Wittgenstein's On Certainty: Insight and Method

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. On Certainty: Scholarship, Development, and Placement

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 1-13

3. Introduction: Philosophical Therapy

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 15-23

4. Background to On Certainty

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 25-39

5. Philosophical Therapy: A Cure for Our Philosophical Disease

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 41-57

6. Knowledge and Belief

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 59-69

7. The Language-Game of Knowledge, Hinge-Propositions, & Actional Certitude

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 71-85

8. Therapeutic Philosophy: “A Quite Different Method”

   • Robert Greenleaf Brice

   Pages 87-94

9. Back Matter

   Pages 95-104

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This book considers the important twentieth century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his conception of certainty. 


In his work entitled On Certainty, Wittgenstein provides not only a brilliant solution to a previously intractable philosophical problem, but also the elements of an entirely new way of approaching this and similar longstanding, apparently unresolvable, problems. In On Certainty, he re-conceives the problem of radical skepticism–the claim that we can never really be certain of anything except the contents of our own minds–as a kind of philosophical “disease” of thought. His approach to the problem, which is emphasized in the book, is similar to the treatment of disease, has two main goals: (1) bring about an awareness in the philosopher that this kind of extreme skepticism is not a methodological approach to be taken seriously, and, with this awareness, (2) an attempt to replace this radical skepticism with a practical, Common Sense framework. Implicit in Wittgenstein’s approach are a number of strategies found in a contemporary approach to psychotherapy known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). These strategies, along with philosophical methods and scientific practices rooted in the Scottish School of Common Sense, seek to diagnose and treat irrational thoughts and beliefs that often emerge (and re-emerge) in the discipline of philosophy. 


The aim of this book, then, is to provide students of philosophy with the tools necessary to adjust and reshape these irrational, self-defeating thoughts and beliefs into something new, something healthy. 

• Actional Certitude
• Hinge-Propositions
• Non-Ratiocinated
• Non-Propositional
• Wittgenstein
• Descartes
• themes and ideas in certainty
• on certainty
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty
• G.E. Moore
• Cartesian skepticism
• G.E. Moore and Cartesian skepticism
• Textual Analysis

• Department of Sociology, Anthropology, & Philosophy, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, USA

  Robert Greenleaf Brice

Robert Greenleaf Brice is a Full-Time Lecturer in the Philosophy Program at Northern Kentucky University. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Houston and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Michigan State University. He has published a number of articles on Wittgenstein’s application of certainty. He is also the author of Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought.