Possibly no topic has received more attention in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein than that of rule following. In this year’s Klagenfurt Workshop, we aim to examine this topic from a fresh perspective by considering how Wittgenstein’s treatment of it is intertwined with three further topics: (1) the relation of sign to symbol, (2) the logical character of human expression, (3) the second person. A treatment of (1) precedes the stretch of sections in Philosophical Investigations standardly singled out as containing the “rule following considerations”—namely, §§185 – 201. (2) is often thought only first to come in for detailed examination in the stretch of sections in Philosophical Investigations standardly singled out as containing the “private language argument”—namely, §§243 – 305. That (3) is central to any portion of the book often goes completely unnoticed.

The shared overarching goal of this year’s Klagenfurt Workshop and this year’s Kirchberg Summer School will be to show how Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule following aims to bring the important and complex interrelations between these three topics into philosophical focus. The Klagenfurt Workshop will seek to do this in connection with the secondary literature on rule following, while the Kirchberg Summer School will involve a close reading of Wittgenstein’s text, focusing on the gradually unfolding dialectical structure of the rule following sections themselves.

The Klagenfurt Workshop will highlight, first, some of the ways in which the interconnection between topics (1) – (3) is overlooked, suppressed, or positively denied in some of the hitherto most influential secondary literature and, second, some of the ways in which it is brought to the fore in less celebrated interventions. We will therefore be focusing on both some of the best-known pieces of secondary literature on rule following as well as on some comparatively neglected ones. After a first session in which we will briefly discuss some of Saul Kripke’s proposals for how to understand this region of Wittgenstein’s thought—which forms the background of most of the articles we will read—we will turn our attention in the first half of the workshop to a series of debates on how to read (and how not to read) Wittgenstein on rule following that may be understood to pit John McDowell and Cora Diamond against Robert Brandom and Crispin Wright. In the second half of the workshop, we will study some articles (by Elizabeth Anscombe, David Finkelstein, Elek Lane, and Edward Minar, among others) that home in on one or another aspect of the three topics mentioned above—(1) the relation of sign to symbol, (2) the logical character of human expression, and (3) the second person.