Reason, objectivity, and human nature are now suspect ideas. Among postmodern thinkers, Richard Rorty has advanced an especially forceful critique of these notions. Drawing partly on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, Rorty contends that objectivity is no more than a metaphysical name for intersubjective agreement, and that “human nature” is an empty category, there being nothing beneath history and culture. Wittgenstein himself, however, recognized within the world's many civilizations “the common behavior of mankind,” without which Rorty's ethnocentric “solidarity” would be inconceivable. (...) This common form of life—the life of those who speak—encompasses countless human activities that presuppose and are interwoven with the concepts of reason and objectivity. (shrink)

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. Pity is not only inefficient; it is also insulting. And besides, how can you pity another when you yourself suffer ignominiously? Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was (...) killed. (E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair). (shrink)

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which (...) are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture. (shrink)

Notwithstanding his own spiritual inadequacies, Wittgenstein has a profound respect for those capable of living a genuinely religious life; namely, those whose “passionate,” “loving” faith demands unconditional existential commitment. In contrast, he disapproves of those who see religious belief as hypothetical, reasonable, or dependent on empirical evidence. Drawing primarily on Culture and Value, “Lectures on Religious Belief,” and On Certainty, in this essay I defend two claims: (1) that there is an unresolved tension between Wittgenstein's later descriptive-therapeutic approach and the (...) implicit normativity of his conception of genuine/passionate religious belief; and (2) that the demarcation between the latter and its pseudo-religious counterpart is itself problematic. To illustrate these claims I argue that apocalyptic Christian fundamentalism presents a significant challenge to Wittgenstein's taxonomy. Despite these shortcomings, however, I conclude by suggesting that his characterization of religious belief as a “passion” or “love” remains valuable. (shrink)

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing (...) philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all. (shrink)

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter-action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be (...) found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)-subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives. (shrink)

Widespread and lasting consensus has not been philosophy's fate. Indeed, one of philosophy's most striking features is its ability to accommodate “not only different answers to philosophical questions” but also “total disagreement on what questions are philosophical” (Rorty 1995, 58). It is therefore hardly surprising that philosophers' responses to this metaphilosophical predicament have been similarly varied. This article considers two recent diagnoses of philosophical diversity: Kornblith and Rescher (respectively) claim that taking philosophical disagreement seriously does not lead to metaphilosophical scepticism. (...) The article argues that their confidence is misplaced in so far as both wrongly assume that ordinary, first-order philosophical practice and second-order metaphilosophical reflection are separate enterprises. We can say that the universe consists of a substance, and this substance we will call “atoms,” or else we will call it “monads.” Democritus called it atoms. Leibniz called it monads. Fortunately, the two men never met, or there would have been a very dull argument. (Allen 1997, 171) When will philosophers learn to be less pretentious and arrogant in their claims? One would imagine that the philosophic experiences of twenty-five centuries would have taught them the fallacy of self-esteem! (Schilpp 1935, 233). (shrink)

The predominant interpretation of Wittgenstein's later remarks on religion takes him to hold that all religious utterances are non-scientific, and to hold that the way to show that religious utterances are non-scientific is to identify and characterise the grammatical rules governing their use. This paper claims that though this does capture one strand of Wittgenstein's later thought on religion, there is an alternative strand of that thought which is quite different and more nuanced. In this alternative strand Wittgenstein stresses that (...) religious utterances and beliefs can come in both scientific and non-scientific varieties. More than that, he claims that the grammar of religious utterances, and the logic of religious beliefs, is often complex – in that individual utterances and beliefs will often be mixed between, indeterminate between, or fluid between being scientific and being non-scientific. This complexity means that it will often be unhelpful to try to pin down one particular grammar or logic for a given utterance or belief. Wittgenstein therefore suggests a new method of grammatical and logical investigation, which is less likely to distort complex grammars or logics by being overly simplistic or rigid. This method is to use simple examples of utterances and beliefs as objects of comparison, so as to illuminate the different aspects of the more complex actual utterances and beliefs under examination. This alternative strand in Wittgenstein's later remarks on religion is a manifestation of a broader strand of Wittgenstein's later thought as a whole, which was first described by Friedrich Waismann, and later developed by Gordon Baker and Oskari Kuusela. The paper concludes by providing examples of religious beliefs which are logically mixed, indeterminate, and fluid, and showing how simple objects of comparison can be used to illuminate them. (shrink)

