Von Wright and “Dante’s Dream” Stages in a Philosophical Pilgrim’s Progress

Abstract

The brief “Postscript 1980”, which we find appended to the “Intellectual Autobiography” that von Wright wrote seven years before for the volume dedicated to him in The Library of Living Philosophers,¹ contains some valuable indications about the development of his research beginning from the mid-Seventies. Not published until 1989, and with a bibliographical update that goes up to 1988, Schilpp and Hahn’s volume presents, in effect, a critical history of von Wright’s vast and multiform philosophical activity up to 1974, putting the seal on his achievements in the fields of induction, probability, and philosophical logic (particularly deontics), as well as in the theories of norms, values and intentional action. The theses formulated in Causality and Determinism,² which were, to a large extent, innovative with respect to those in the preceding volume, Explanation and Understanding,³ and to the results attained in the wide-ranging and passionate debate to which that work gave rise, may be considered the terminus ad quem of a systematic reconstruction of von Wright’s thought, documented, in the Schilpp and Hahn volume, by a huge collection of essays dedicated to the various aspects of his reflections and accompanied by the Philosopher’s “Replies”, which were also composed, like the larger part of the critical studies, between 1974 and 1975.⁴