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Articles

Wittgenstein & Occam: A Philosophical Conversation

Christian Erbacher and Lu Jiang imagine a meeting between a modern and a medieval philosopher.

Although William of Occam (1285-1349) is one of the very few authors explicitly mentioned in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the relation of Wittgenstein’s and Occam’s philosophy has not been extensively investigated. This article brings the two thinkers into a dialogue in which they mutually illuminate their views on the logical analysis of ordinary language, taking into account their conception, fundamental to both philosophers, of logic as an activity. The dialogue is taken with very few alterations from Occam’s Summa Logicae and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Setting:

Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian army at the beginning of August 1914, only ten days after the outbreak of World War I.

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