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Books

The Death of Reality by Lawrence Dawson

Antony Flew scorns Lawrence Dawson’s attack on Wittgenstein.

Subtitled ‘How a conspiracy of fools is imposing unreality and laying claim to the destiny of a nation’ this book contains a wealth of information about the misdoings of the mass media in the USA. However, The Death of Reality is relevant to the interests of readers of Philosophy Now only in as much as the author attributes this deplorable imposition of unreality to the discredit of the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.

Those who, like the present reviewer, were privileged to have studied The Blue Book and The Brown Book in typescript before the publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953, would have found it difficult, not to say perverse, to construe Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insistence that the meaning of a word is its use – as Dawson here construes it – as revealing the essential and inescapable subjectivity of all human language, and consequently as revealing Wittgenstein’s supposed adherence to his own newfangled form of philosophical idealism. It seemed obvious to us then, as it still does to me now, that the ordinary colloquial use of the word ‘chair’ is to refer to members of a somewhat diverse but nevertheless identifiable kind of physical object; viz., chairs.

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