Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind

An Analytic Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations #3.1

by P.M.S. Hacker, Gordon P. Baker

Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind is the third volume of a four-volume analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, consisting of two parts. Part 1 is a sequence of fifteen essays that examine in detail all the major topics discussed in Philosophical Investigations ��243-427. These include the private language arguments, privacy, private ostensive definition, the nature of the mind, the inner and the outer, behaviour and behaviourism, thought, imagination, the self, consciousness, and criteria. Published in 1990 to widespread acclaim as a scholarly tour de force, the first edition of this volume of essays provides a comprehensive survey of these themes, the history of their treatment in early modern and modern philosophy, the development of Wittgenstein's ideas on these subjects from 1929 onwards, and an elaborate analysis of his definitive arguments in the Investigations.

The new second edition has been thoroughly revised by the author and features four new essays. These include a survey of the evolution of the private language arguments in Wittgenstein's oeuvre and their role within the developing argument of the Investigations, a comprehensive essay on private ownership of experience and its pitfalls, a detailed examination and defence of Wittgenstein's repudiation of subjective knowledge of one's experience, and an overview of the achievement and importance of the private language arguments. Revised essays examine new objections to Wittgenstein's arguments - which are found wanting- and incorporate new materials from the Nachlass that were not known to exist in 1990. All references have been adjusted to the revised fourth edition of the Investigations, but previous pagination in the first and second editions has been retained in parentheses.

These revisions bring the book up to the high standard of the extensively revised editions of Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Blackwell, 2005) and Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Wiley Blackwell, 2009). They ensure that this survey of Wittgenstein's private language arguments and of his accounts of thought, imagination, consciousness, the self, and criteria will remain the essential reference work on the Investigations for the foreseeable future.

Genres: Philosophy

344 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Peter Hacker was born in London in 1939. He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at The Queen's College, Oxford from 1960-63, obtaining a Congratulatory First Class degree. He was elected to a graduate studentship at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he remained from 1963-65, writing a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of H.L.A. Hart on the subject of 'Rules and Duties'. In 1965 he was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College. In 1966 he completed his doctorate and was granted the D. Phil.

He became a Tutorial Fellow at St John's College in 1966, a post he held until his retirement in 2006, when he was appointed to an Emeritus Research Fellowship at St John's. He was College Librarian 1986-2006, and Keeper of the College Pictures 1986-1998. In 2010 he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at The Queen's College, Oxford.

He was a visiting lecturer at Makere College, Uganda (1968), a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, Pa., U.S.A (1973), a visiting professor at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, U.S.A. (1974), a Milton C. Scott Visiting Professor, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario (1984). He was elected to a British Academy Research Readership in Humanities 1985-7. In 1986 he was again a visiting professor for a semester at Swarthmore College, Pa., U.S.A. He was elected to a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship (1991-4). From 1992 to 2010 he served as a member of the Rothschild Fellowships Academic Committee, Yad Hanadiv, Jerusalem. He was a visiting fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, Italy in 2006. He was a visiting research fellow at the University of Bologna for a semester in 2009. In 2013 he was appointed Professor of philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury for three years.

He is an associate editor of Philosophical Investigations, and of Wittgenstein Studies. From 1997 to 2003 he was an associate editor, 20th century philosophers - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From 1998 to 2003 he was a Trustee of the Wittgenstein papers and Member of the Committee of Editors; since 2003 he has been a member and Secretary of the Advisory Committee of Wittgenstein Editors.