Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy (History of Analytic Philosophy)

Description

This collection of essays explores Friedrich Waismann's philosophical path from his key position in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, through his long cooperation with Ludwig Wittgenstein, to his signature works on open texture and analyticity among the first ordinary language philosophers. At Oxford Waismann published a remarkable series of criticisms of verificationism, reductionism, the analytic-synthetic distinction, philosophy's therapeutic or clarifying role, and the very idea of ordinary language philosophy. His notion of open texture states that our concepts are only defined to certain more or less familiar ends, while open to surprising but yet conceivable applications. Open texture allows for the continuous development of language to accommodate social change and scientific discoveries. Several of Waismann's original papers, his contributions to ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, metaphilosophy, his impact on legal philosophy, his theory of action and philosophy of mathematics, his notion of language strata, his trailblazing work on fiction and criticism of the descriptivist theory of proper names as well as his philosophical analysis of Kafka's Trial, are here evaluated for the very first time