The word “picture” occurs pervasively in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Not only does Wittgenstein often use literal pictures or the notion of mental pictures in his investigations, but he also frequently uses “picture” to speak about a way of conceiving of a matter (e.g. “A picture held us captive” at Philosophical Investigations§115). I argue that “picture” used in this conceptual sense is not a shorthand for an assumption or a set of propositions but is rather an expression of conceptual bedrock on (...) the model of an organising myth. This reading builds primarily on work by Gordon Baker and Stanley Cavell. (shrink)

The paper develops and addresses a major challenge for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy of the sort increasingly attributed to Wittgenstein. To be substantive and relevant, such conceptions have to identify “diseases of the understanding” from which philosophers suffer, and to explain why these “diseases” need to be cured in order to resolve or overcome important philosophical problems. The paper addresses this challenge in three steps: With the help of findings and concepts from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, it redevelops the (...) Wittgensteinian notion of “philosophical pictures.” Through a case study on seminal versions of familiar mind-body problems, it examines how such pictures shape philosophical reflection and generate ill-motivated but captivating problems. Third, it shows that philosophical pictures are constitutive of “diseases of the understanding,” in a quite strict sense of the term. On this basis, the paper explains when and why philosophical therapy is required. (shrink)

The human brain is subjective and reflects the life of a being-in-the-world-with-others whose identity reflects that complex engaged reality. Human subjectivity is shaped and in-formed (formed by inner processes) that are adapted to the human life-world and embody meaning and the relatedness of a human being. Questions of identity relate to this complex and dynamic reality to reflect the fact that biology, human ecology, culture, and one's historic-political situation are inscribed in one's neural network and have configured its architecture so (...) that it is a unique and irreplaceable phenomenon. So much is a human individual a relational being whose own understanding and ownership of his or her life is both situated and distinctive that neurophilosophical conceptions of identity and human activity that neglect these features of our being are quite inadequate to ground a robust neuroethics. (shrink)

In "Culture and Value" Wittgenstein remarks that the truly "religious man" thinks himself to be, not merely "imperfect" or "ill," but wholly "wretched." While such sentiments are of obvious biographical interest, in this paper I show why they are also worthy of serious philosophical attention. Although the influence of Wittgenstein's thinking on the philosophy of religion is often judged negatively (as, for example, leading to quietist and/or fideist-relativist conclusions) I argue that the distinctly ethical conception of religion (specifically Christianity) that (...) Wittgenstein presents should lead us to a quite different assessment. In particular, his preoccupation with the categorical nature of religion suggests a conception of "genuine" religious belief which disrupts both the economics of eschatological-salvationist hope, and the traditional ethical precept that "ought implies can." In short, what Wittgenstein presents is a sketch of a religion without recompense. (shrink)

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in "With the Grain of the Universe" (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show (...) at least this much: "With the Grain of the Universe" transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my essay may demonstrate what many have feared, that Hauerwas is, in fact, a Christian apologist-though of a very ancient sort. (shrink)

In education issues to do with insider and outsider understanding arise in debates about religious education and about certain areas of research, and in argument about education for international understanding. Here I challenge the dichotomy between insider and outsider, arguing that a more collectivist view of human identity combined with elements of 'the self which we share with our fellows' means that we always stand in part as an insider and in part as an outsider in relation to others. I (...) argue further that 'understanding' needs always to be thought of in the plural, as a matter of 'understanding s ', since members of any community, and even any one individual, have different understandings at different times. Against what may seem the strong case in favour of the superiority or exclusivity of insider understanding, I note the force of claims in a variety of theoretical traditions (expressed notably in the Marxist tradition in the notion of 'false consciousness' and in psychoanalytic attention to the unconscious) concerning the limitations of the exclusively insider perspective and in contrast the particular authority of the outsider perspective. Finally, I acknowledge the discomfort with which people respond to outsiders' claims to understand them, especially where such understanding fails to support their own self-understanding, and identify ethical considerations, which might shape sensitive negotiation between insider and outsider perspectives. (shrink)

The paper reviews the grounds for relativist interpretations of Wittgenstein's later thought, especially in On Certainty . It distinguishes between factual and virtual forms of epistemic relativism and argues that, on closer inspection, Wittgenstein's notes don't support any form of relativism – let it be factual or virtual. In passing, it considers also so-called "naturalist" readings of On Certainty , which may lend support to a relativist interpretation of Wittgenstein's ideas, finds them wanting, and recommends to interpret his positive proposal (...) in On Certainty as a form of "internal rationalism.". (shrink)

