Investigating “Man’s Relation to Reality”: Peter Winch, the Vanishing Shed and Metaphysics after Wittgenstein

Abstract

Peter Winch believed that the central task of philosophy was toinvestigate ‘the force of the concept of reality’ in human practices. Thisinvolved creative dialogue with critical metaphysics. In ‘Ceasing toExist’, Winch considered what it means to judge that somethingunheard-of has happened. Referring to Wittgenstein, Winch argued thatjudgments concerning reality must relate our observations to a shared‘flow of life’. This implies criticism of the form of epistemologyassociated with metaphysical realism. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, asentence has no fixed meaning in isolation, an observation does notconstitute knowledge outside shared human practices.