Wittgenstein: Mind and Language

The essays collected in this volume represent, in a revised version, the pa- pers of the Wittgenstein Conference held in November 1989 at the Univer- sity ofRome La Sapienza to celebrate the centenary ofhis birth. They offer a systematic account ofWittgensteins philosophy ofmind and contribute to illuminate his later conception of perceptive, emotional and cognitive lan- guage. Some of the reasons why it seemed the right time to promote an am- pIe confrontation ofideas on Wittgensteins mature perspective are sufficiently c1ear as they derive from the need to sum up the state of research based on the availability of the Nachla and the publication in the last decade of a conspicuous quantity ofwritings dedicated to philosophical psychology; other reasons are more complex as they depend on the already noticed tendency in the recent epistemological debate to interpret Wittgensteins provocative and controversial theses in a "perverse" way, in a way which has been used as a banner for epistemic relativism, subjectivism, and irrationalism. The intention of this collection of essays is to construct an image of Wittgensteins thought, which is as faithful as possible to his philosophy of mind and language from both a theoretical and exegetical point of view. The book also strives to assess the continuity and internal coherence of the theses developed throughout the different phases of his research.