Hayek's and Mises's argument for the impossibility of socialist planning is once again popular. Their case against socialism is predicated on an account of the nature of knowledge and social interaction. Hayek refined Mises's original argument by developing a philosophical anthropology which depicts individuals as tacitly knowledgeable rule-followers embedded in a 'spontaneous order' of systems of rules. Giddens, whose social theory is informed by his reading of Wittgenstein, has recently added his sociological support to Hayek's 'epistemological argument' against socialism. With (...) the aid of an interpretation of Wittgenstein which emphasizes his philosophy of praxis , I attempt to 'deconstruct' Giddens's and Hayek's 'picture' of tacit knowledge and rule-following on which their argument against socialism is predicated. (shrink)

Everything about Derrida suggests that he is for a radical reform or transformation of language, whilst Wittgenstein seems to vindicate a fidelity to ordinary language and to want to 'expunge' from language the 'metaphysical use' of words. But just how opposed are they? My contention in this paper is that Wittgenstein does not 'deconstruct', as some critics have rather loosely suggested, because, as we shall see, the expunging of metaphysical use favoured by Wittgenstein does not amount to the deconstruction of (...) metaphysical appurtenance practised by Derrida. However, there are interesting parallels to be drawn between the two philosophers which I shall try to articulate in the course of this paper. The first part provides the background, in Wittgenstein's writings, to his concept of 'metaphysi cal use'; the second is an exposition of what Derrida refers to as 'metaphysical appurtenance' and attendant notions such as those of binary oppositions and of the labouring of concepts; and the third is a summing up and a defence of the thesis that Wittgenstein does not, in any full-bodied sense of the term, 'deconstruct'. Key Words: Derrida • language • meaning • metaphysics • Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge ("can God look into the human mind?"), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part of the (...) latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language-games undergo within it. (shrink)

This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.

Academia’s mathematical metaphysics are briefly explored en route to an elaboration of the qualitatively rigorous requirements underpinning the calibration and unambiguous interpretation of quantitative instrumentation in any science. Of particular interest are Gadamer’s emphases on number as the paradigm of the noetic, on the role of play in interpretation, and on Hegel’s sense of method as the activity of the thing itself that thought experiences. These point toward and overlap with (1) Latour’s study of the metrological social networks through which (...) technological phenomena are brought into language as modes of being that can be understood, and (2) the way that Rasch’s models for measurement comprise a potential beginning for metaphysically astute, qualitatively and quantitatively integrated, mathematical methods in the social sciences. The paper closes with observations on the general problem that is philosophy, the need to remain open to multiplicities of meaning even as clear understandings are sought and obtained. (shrink)

Several authors claim that, according to Wittgenstein, ethics has no particular subject matter and that, consequently, there is and can be no such thing as meta-ethics. These authors argue that, for Wittgenstein, a sentence’s belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter and that ethics is a pervasive dimension of life rather than a distinguishable region or strand of it. In this article, I will critically examine the reasons and arguments given for these claims. In (...) my view, a Wittgensteinian perspective does not exclude the possibilities of doing meta-ethics and of there being a particular subject matter of moral philosophy. These alleged impossibilities are not the distinguishing marks of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy. What distinguishes Wittgensteinian moral philosophy from traditional moral philosophy is, rather, its emphasis on alternative ways of thinking about the subject matter of moral philosophy. (shrink)

The notion of forms of life points to a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach that challenges an influential line in the philosophical tradition. He portrays intellectual activities in terms of a cohesion of things held together in linguistic scenes rooted in the lives of people and the facts of the world. The original inspiration with which Wittgenstein worked on this approach is still relevant today in the recent technological turn associated with AI. He attacked a conception that treated human (...) activities as material to be examined by external models of rationality. Along with other modernists such as Musil, he saw the danger of losing faith in human intellectual and moral capacities. In contrast, Wittgenstein elucidates and substantively defends an idea of forms of life in which the great normative enterprises, from science to the works of the imagination, are based on our individual capacity to take the next step from a normative authority that rests entirely with us, as agents who can claim it in the name of others, in the name of arithmetic, in the name of our native language, in the name of justice, and so on. Forms of life are the place to look to claim this authority over the mistrust we feel compelled to cultivate in our human endeavors. (shrink)

