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Here are the topics, questions, and reading lists for the Part IB History of Analytic Philosophy supervisions in the Philosophy Tripos at Cambridge.

The reading list is suggestive and is ranked by importance. It is not feasible to do all the readings every week. However, it should be possible to do all the primary readings every week. Try to read the secondary readings as well for at least one week. Below the essay questions is a more extensive list of common exam questions and the primary material which will be examined.

Essay 1: Frege

  • Does it matter whether Julius Caesar is a natural number or not?

Primary readings:

  • Potter, M. 2020. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Chapters 10, 12 and 13.
  • §§22–24 and §§51–69 from The Foundations of Arithmetic.
  • Kitcher, P. 1979. Frege’s epistemology. Philosophical Review 88: 235–262.

Secondary readings:

  • Heck, R. 1999. Frege’s theorem: an introduction. Harvard Review of Philosophy 7: 56–73.
  • Heck, R. 1997. The Julius Caesar objection. In Language, Thought, and Logic. §§I–III.

Essay 2: Frege and Wittgenstein

  • ‘The horse Bucephalus is an object, while the concept horse is a concept’. Explain the problem of the concept horse as Frege saw it and discuss the solution that Wittgenstein proposed in terms of the saying-showing distinction.

Primary readings:

  • Potter, M. 2020. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Chapter 16.
  • Frege, G. 1891. Function and concept.
  • Frege, G. 1892. On concept and object.
  • Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §§4.126–4.128

Secondary readings:

  • Parsons, T. 1986. Why Frege should not have said “the concept horse is not a concept”. History of Philosophy Quarterly 3: 449–465. [Ignore section IX].
  • Anscombe, G.E.M. 1971. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Fourth edition. Chapter 7 and the first three paragraphs of chapter 9

Essay 3: Russell and Wittgenstein

  • What did Wittgenstein think was wrong with Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment? Was Wittgenstein’s own theory any better?

Primary readings:

  • Potter, M. 2020. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Chapter 40 and 56 (esp. ‘Judgment’).
  • Russell, B. 1910. On the nature of truth and falsehood. In Russell’s Collected Papers, volume 6.
  • Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §§5.54–5.5423

Secondary readings:

  • Griffin, N. 1985. Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. Philosophical Studies 47: 213–247.
  • Hylton, P. The nature of the proposition and the revolt against idealism. In his Propositions, Functions and Analysis (link). [Read from page 17, the paragraph starting ‘Thus far I have been…’ until page 24, ‘necessary structure of the (knowable) world.’]
  • Pears, D. 1977. The relation between Wittgenstein’s picture theory of propositions and Russell’s theory of judgment. Philosophical Review 86: 177– 196

Essay 4: Wittgenstein

  • Is it clear that ethics cannot be put into words?

Primary readings:

  • Potter, M. 2020. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Chapters 61 and 62.
  • Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §§6.4–7.
  • Wittgenstein, L. A lecture on ethics.

Secondary readings:

  • McGuinness. 1966. The mysticism of the Tractatus. Philosophical Review 75: 305–328.
  • Diamond, C. 2000. Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Read.

Primary materials and exam questions

Frege

Primary material

  • Begriffsschrift, Preface, §§1-12 and 23-4 (1879)
  • The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)
  • ‘Function and concept’ (1891)
  • ‘On sense and reference’ (1892)
  • ‘On concept and object’ (1892)
  • The Frege-Hilbert correspondence
  • ‘Thoughts’ (1919)

Common exam questions

  • ‘The horse Bucephalus is an object, while the concept horse is a concept’. Why did Frege disagree? Was he right?
  • Can axioms succeed as implicit definitions?
  • Was Frege correct to ascribe cardinal numbers to concepts rather than to ‘external things’?

Russell

Primary material

  • The Principles of Mathematics, chs. IV-VIII (1903)
  • ‘On denoting’ (1905); ‘On the nature of truth’ (1906)
  • ‘Mathematical logic as based on the theory of types’ (1908)
  • ‘On the nature of truth and falsehood’ (1910)
  • ‘Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description’ (1911)
  • ‘The relation of sense data to physics’ (1914)

Common exam questions

  • What are Russellian sense data? Can they be used as a basis for explaining our knowledge of the external world?
  • Why did Russell adopt the multiple relation theory of judgment? Was he right to do so?
  • Why did Russell aim to construct things from appearances? Did he succeed?

Wittgenstein

The primary material is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

Common exam questions

  • How realist is the Tractatus?
  • ‘All propositions are of equal value.’ (TLP, 6.4) Discuss.
  • ‘It is clear, however, that “A believes that p”, “A has the thought p”, and “A says p” are of the form “‘p’ says p”.’ (TLP, 5.542) Discuss.
  • Critically assess Wittgenstein’s account of objects and their forms in the Tractatus.
  • What remains when the ladder is thrown away?
  • Is ethics nonsense?

Ramsey

Primary material

  • ‘The foundations of mathematics’(1925)
  • ‘Universals’ (1925)
  • ‘Facts and propositions’ (1927)

Common exam questions

  • Was Ramsey right to think there is ‘no separate problem of truth’?
  • Was Ramsey correct to argue that no fundamental classification of objects can be based on the distinction between the subject and predicate of a proposition?

Common comparative exam questions

  • Compare and contrast Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of empty singular terms such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’.
  • Can Russell’s Gray’s Elegy argument be made to work against the Fregean notion of sense?
  • Compare the views on the particular/universal distinction of two or more of the authors set for this paper.
  • Compare the views on identity of two or more of the authors set for this paper.
  • What did Wittgenstein think was wrong with Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment? Was Wittgenstein’s own theory any better?

Thanks to Wouter Cohen for help with this page.