Silver Bronzo was Assistant Professor at HSE University, Moscow, between 2016 and 2022. His research interests focus on the Wittgenstein, the History of Analytic Philosophy, and foundational issues in contemporary philosophy of language.
Selected Publications
- Wittgenstein on Sense and Grammar. In the series Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. by David Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- “Thought, Language, and Expression in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Forthcoming in J. Conant and G. Nir (eds.), Early Analytic Philosophy: Essays on Its Origins and Transformations, Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming.
- “Propositional Complexity and the Frege-Geach Point.” Synthese 198: 3099-3130, 2021.
- “On the Idea and Ideology of Analytic Philosophy.” Iride (2): 251-361, 2021.
- “Actions, Products, and Truth-bearers: A Critique of Twardowskian Accounts.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50(3): 297-312, 2020.
- “Truth-Bearers in Frege and Wittgenstein.” Analiza i Egzystensja 47: 31-53, 2019.
- “Forms of Life and Social Critique: Pasolini after Wittgenstein.” In A. Siegetsleitner et al. (eds.), Crisis and Critique: Philosophical Analysis and Current Events. Contributions of the 42nd International Wittgenstein Symposium, pp. 25-27. Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Wittgenstein Society, 2019.
- “Demystifying Meaning in Horwich and Wittgenstein.” In J. Conant and S. Sunday (eds.), Wittgenstein on Objectivity, Intuition, and Meaning, pp. 164-184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- “Frege and Propositional Unity.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25(4): 750-771, 2017.
- “Wittgenstein, Theories of Meaning, and Linguistic Disjunctivism.” European Journal of Philosophy 25(4): 1340-1363, 2017.
- “Frege on Multiple Analyses and the Essential Articulatedness of Thought.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5(10): 1-34, 2017.
- “Resolute Readings of the Tractatus,” co-authored with J. Conant. In H.-J. Glock and J. Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, pp. 175-194. Oxford: Blackwell, 2017.
- “Bentham’s Contextualism and Its Relation to Analytical Philosophy.” Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy 2(8): 1-41, 2014.
- “Cora Diamond. Philosophy in a Realistic Spirit: An Interview by Silver Bronzo,” Iride (2): 239-282, 2013.
- “Atomism, Contextualism, and the Burden of Making Sense: Cavellian Themes in the Tractatus,” Wittgenstein-Studien 4: 95-108, 2013.
- “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics: An Introduction to the Literature,” Wittgenstein-Studien 3: 45-80, 2012.
- “Context, Compositionality and Nonsense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” In R. Read and M. Lavery (eds.), Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, pp. 84-111. London: Routledge, 2011.
Recent Courses
PHIL 20121/30121 The Philosophy of Language of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
This course examines the conception of language of the early Wittgenstein though the lens of six common distinctions in the philosophy of language: (1) meaningful sentences vs. meaningful words; (2) semantic content vs. syntactical form; (3) meaningful signs vs. signs; (4) act vs. content; (5) forceful vs. forceless content; and (6) language vs. thought. We will see that the Tractatus challenges familiar ways of construing these distinctions. Specifically, it rejects the view that the second term of each distinction is the conceptually more basic case, while the first term is a composite phenomenon obtained by adding some extra ingredient to the second term. Rather, the second term of each pair, insofar as it is a genuine phenomenon, presupposes in various different ways the other term (sometimes because it is only an abstraction, sometimes because it is a derivative phenomenon, and sometimes because its specification involves derivative notions), or has instead exactly the same status (as in the case, arguably, of language and inner thought). This means that the Tractatus opposes the idea that the full-blown phenomenon of language (that is, language used by some speaker to say something that makes sense) can be reconstructed from a number of more fundamental ingredients. Rather, the full-blown phenomenon of language is the starting point in terms of which each of the aforementioned distinctions, if at all defensible, can be properly vindicated. (B) (IV)
There are no prerequisites for this course, but some previous exposure to the philosophy of language or the history of analytic philosophy is recommended.