I show that Wittgenstein's critique of G.H. Hardy's mathematical realism naturally extends to Paul Benacerraf's influential paper, ‘Mathematical Truth’. Wittgenstein accuses Hardy of hastily analogizing mathematical and empirical propositions, thus leading to a picture of mathematical reality that is somehow akin to empirical reality despite the many puzzles this creates. Since Benacerraf relies on that very same analogy to raise problems about mathematical ‘truth’ and the alleged ‘reality’ to which it corresponds, his major argument falls prey to the same critique. (...) The problematic pictures of mathematical reality suggested by Hardy and Benacerraf can be avoided, according to Wittgenstein, by disrupting the analogy that gives rise to them. I show why Tarskian updates to our conception of ‘truth’ discussed by Benacerraf do not answer Wittgenstein's concerns. That is, because they merely presuppose what Wittgenstein puts into question, namely, the essential uniformity of ‘truth’ and ‘proposition’ in ordinary discourse. (shrink)

Wittgenstein composed five original musical fragments during his transitional middle period, in which he employs musical notation as a means by which to convey his philosophical thoughts. This is an overlooked aspect of the importance of aesthetics, and musical thinking in particular, in the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We explain and evaluate the way the music interlinks with Wittgenstein’s philosophical thoughts. We show the direct relation of these musical examples as precursors to some of Wittgenstein’s most celebrated ideas (the push (...) beyond the inner/outer picture, the problem of rule-following, and aspect perception). We also show how important broad aesthetic notions such as style and composition concerning the very possibility of philosophizing were to Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the everyday can (...) be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

This article offers a Marxist reading of Wittgenstein and juxtaposes his famous dictum that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’ with the idea of transformative action. I seek to align the later philosophy of Wittgenstein with Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. I advance an unorthodox view interpreting Wittgenstein as an advocate for social and political reform. Wittgenstein’s philosophy encourages us to imagine alternatives and contemplate concrete possibilities for changing the world. The debate operates within the philosophy of education and draws (...) inspiration from related inquiries in political thought and, more specifically, from Marxist connections with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

A prominent trend in moral philosophy today is the interest in the rich textures of actual human practices and lives. This has prompted engagements with other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, literature, law and empirical science, which have produced various forms ofcontextual ethics. These engagements motivate reflections on why and how context is important ethically, and such metaethical reflection is what this article undertakes. Inspired by the work of the later Wittgenstein and the Danish theologian K.E. Løgstrup, I first describe (...) one of the ways in which context plays a central role with regard to ethical meaning and normativity. I then examine how ‘context’ is to be defined, and finally I discuss some of the questions which arise when giving context prominence in ethics – namely, how to delimit the scope of relevant context, the relevant traits of a particular context and what ‘the ethical’ is. (shrink)

Public intellectuals today must be understood in relation to the concept of ‘viral modernity’, characterised by viral and open media and technologies of post-truth that reveal the dramatic transformations of the ‘public’, its forms and its future possibilities. The history, status and role of the public intellectual are constituted by both the network of law in liberal society and above all the primacy of the concept of freedom of expression. The task of public intellectuals was to define, analyse and protect (...) these rights by speaking truth to power. Both Wittgenstein and Foucault as exemplary intellectuals distinguished themselves by problematising truth and showing that truth-telling is an aspect of self-transformation and the intellectual form of life. (shrink)

This paper shows that Wittgenstein's later explorations of the meaning of expressive moral judgements reach far deeper than has so far been noticed. It is argued that an adequate description of the meaning of expressive moral judgements requires engaging in a grammatical investigation that focuses on three interwoven components within specific language-games. First, the ethical reactions expressed by moral words and the additional purpose they may fulfil. Second, the features of the actions which are bound up with moral words and (...) are constitutive of our moral evaluations. And, finally, the forms of life in which expressive moral judgements and moral language-games are embedded. (shrink)

This paper deals with Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, focussing on the infinite rule-regress as featured in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I argue that one of the most salient and popular proposed solutions (championed by John McDowell), which argues that rule-following is grounded in “custom,” “practice” or “form of life, remains unsatisfactory because part of this proposal is the rejection of further “theory” (commonly attributed to Wittgenstein) which seemingly makes it impossible to substantiate the claim of how customs, practices (...) or forms of life ground rule-following. I argue that this conundrum can be solved by introducing Wilhelm Dilthey’s overlooked notion of objective spirit as the objectivated sediment of historical human communality. This proposal allows us to substantiate Wittgenstein’s hints at the connection between rule-following and customs, practices, and forms of life without introducing “problematic theories.” Combining Wittgenstein’s views with Dilthey’s notion of objective spirit results in a solution that is neither skeptical nor straight, but therapeutic. (shrink)

Starting with the puzzlement M O.C. Drury and Rush Rhees felt about Wittgenstein's admonition that believers ought not to pick and choose among the passages of the bible, this paper seeks to clarify the sense of scriptural authority in the Judeo-Christian traditions. This paper argues that (1) picking and choosing, imposing certain criteria external to the Scripture, is grammatically constitutive of accepting the authority of Scripture and (2) such a picking and choosing is guided by a tradition and its grammar. (...) It notes that Wittgenstein's stance on Scripture is itself based on (1) and (2). (shrink)

The questions of how we can understand others and how we can know what they feel, think and sense have repeatedly preoccupied Wittgenstein since the 1930s and especially in his last writings. In this article, the author will tackle these questions by focusing on the other as other or strange. For it is also the strangeness of others, their otherness as such, that makes it difficult and even impossible to recognize and understand their inner life. As she will show, such (...) otherness can be made comprehensible by fictional narratives, in which aspects of others’ lives are related to what is one’s own, i.e., our own inner experience, such that we can find ourselves in them. Moreover, she will argue that this idea of making something comprehensible through fictional narratives has a special methodological relevance for Wittgenstein when it comes to understanding what is ‘one’s own’ in the broadest sense. (shrink)

A lack of consensus persists as to whom exactly the dialogues of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are between: Wittgenstein and an interlocutor? Or perhaps a variety of interlocutors, none of whom can be identified with Wittgenstein himself? I argue here that this lack of consensus is possibly due to an ambiguity in the ordinary concept of “talking to oneself,” and that a new concept of “talking to oneself” appropriate to Wittgenstein's dialogues is needed to properly understand them. Wittgenstein is talking to (...) himself—but he is doing so in the way we talk to other people. (shrink)

I demonstrate that analogies, both explicit and implicit, between Wittgenstein’s discussions of rituals, aesthetics, and aspect-perception, have important payoffs in terms of understanding his notion of a “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) as it applies to phenomena that are not exclusively grammatical in nature. In particular, I argue that a surveyable representation of certain anthropological and aesthetic facts allows us to see, qua form of aspect-perception, internal relations and formal connections, so that the inner nature of a ritual or the solution (...) of an aesthetic puzzle is exhibited. This particular form of seeing both explains why Wittgenstein thought that hypothetical explanations about the origins of a ritual are irrelevant to appreciating its meaning and elucidates his understanding of rituals, which involves seeing “internal relations” and “formal connections.” The upshots of the account for work in anthropology are discussed. (shrink)

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism is, I argue, compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘Be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant X-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘persuasion’, understood as the persuader’s attempt to modify the persuadee’s certainties, has been recently misinterpreted by some scholars. For Persichetti has overlooked the fact that one cannot persuade unintentionally, while Marconi and Perissinotto have not only taken for granted that persuasion consists in the mere transfer of a world-picture or set of certainties to an individual even when she has not alternative or different certainties, but also that education is restricted to persuading or transmitting certainties. After clarifying (...) these misinterpretations, among others, I argue that persuasion is not used for teaching certainties at the outset, but for modifying them when they do not fit the ones expected by the persuader. If it is agreed that education partly consists in transmitting a world-picture, then persuasion constitutes a necessary resource for educators. Lastly, I provide a set of guidelines for teachers to draw attention to the basic aspects of persuasion that they should consider in the classroom. (shrink)

Comparing Buddhist and contemporary analytic views about mereological composition reveals significant dissimilarities about the purposes that constrain successful answers to mereological questions, the kinds of considerations taken to be probative in justifying those answers, and the value of mereological inquiry. I develop these dissimilarities by examining three questions relevant to those who deny the existence of composite wholes. The first is a question of justification: What justifies denying the existence of composite wholes as more reasonable than affirming their existence? The (...) second is a question of ontology: Under what conditions are many partless individuals arranged composite-wise? The third is a question of reasonableness: Why, if there are no composites available to experience, do “the folk” find it reasonable to believe there are? I motivate each question, sketch some analytic answers for each, develop in more detail answers from the Theravādin Buddhist scholar Buddhaghosa, and extract comparative lessons. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 403-425, October 2021.

