1 Saying, Showing, Thinking, Meaning, Understanding – the Connecting Threads from Kant to Wittgenstein Terry Pinkard Abstract: In raising the possibility that much modern philosophy might just be “frictionless spinning in the void,” John McDowell pointed to one of the central issues in modern philosophy. Kant raised this issue in his worry that pure reason (as simply logic) might have no a priori content to itself. To that end, Kant proposed that a priori content comes from the non-conceptual form of pure intuitions of space and time, which when combined with the pure forms of thought in one self- consciousness produce the categories that yield synthetic a priori truths, and “friction” was thus secured. Kant’s reliance on space and time as a priori forms of intuition, however, convinced few of his contemporaries. Fichte took up the problem as discarding the idea of a priori forms of intuition and investing all the weight into a theory of self-consciousness that, as it were, begins without friction, goes looking for friction and finds it as its own logical requirement. Hegel argued that Fichte confused something concrete (the “I”) with an abstract principle, and he proceeded to argue in his Science of Logic that pure thought on its own could provide its own “friction”. This led him to argue that in order to do this, the logical form of thought had to push itself to the conclusion that the absolute, as the substance of the world, manifested itself in various ways, but it could not make sense of itself. Like the light of nature that illuminates all but itself, the substance-absolute could only “show itself” (zeigt sich) but could not say what it was. For that, a separate logic of subjectivity (that of “the Concept”) was needed. Wittgenstein followed an analogous path, arguing that the logical form of the world could only show itself and not say anything about itself, and that resulted in his Tractatus being essentially a series of nonsensical propositions. He later changed his mind about this, substituting a notion of “grammar” for the role formerly played by logical form, and this led him to a new conception of the “I” and the “We” that were doing the thinking. At that point, the lines of thought found in German Idealism and Wittgenstein’s thought partially converged only at that point to split apart again. What is at stake only emerges in the reconstruction of these different conceptions of what “friction” requires. Keywords: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Wittgenstein, logical form, form of the world, saying, showing. In Mind and World, John McDowell introduced what has since become the equivalent of a philosophical meme, widely and regularly repeated, having to do with the perceived threat that our conceptual capacities might only be “frictionless spinning in the void.” 1 In McDowell’s story, philosophers’ worry since Kant was that without the deliverances of receptivity (usually taken to come from the senses’ relation to the world), pure spontaneity (pure conceptual activity) would