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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

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192230

Other minds

Godfrey Vesey

pp. 229-242

Abstract

There is a passage in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations1 in which he compares an answer that may be given to a philosophical question about someone else's pain with an answer that may be given to a question about the meaning of "It is 5 o"clock on the sun". Wittgenstein does not compare other answers that may be given to the two questions. And he does not compare the questions themselves in respect of what lies behind them — making them ones which we can, or cannot, easily 'see through" — or in respect of how they should be answered. Yet there is material in what he says elsewhere in the Investigations and in other of his later writings2 for a many-sided and, I think, useful development of the comparison. Anyway, that is what I shall attempt in this essay.3

Publication details

Published in:

Vesey Godfrey (1991) Inner and outer: essays on a philosophical myth. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 229-242

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-21639-0_17

Full citation:

Vesey Godfrey (1991) Other minds, In: Inner and outer, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 229–242.