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Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger: The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox Cover

Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger: The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics

Volume 57 (2020): Issue 1

By: Vojtěch Kolman

Open Access

|Apr 2020

Abstract

Starting with Wittgenstein’s remark about his allegedly frequent visits to the performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the paper presents Wagner’s opera – being explicitly an opera about rules and rule-following – as a possible stimulus for the later Wittgenstein’s thinking about language. Besides Wittgenstein’s systematic interests in parallels between music and language, the paper draws on the choice of terminology (such as the comparison of rules to rails) and on Wittgenstein’s own examples of rule-following. More speculatively, the phrasing as well as the solution to what Kripke called Wittgenstein’s sceptical paradox is used as a point of comparison that brings Wittgenstein’s aesthetic innuendos closer not only to mainstream philosophy of language, but due to the antithetical structure of Kripke’s argument also to the broader philosophical and aesthetical tradition, with a particular focus on the great philosophical systems of German idealism.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.28 | Journal eISSN: 2571-0915

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Language: English

Page range: 44 - 63

Submitted on: Mar 10, 2018

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Accepted on: Sep 24, 2019

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Published on: Apr 15, 2020

Published by: Helsinki University Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

rule-following,

Richard Wagner,

sceptical paradox,

© 2020 Vojtěch Kolman, published by Helsinki University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 57 (2020): Issue 1

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