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This book explores the idea that there is a certain performativity of thought connecting Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On this view, we make judgments and use propositions because we presuppose that our thinking is about something, and that our propositions have sense. Kant's requirement of an a priori connection between intuitions and concepts is akin to Wittgenstein's idea of the general propositional form as sharing a form with the world.
Aloisia Moser argues that Kant speaks about acts of the mind, not about static categories. Furthermore, she elucidates the Tractatus' logical form as a projection method that turns into a so-called 'zero method', whereby propositions are merely the scaffolding of the world. In so doing, Moser connects Kantian reflective judgment to Wittgensteinian rule-following. She thereby presents an account of performativity centering neither on theories nor methods, but on the application enacting them in the first place.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Kant's Acts of the Mind and Wittgenstein's Projection Method.- Part I Kant and the "I Think" as the Facticity of Thought.- 2.A Connection Between Thought and Thing A Priori.- 3. Judging as Connecting Thought and Thing.- 4. Synthesis and Bringing the Manifold of Intuition into an Image.- Part II Wittgenstein's Picture Theory as a Method of Projection.- 5. The Form of the Proposition.- 6. Projection Method.- 7. Logic Degree Zero.- Part III Kant's Schematizing and Wittgenstein's Picturing or Projecting as Performativity.- 8. Kant, Synthesis, and Schema.- 9. Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Use.- 10. Performativity and the Act of Thinking.- 11. Conclusion.
About the author
Aloisia Moser is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Catholic Private University in Linz, Austria
