Lexington Books
Pages: 132
Trim: 6 x 9½
978-0-7391-7566-8 • Hardback • March 2014 • $91.00 • (£70.00)
978-1-4985-5649-1 • Paperback • March 2017 • $41.99 • (£32.00)
978-0-7391-7567-5 • eBook • March 2014 • $39.50 • (£30.00)
Robert Greenleaf Brice is assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans, and is the author of several articles on Wittgenstein.
Introduction: “Wide Fields of Thought”
Chapter 1: Common Sense Propositions: Moore and Wittgenstein
Chapter 2: Recognizing Targets
Chapter 3: Mistakes and Mental Disturbances: Pleasants, Wittgenstein, and Basic Moral Certainty
Chapter 4: “Aesthetic Scaffolding”: Hagberg and Wittgensteinian Certitude
Chapter 5: “Hinge Propositions,” Actional Certainty, and Religious Belief
Chapter 6: “The Whole Hurly-Burly”: Wittgenstein, Language, and Embodied Cognition
Chapter 7: The Peculiar Inexorability of Mathematics: Wittgenstein and Mathematical Certainty
Chapter 8: Exceeding A Different Scope: Wittgenstein’s Political Views
Chapter 9: “A Sketch of the Landscape”
This brief book of Wittgenstein's On Certainty lives up to its subtitle. The 'fields of thought' it covers are indeed wide; they include epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, religion, cognitive science, mathematics, psychotherapy and even Wittgenstein's political views. Brice successfully shows the broad reach of Wittgenstein's ideas... [This] interpretation is worth understanding, and Brice's book offers a concise introduction to it, as well as some interesting developments of it.
— Philosophical Investigations
Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought is a creative and original work on one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. This will give it a broad audience, including Wittgenstein scholars, anyone in analytic philosophy, and the non-analytic philosopher. It is easily accessible to the newcomer to Wittgenstein. Thus it will have a wide appeal.
— Patrick Bourgeois, Loyola University
"Drawing on recent scholarship that makes the case for the neglected importance of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, this book applies Wittgenstein's strikingly insightful ideas to foundational questions in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy of mind and mathematics. Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought is a stimulating and provocative contribution to Wittgensteinian exegesis."
— Nigel Pleasants, University of Exeter