Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule, edited by Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

An early collection of articles on rule following, collected from a colloquium held in Oxford in Trinity Term, 1979. The papers are by some of the heavy hitters in the debate and are set up in a presentation and reply format. Included in the volume are papers by Gordon Baker, Christopher Peacocke, Crispin Wright, John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Charles Taylor, Phillip Pettit and the late Gareth Evans. Baker makes some mention of Kripke's views in his paper but for the most part Kripke's book was a non-issue at this time. For me, the most interesting papers in the volume are those of McDowell and Blackburn dealing with the consequences of rule-following for ethics. Although the papers are, for the most part, less sophisticated than those of the current debate, it is still a useful volume, if only to see how the discussion of rule following and private language has evolved, or not evolved, as the case may be.


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Last modified March 24, 1998
JAH, Professor
Dept. of Philosophy