"History of Logic" Seminar Series - Talk: N. Milkov, "Lotze and Wittgenstein" (29.05.2025)
antpic...@gmail.com
I am happy to announce the eighth session of our History of Logic seminar series. The session will be held on Thursday, May 29, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm Central European Summer Time (CEST). It will be held online, via Zoom. The Zoom link is available only to subscribers of the Seminar's mailing list. Please write to historyofl...@gmail.com if you are interested.
On this occasion, we will host a talk by Nikolay Milkov, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Paderborn. His research runs across the History of Analytic Philosophy, the History of the Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophy of Mind, with a special focus on Lotze, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. He translated the Tractatus and other writings by Wittgenstein into Bulgarian. He recently authored, among other works, Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition (2020) and Hermann Lotze's Influence on Twentieth Century Philosophy (2023).
His talk is titled Lotze and Wittgenstein. Here is a short abstract:
Wittgenstein’s philosophical work has often been judged as constituting a decisive break with the philosophical tradition. Georg Henrik von Wright, for example, wrote that it “is unlike anything I know in Western thought and in many ways opposed to aims and methods in traditional philosophy”. In this paper I am going to show, first, that Wittgenstein was indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, through his philosophy teachers Frege and Russell. Secondly, I’ll demonstrate that there is a series of related points in Lotze’s philosophy and that of Wittgenstein. Lotze initiated a logical turn in philosophy, connecting thinking to two “logically different” domains, validating and becoming. Starting from this insight, he introduced —or simply revived— a number of seminal philosophical concepts: (i) the concept of value in logic —its most notorious successor being the concept of truth-value; (ii) the anti-psychologism in logic; (iii) the context principle; (iv) the objective content of judgment; (v) the idea that perception features objective content; (vi) the idea of concept/judgment as a function; (vii) the concept of state of affairs (Sachverhalt). In this way Lotze decisively influenced the two leading philosophical movements of the 20th century, analytic philosophy and phenomenology.
More information can be found on our website. Please feel free to share the news and invite other scholars to subscribe to this mailing list, and do not hesitate to contact historyofl...@gmail.com with any questions you might have.
Kind regards,
Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona