Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the status of a symbol in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It is claimed in the first section that a Tractarian symbol, whilst essentially a syntactic entity to be distinguished from the mark or sound that is its sign, bears its semantic significance only inessentially. In the second and third sections I pursue this point of exegesis through the Tractarian discussions of nonsense and the context principle respectively. The final section of the paper places the forgoing work in (...) a secondary context, addressing in particular a debate regarding the realism of the Tractatus. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 150-174, June 2022. This article offers a reassessment of the main import of Peter Winch’s philosophy of the social sciences. Critics argue that Winch presented a flawed methodology for the social sciences, while his supporters deny that Winch’s work is about methodology at all. Contrary to both, the author argues that Winch deals with fundamental questions about methodology, and that there is something substantial to learn from his account. Winch engages (...) methodological questions without being committed to social ontology. Instead, Winch’s work on methodology is best described as a descriptive metaphysics of social inquiry. This alternative reading clarifies the close link between Winch’s argument for the autonomy of the social sciences and R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophy is split between an inherently a-historical moral philosophy/theory on the one hand and a growing interest in moral history and the historicity of morality on the other. In between these, the very moments of moral change are often left insufficiently attended to and under-theorized. Yet moral change is, arguably, one of the defining features of present day moral frameworks, and thus one of the main things we need to make sense of in moral philosophy. In this paper, (...) I present an account of moral change through the use of three metaphors: the tipping point, the bargaining table and the strong rope. I suggest these as coordinates for the development of a full-blown, historically sensitive conception of morality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores how literary study engages readers’ moral perception and imagination. Although some philosophers discuss reading as a largely solitary activity, this article explores social practices of reading common in English language arts classrooms in secondary schools. The article shows how reading with others can change the quality of moral perception and imagination in literary study. Reading with others, the article contends, can involve an ethic focused on the good of knowing one’s ways of seeing make a difference (...) to others. The article defends social practices of reading by arguing they can broaden and complicate students’ moral perception and imagination by making students accountable to texts, one another, and the wider world. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein has often been called a quietist. His work has inspired a rich and varied array of theories in moral philosophy. Some prominent meta-ethicists have also been called quietists, or ‘relaxed’ as opposed to ‘robust’ realists, sometimes with explicit reference to Wittgenstein in attempts to clarify their views. In this chapter, I compare and contrast these groups of theories and draw out their importance for contemporary meta-ethical debate. They represent countercultures to contemporary meta-ethics. That is, they reject in different (...) ways one or more of the common assumptions that, whilst not universally shared, shape how to understand and engage in contemporary meta-ethical debate. Despite striking similarities, I argue that the ‘quietist’ label has obscured the views it is used to describe, the crucial differences between them, and the challenge that they offer to the predominant culture of meta-ethical enquiry. That challenge is this: there are plausible different ways of understanding and doing meta-ethics to those of the meta-ethical orthodoxy. We ignore such heterodoxy at our own peril. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious and magical practices are often thought to harbour troubling fideistic and relativistic views. Unsurprisingly, commentators are generally resistant to the idea that religious belief constitutes a ‘language‐game’ governed by its own peculiar ‘rules’, and is thereby insulated from the critical assessment of non‐participants. Indeed, on this fideist‐relativist reading, it is unclear how mutual understanding between believers and non‐believers (even between different sorts of believers) would be possible. In this paper I do three things: (i) show why (...) the fideist‐relativist reading of Wittgenstein is not wildly implausible (Sections 1–2); (ii) argue that, despite its initial plausibility, this reading fails to take into account Wittgenstein’s naturalism (Sections 3–4); and (iii) explain what sort of naturalism this is, and how it sheds light on Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief (Sections 5–6). (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the relationship between patients and their health care providers need not be construed as a contract between moral strangers. Contrary to the (American) legal presumption that health care providers are not obligated to assist others in need unless the latter are already contracted patients of record, I submit that the presence of a suffering human being constitutes an immediate moral commandment to try to relieve such suffering. This thesis is developed in reference to the (...) French philosopher Levinas and the Dutch theologian Schillebeeckx. An expanded version of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan serves as test case. (shrink)

Today, the notion of identity is usually linked with ethical-political discussions like multiculturalism, gender or sexual diversity, recognition of plurality, etc. Nevertheless, the flourishing of this vision that interprets “identity” mainly in its plural form (as “identities”) contrasts sharply with the sense that “identity” has had during most of the history of philosophy (in which identity was understood in connection with “unity” or “selfsameness”, not with “diversity” or “otherness”). In order to explain the passage from one notion of identity to (...) the other (a passage mainly made in the last third of the 20th century), we will focus on the reflections made by Ludwig Wittgenstein towards the middle of that century. Our contention is that these reflections open the way to a more plural understanding of human identity, against the many interpreters of Wittgenstein that defend the opposite: that he offered a strong notion of common human identity in his writings, a notion based on the idea of “human nature”. In order to sustain our thesis, we will have to give an interpretation of some key terms of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (like “forms of life” or “natural history”) from a pluralistic point of view; this is the only way of understanding to what extent he is a predecessor of contemporary discussions about plural identities. (shrink)

In this article I offer a novel explanation of Wittgenstein’s claim, in his Tractatus, that to represent the logical form of a proposition would require our being positioned outside of logic. The account here presented aims to exploit a connection, widely noticed, between the logical forms of objects and those of the propositions in which the names of those objects figure. I show that the logical forms of propositions may, on Wittgenstein’s view, be identified with places in logical space, and (...) that places in logical space are reducible to the forms of both objects and their names. I argue, though, that according to Wittgenstein the representation of a proposition’s logical form would require the existence of a place in logical space not so reducible. I conclude that on Wittgenstein’s position, the attempt to represent logical forms cannot, therefore, succeed. (shrink)

This essay introduces a tension between the public Wittgenstein’s optimism about knowledge of other minds and the private Wittgenstein’s pessimism about understanding others. There are three related reasons which render the tension unproblematic. First, the barriers he sought to destroy were metaphysical ones, whereas those he struggled to overcome were psychological. Second, Wittgenstein’s official view is chiefly about knowledge while the unofficial one is about understanding. Last, Wittgenstein’s official remarks on understanding themselves fall into two distinct categories that don’t match (...) the focus of his unofficial ones. One is comprised of those remarks in the Investigations that challenge the thought that understanding is an inner mental process. The other consists primarily of those passages in PPF and On Certainty concerned with the difficulty of understanding others without immersing oneself into their form of life. In its unofficial counterpart, Wittgenstein focuses on individuals, rather than collectives. The official and the unofficial sets of remarks are united in assuming a distinction between understanding a person and understanding the meaning of their words. If to understand a language is to understand a form of life, then to understand a person is to understand a whole life. (shrink)

Peter Winch believed that the central task of philosophy was to investigate ‘the force of the concept of reality’ in human practices. This involved creative dialogue with critical metaphysics. In ‘Ceasing to Exist’, Winch considered what it means to judge that something unheard-of has happened. Referring to Wittgenstein, Winch argued that judgments concerning reality must relate our observations to a shared ‘flow of life’. This implies criticism of the form of epistemology associated with metaphysical realism. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, (...) a sentence has no fixed meaning in isolation, an observation does not constitute knowledge outside shared human practices. (shrink)

Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

This paper critically discusses D. Z. Phillips’ use of literary works as a resource for philosophical reflection on religion. Beginning by noting Phillips’ suggestion, made in relation to Waiting for Godot , that the possibilities of meaning that we see in a literary work can reveal something of our own religious sensibility, I then proceed to show what we learn about Phillips from his readings of certain works by Larkin, Tennyson, and Wharton. Through exploring alternative possible readings, I argue that, (...) although Phillips’ discussions are of considerable philosophical interest, they undermine his claim to be deploying a purely contemplative hermeneutical method. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how we ought to read the aspect‐perception passages in the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus (TLP) in the light of its ethics. I engage with a recent proposal, of Genia Schönbaumsfeld's, that we should replace the TLP account of aspect‐perception with that which Wittgenstein puts forward in the Philosophical Investigations (PI). I show that, far from helping us to grasp the ethical vision contained in the TLP, this proposal obscures it. I go on to draw some conclusions from (...) this as to how to read the TLP in its relation to Wittgenstein's other work. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the Tractatus classifies names into constant names and variable names. A variable name, via the application of the existential quantifier against the background of picturing, picks out and denotes an unspecified object from the range of objects of the form shown by the relevant variable. A constant name labels an object picked out from a scope of the existential quantifier. I also refute two types of attempts to argue that the Tractarian relation between a (...) name and its meaning is not realist, and to explain why it is more reasonable to hold that it is. (shrink)

I argue that given a plausible reading of John Williams’s Stoner (2012 [1965]) the novel throws light on the demands and costs of pursuing a strategy for self-realisation along Platonic lines which seeks unification through the adoption of a single exclusive end in a manner that emulates the Socratic maieutic teacher. The novel does not explicitly argue either for or against such a strategy but rather vividly depicts its difficulties, appeal, and limitations, thus leaving the ultimate evaluation up to the (...) reader. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the lack of interest, among analytic moral philosophers, in the contingencies of our moral present, produces an impoverished moral philosophy, unable to address the moral problems and quandaries of ordinary people. What is needed to remedy this is a broadening of the scope of the moral philosopher’s thought to include a rich attention to moral phenomena of the present. One such phenomenon, attended to by sociologists and critical journalists over the past few decades, is (...) the contemporary proliferating genre of psychologically oriented self-help literature. I display a range of sociological responses to self-help in order to point out aspects of morality that are made visible in these discussions, whereas they often remain invisible in standard moral philosophy. The aim is not to suggest a specific methodology for including such material into philosophical discussions, but rather to urge philosophers to reconsider the range of materials they attend to in their work, in order to produce a more lively engagement with and understanding of contemporary morality. (shrink)

It is generally considered the case that an authorial preface is an author’s opportunity to give the reader a hand in interpreting the work he or she is about to read. It is strange then that the Preface to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922) has often been overlooked. Max Black’s (1964) influential A Companion toWittgenstein’sTractatus, for example, passes over the Preface in silence. And even in the latest published edition of the so-called Prototractatus (1996), the Preface is the only part that appears (...) in hand-written facsimile but is not reproduced in typescript form. Perhaps an argument for not so-reproducing the Preface of the Pro- totractatus in typescript is also an argument for the importance of the Preface: not one letter of this early hand-written text of the Preface is different from the final published edition (I will return to this later). Only of late has the Preface to the Tractatus been seen as having any kind of focal importance.This recent interest in the Preface has largely been spawned by Cora Diamond’s and James Conant’s “New” view of Wittgenstein. This New view (designated as such subsequent to the publication in 2000 of the volume entitled The New Wittgenstein) uses the Preface as a central interpretive tool that, according to this view, shows that the Tractatus takes “a strong anti-metaphysical stand” which is “most explicit in Wittgenstein’s statements in the book’s Preface and concluding remarks.1”The third and fourth paragraphs of the Preface are seen as especially revealing of Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical purpose. (shrink)

In order to understand Hegel's approach to philosophy, we need to ask why, and how, he reacts to the well-known criticism of German Romantics, like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, against philosophical system building in general, and against Kant's system in particular. Hegel's encyclopedic system is a topical ordering of categorically different ontological realms, corresponding to different conceptual forms of representation and knowledge. All in all it turns into a systematic defense of Fichte's doctrine concerning the primacy of us as actors (...) with respect to any knowledge claim or scientific theory. Hegel's limitations of the principle of causality and of the possibility of using mathematical methods in science show, in fact, how a merely compatibilist solution of Kant's third antinomy can be overcome. (shrink)

Claims that some sorts of genuine moral behavior exist in nonhuman beings are increasingly common. Many people, however, remain unconvinced, despite growing acceptance of the remarkable behavioral complexity of animals and despite the admission that there may be significant differences between human and nonhuman moral behavior. This paper argues that the rejection of “moral animals” is misplaced. Yet at the same time, it attempts to show how the philosophical task of exhibiting the possibility of nonhuman moral behavior is often misguided, (...) leaving claims about nonhuman morality unnecessarily exposed to philosophical rejection. (shrink)

This thesis is a critical and comparative study of four commentators on the later Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations. As such its primary aim is exegetical, and ultimately the thesis seeks to arrive at an enriched understanding of Wittgenstein’s work through the distillation of the four commentators into what, it is hoped, can be said to approach a definitive interpretation, freed of their individual frailties. -/- The thesis commences by explicating the position of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. He draws our attention to the (...) ‘sceptical problem’ of how we are to resolve the apparently paradoxical situation that whilst we seem to use language meaningfully, there is no fact about us that constitutes our meaning one thing as opposed to something else, and consequently the possibility of our actually meaning anything seems to evaporate. Kripke interprets Wittgenstein as accepting the validity of the sceptical problem, but seeking to establish that the force of the problem is radically diminished because the justification which it has shown to be unobtainable is actually unnecessary for rule following to take place. -/- McDowell tries to show that Kripke is mistaken when he views Wittgenstein as endorsing scepticism in this way, because he sees Kripke as failing to appreciate a section of Philosophical Investigations which suggests that one ought to reject the sceptical paradox by correcting the misunderstanding which gives rise to it. McDowell reads Wittgenstein’s claim as being that we mistakenly think we are caught in a dilemma which requires us either to endorse the sceptical paradox or to subscribe to a mythological picture of rule following; whereas, so the thought goes, we must reject the entire dilemma. -/- Although McDowell’s criticism of Kripke is essentially correct, he is motivated to that criticism by an incorrect reading of Wittgenstein. Central to this misinterpretation is his failure to note Wittgenstein’s belief that universal scepticism is nonsensical. Winch does much to flesh out the nature of Wittgenstein’s claim here, although he makes the mistake of attributing to Kripke that position which the latter finds in Philosophical Investigations. Despite inheriting this error from Winch, Diamond nonetheless improves on his attempt to characterize the shortcomings of Kripke’s reading as an interpretation of Wittgenstein, enabling the thesis to reach a conclusion about Wittgenstein’s understanding of rule following. (shrink)

While Wittgenstein wrote unconventionally and denied that he was advancing philosophical theses, most of his interpreters have attributed conventional philosophical theses to him. But the best recent interpretations have taken the form of his writing and his distinctive way of doing philosophy seriously. The 1980s have also seen the emergence of a body of work on Wittgenstein that makes extensive use of the unpublished Wittgenstein papers. This work on Wittgenstein's method and his way of writing are the main themes of (...) this literature review.Section 1 surveys Wittgenstein's conception of philosophical method and its reception. Section 2 is a review of recent work on rule-following and the methodological issues it raises. Section 3 concerns research on the WittgensteinNachlass and its implications for the interpretation of his philosophy. (shrink)

Book review of Ian Dearden: _Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? An inquiry into the possibility of illusions of meaning_. London, Rellet Press 2013, 136 pp.

This essay addresses various issues about interpretive social investigation that arise in recent books by Berel Lerner and by Mark Risjord. The general topics considered are the relation between interpretation and explanation, the explanation of action, and alternative rationalities. Part 1 centers on Risjord’s attempt to draw interpretation into the explanatory enterprise, among other things pointing out the limiting assumptions of his account and asking whether social investigation has epistemologically significant practical ends. Part 2 addresses the roles of normativity and (...) rationality in explanations of action, taking up (1) a disagreement between Risjord and David Henderson on normativity, and (2) Lerner’s account of Winch’s appropriation of Wittgenstein’s idea of expressive action. Part 3, finally, endorses Lerner’s and Risjord’s version of the claim that rationality has multiple criteria while also suggesting that intelligibility, not rationality, lies at the heart of many debates on interpretive social science. (shrink)