On Certainty

Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austria)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-02-01
Features: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century in the West. He was the decisive influence on contemporary analytic philosophy after Russell. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) had a significant inspirational role on the emerging Vienna Circle. Since the mid-20th century, with the successive publication of his posthumous works, Wittgenstein's philosophy has garnered increasing attention, and many of his philosophical views have become central topics of heated discussion in the philosophical community. Today, no philosopher discussing a philosophical issue can ignore Wittgenstein's perspective on it. His philosophy has become an essential part of contemporary philosophy. We could even say that without understanding Wittgenstein, one cannot understand contemporary philosophy, just as one cannot understand Greek philosophy without understanding Aristotle. On Certainty (1969) is Wittgenstein's critique of the method of "showing" used by the British contemporary philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958) in his famous paper Proof of an External World (1939) to refute skepticism. In this paper, Moore proposed his own "proof" of the existence of external objects to counter skepticism. By raising his hands and saying "Here is one hand" and "Here is another hand," he concluded that there are things outside the mind. Moore knew that some philosophers would not be satisfied with this method of proof. They demanded logical justification for the premises "Here is one hand" and "Here is another hand." Moore admitted that he could not provide such a proof but still insisted that he could indeed know these propositions to be true. He believed that some truths are known by people but cannot be proven. He had also listed some propositions in an earlier paper Common Sense (1925), claiming that he "knew them to be true," such as "I have a body," "There are others besides myself," and "The Earth existed long before I was born," etc. On Certainty is the result of Wittgenstein's in-depth exploration of the issues of knowledge and certainty in the last 18 months of his life. It is, in fact, a record of his philosophical thinking during that period, reading like a monologue of the author's thoughts. Each note simply records the thoughts of the time by date, without rearranging or organizing them in chronological order. As a result, the same discussion topic is often repeated multiple times, and sometimes the arguments are not without contradictions. Readers often have to flip through hundreds of notes back and forth to clarify the author's perspective on a particular issue, requiring great patience to read this book. However, this effort is worthwhile. As one reads, one occasionally discovers brilliant sparks of thought emerging during the formation of ideas, and the ever-new ideas continuously expand and reshape the reader's horizons, as if allowing them to wander with the author in a new realm of thought. This book is the crystallization of a great thinker's fresh perspective on these difficult epistemological issues of knowledge and certainty. Here, Wittgenstein powerfully critiques the mistaken direction of epistemology since Descartes, which has solely pursued some "complete certainty." It can be said with certainty that On Certainty represents a major advancement in the field of epistemology achieved by 20th-century philosophy.