / Edition 1

by Avrum Stroll

Overview

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty. The philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views is the subject of this book. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of skepticism. However, their defenses and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of skepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195084887
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/03/1994
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

University of California, San Diego

Table of Contents

1.	Why Moore and Wittgenstein?	3
2.	Is There Such a Thing as Certainty?	20
3.	Moore	28
4.	Moore's Strategy	40
5.	Moore's Proof of an External World	55
6.	Finding the Beginning	79
7.	The Oddity of Moore's Proof	97
8.	Dreaming, Knowing, Doubting	119
9.	Wittgenstein's Foundationalism	138
10.	Folk Theory, Standing Fast, and Scepticism	160
	Bibliography	183
	Index	187

Editorial Reviews

"It is pleasant to see a highly skilled contemporary put texts from the later philosophy under close scrutiny and mine them for insight, and that outside the bounds of familiar Wittgenstein scholarship....Stroll's arguments are always well motivated and clearly presented."—The Philosophical Review

From the Publisher