Activiteit: Talk or presentation at a workshop/seminar
Description
In this talk our guest reseacher Vincent Vincke will explore Wittgenstein's suggested analogy between the arbitrariness of mathematics and logic and the arbitrariness of ethics.
Wittgenstein wrote very little on ethics during his lifetime, and the few remarks he made on the matter are notoriously scarce and dense. As a result, the scholarship surrounding his (meta)ethical thought has inevitably been plagued by issues concerning both the assessment of its continuity and its reconstruction. One of the very few glimpses we get of his thoughts on the matter appear in Rush Rhees’s (2015) transcription of a conversation both had on September 12, 1945. In this conversation Wittgenstein suggests an analogy between the “arbitrariness of mathematics and logic”, and the arbitrariness of ethics. The aim of this talk is to explore this suggested analogy.