Blackburn’s Wittgenstein: The Quasi-Realist

Simon Blackburn has written extensively across a broad range of philosophical areas, including meta-ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Deeply influenced by David Hume, he developed and defended his well-known ‘quasi-realism’ in meta-ethics, a view that has substantially shaped his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Blackburn refers to his own version of Wittgenstein as ‘Blackburn’s Wittgenstein’, in explicit contrast to ‘Kripke’s Wittgenstein’. Wittgenstein figures prominently in many of Blackburn’s discussions of quasi-realism, pragmatism, relativism, and minimalism about truth. In what follows, I shall refer to this figure as the ‘quasi-realist Wittgenstein’ and demonstrate the central features of his moral and semantic outlook.