The Grice/Dummett Connection: Via McGuinness

Speranza


Brian F. McGuinness was born in Wrexham, Wales, UK, in 1927.

He holds a M.A. from the University of Oxford.

He is Professor of "The History of Scientific Thought" at Università degli Studi di Siena.

During his period as Guest of the Rector McGuinness was able to make final corrections to his selected papers,

"Approaches to Wittgenstein",

Routledge, London 2001/2.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death McGuinness was able to write some general articles.

In one, he describes his ambivalent relation to the Bloomsbury Circle. This appeared in English in Erasmo (Milan).

In the other, McGuinness deals with his intellectual project and its echoes of Goethe will perhaps yield two articles.

McGuinness gave it at a NIAS seminar and profited from the discussion.

Finally during his time in Siena, McGuinness was able to bring nearer perfection a graphic and electronic method of presenting different phases in the composition of a work of Wittgenstein's.

Applied to the earlier version of Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (the so-called Prototractatus, which McGuinness thinks contains in fact two versions) this suggests new ways of looking at what his aim was and how it changed.

An account of this was printed in the proceedings of the Bergen 2001 Conference on "Editing Wittgenstein".

An actual 'edition', which presents some technical challenges, is a project for the future.

Or not.

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Grice said, "Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man" -- but then he was quoting Austin.

Dummett said that he 'regarded' for some time, "no doubt wrongly" as a Wittgensteinian.

Note that 'wrongly' applies to Dummett-2 recollecting Dummett-1. It would be absurd to suggest that Dummett-1 regarded himself wrongly as Wittgensteina, since 'regard' is incorrigible, for Witters -- AND Grice.