The lingering mystery of John Rawls’s reflective equilibrium is that its nature is unclear. Rawls at times suggests he is merely describing people’s conceptions of justice, whereas at other times he implies that his reflective equilibrium is a way to justify his conception of justice. Faced with seemingly conflictual passages, most scholars privilege the justificatory ones. However, I argue that this is not an effective strategy because understanding how the descriptive and justificatory aspects of reflective equilibrium fit together is the (...) key to unlocking its nature and actual force. This paper compares Rawls’s method to the philosophical method of later Wittgenstein in his so-called private language argument to argue how the descriptive and justificatory aspects of Rawls’s reflective equilibrium fit together. In my view, both philosophers’ methods are descriptive clarifications of our unclear conceptions. However, their clarification is not just descriptive; they also aim at their readers achieving enlightenment. Importantly, I argue, that enlightenment offers us justification of the conception resulting from their clarification. Hence, their methods are justificatory as well. Finally, I claim that this way of understanding reflective equilibrium makes us realise how Rawls could respond to a prominent objection to it. (shrink)

Purpose. The paper is aimed at analyzing in a comparative way the philosophical conceptions of the human, proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger as the main representatives of the analytic and continental tradition of philosophizing in the XXth century. The theoretical basis of the study is determined by Wittgenstein’s legacy in the field of logical and linguistic analysis, as well as Heidegger’s existential, hermeneutical, and phenomenological ideas. Originality. Based on the analysis of the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, (...) the initial principles of their anthropological concepts in the unity of transcendental preconditions, essential foundations, and correlations to the world in the technosphere are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, despite the difference in the explanation of the peculiarities in the interpretation of the realm of the transcendental and basic characteristic of the inner world of human, both philosophers emphasized the understanding of the human being through the prism of language and the need for anthropologization of science and technology. Conclusions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger developed their own original considerations on the nature of human being, which fully conform to the basic theoretico-methodological principles of their philosophical conceptions. The former focused on how language reflects a human’s world and serves as a means of expressing their knowledge and aspirations. The latter, on the contrary, interpreted the world as a reflection of language that expresses itself through human. As a supporter of analytic methodology and, accordingly, of accuracy in formulations, Wittgenstein came to the concept of the unspeakable in the process of reflection on the being of human over the language. But in Heidegger’s existential discourse, which is full of metaphors and neologisms, being of human is limited by the concept of Nothing. As a consequence, it is noted that the ontological status of values is transcendental to the world according to Wittgenstein, but it is immanent to the world, according to Heidegger. It is argued that the Austrian thinker developed a linguo-psychological approach to the study of human through the prism of the mental, but the German philosopher comprehended the human on the basis of the concept of self in the ontological sphere. It has been demonstrated that both thinkers have pointed to the challenges faced by humans in the development of science and technology while emphasizing the importance of substantiating their anthropological foundations. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 48-69, December 2019.

This paper argues that the problematic of rule following in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Heidegger's analysis of anxiety in Being and Time have analogous structures. Working through these analogies helps our interpretation of both of these authors. Contrasting sceptical and anti-sceptical readings of Wittgenstein helps us to resolve an interpretive puzzle about what an authentic response to anxiety looks like for Heidegger. And considering the importance of anxiety to Heidegger's conception of authenticity allows us to locate in Wittgenstein's later philosophy (...) a covert appeal to something resembling Heideggerian authenticity. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories have largely been framed by the academy as a stigmatised form of knowledge. Yet recent scholarship has included calls to take conspiracy theories more seriously as an area of study with a desire to judge them on their own merits rather than an a priori dismissal of them as a class of explanation. This paper argues that the debates within the philosophy of religion, long overlooked by scholars of conspiracy theories, can help sow the seeds for re-examining our (...) understanding of conspiracy theories in a more balanced and nuanced way. The nature of religious belief is elemental to understanding the epistemological foundations of the conspiracy theorising worldview amidst what we may call ‘conspiratorial ambiguity’. Specifically, R.M. Hare's concept of bliks, which are unfalsifiable but meaningful worldviews, offers a way forward to reframe our approach towards the theory of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

Flagging labor governance in far-flung supply networks has prompted greater scrutiny of instrumental CSR and calls for models that are tethered more closely to accountability, constraint, and oversight. Political CSR is an apt response, but this paper seeks to buttress its deliberative moorings by arguing that the agonist notion of ‘domesticated conflict’ provides a necessary foundation for substantive deliberation. Because deliberation is more viable and effective when coupled with some means of coercion, a concept of CSR solely premised on reciprocal (...) corporate-stakeholder engagement is pre-mature; efforts should first be directed toward the antecedents of reciprocity and how it is to be achieved, and only then does deliberation become a reliably substantive exercise. The resulting account of agonistic CSR is generated through agonistic principles of realism, pro-action, contestation, and countervailence, and illustrated by the Bangladesh Accord. (shrink)