Seminar cercetare DFT ‘Can Descriptions be Non-Hypothetical? Thought Experiments from Wittgenstein’s Manuscripts’

‘In manuscripts around 1930, Wittgenstein characterizes ordinary language as hypothesis-laden and envisages what he calls a “phenomenological language”, which would provide non-hypothetical descriptions of experience. I will first reconstruct that under-explored project, which illuminates the transition from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. Then I will discuss several thought experiments which Wittgenstein devices in order to test the viability of a phenomenological language. The methodological moral I advance is that the price to be paid for the attempt to provide non-hypothetical descriptions is one’s estrangement from intelligibility.’