Choreography and Ceremony: The Artful Side of Action "Actions" are normally thought of as taken by individuals. But to understand their quality, it is not enough to classify them from the perspective of individual psychology (rational vs. emotional, technical vs. artistic, etc.). We need to grasp their relation to those forms of collective life which have a historical existence independent of specific individual action (institutions, the conventions of social gathering, the organizing principles of games, architecture, music, ritual, etc.). This paper (...) focuses on what characteristics such forms of collective life share, not what seems to separate them (eg. into sacred vs secular, technology vs creative art). The main features emphasized are their choreography, that is their enactment within commonly understood patterns of a spatial and temporal kind, as well as rules of interactive movement; and their ceremonial character, something which can be found in simple situations such as a conversation or a meal, though much more intensely in major religious ritual. A particularly resonant image for these enactments of social life is the dance. Because there is a ceremonial aspect to all social interaction, the paper argues that individual action, necessarily oriented to the social context, always has an "artful" side (however habitual or technical). The paper draws on the writings of Wittgenstein on action, and those of Collingwood on language and art, to shape the argument. Illustrations are provided of the "artful" employment of language (especially by actors on the stage), the "artful" side of material culture, and from the author's own ethnographic studies, the significance of dance among Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophical methods to therapies has been interpreted in highly different ways. I identify the illness, the patient, the therapist and the ideal of health in Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and answer four closely related questions concerning them that have often been wrongly answered by commentators. The results of this paper are, first, some answers to crucial questions: philosophers are not literally ill, patients of philosophical therapies are not always philosophers, not all philosophers qualify as therapists, the therapies are (...) not necessarily to be thought of as psychological therapies and the ideal of health does not consist in the end of philosophy. Second, the paper shows that the comparison has had a misleading effect, because properties of therapies have been illegitimately projected onto the philosophical methods advanced by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

It is often assumed that moral questions ask for answers in the way other questions do. In this article, moral and non-moral versions of the question ‘Should I do x or y?’ are compared. While non-moral questions of that form typically ask for answers of the form ‘You should do x/y’, so-called ‘narrow answers’, moral questions often do not ask for such narrow answers. Rather, they ask for answers recognizing their delicacy, the need for a deeper understanding of the meaning (...) of the alternatives and the fact that moral decisions are, as Gaita formulates it, ‘non-accidentally and inescapably’ the agent’s to make. In short, moral questions often ask for a kind of answer that is highly different from the kind of answer non-moral questions ask for. In presupposing the ideal answer to a moral question to be a narrow answer, moral philosophers have tended to overlook this. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the claim by Schneider and Butcher (2000) that it makes little sense to criticise the use of performance-enhancing drugs as ?dehumanising? (as, for example, Hoberman does (1992)) because we are unable to give a satisfactory account of what it is to be human. Schneider and Butcher (2000, 196) put this as follows: ?The dehumanisation argument is interesting but incomplete. It is incomplete because we do not have an agreed-upon conception of what it is to be human. (...) Without this it is difficult to see why some practices should count as dehumanising.? The paper begins by considering J.L. Austin's (1962) treatment of the word ?real?. By transposing ideas from Austin to the terms ?dehumanise? and ?human? I argue that (a) In the pair ?dehumanise? and ?human?, the term ?dehumanise? is dominant; (b) We cannot understand ?dehumanise? and ?human? independently of either the context of their use or the contrast that is drawn in their use; (c) Either one of these is sufficient to understand the terms; (d) ?Dehumanise?, ?human? and their cognates are not univocal; we can have no recourse to exceptionless accounts of the meaning of such terms. The importance of context is developed further by consideration of an example from the work of Charles Travis (2005), and the issue of exceptionless accounts of the meaning of words is addressed through an application of Gordon Baker's (2004) characterisation of Wittgenstein's uses of the term ?metaphysical? to Miah's (2004) treatment of human-ness. I argue that Miah's conception of human-ness exhibits all the forms of metaphysical use of terms (in this case the term ?human?) outlined by Baker (2004). The article attempts to clarify some objections to the use of performance-enhancing drugs and the prospect of genetic modification of athletes by sketching an overview of possible concrete uses of ?dehumanise?. The focus of the paper, however, is on ?making sense of what we (are inclined to) say ? [rather than] making explicit what underlies what we say? (McFee, 1993/4, 115). (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)

In recent years, philosophers have used expressions of Wittgenstein’s (e.g. “language-games,” “form of life,” and “family resemblance”) in attempts to conceive of the discipline of philosophy in a broad, open, and perhaps global way. These Wittgenstein-inspired approaches indicate an awareness of the importance of cultural and historical diversity for approaching philosophical questions. While some philosophers have taken inspiration from Wittgenstein in embracing contextualism in philosophical hermeneutics, Wittgenstein himself was more instrumental than contextual in his treatment of other philosophers; his focus (...) in his writings was on his own philosophical problems. Does this mean that Wittgensteinian philosophy is a poor resource after all for comparative, cross-cultural, or globally-engaged philosophy (i.e. if it is properly Wittgensteinian)? In this article, I examine the relevance of Wittgenstein to contextually-sensitive philosophy through studies of his conceptions of history and culture, his interest in Spengler’s philosophy of history, and recent scholarship by Hans-Johann Glock and Hans Sluga on the place of contextualism in Wittgenstein’s analysis of philosophical problems. Ultimately, this article advances the view that there are strong resources in Wittgenstein’s philosophy for those seeking a more globally-engaged approach to the field. (shrink)

The article shows how in Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu relies on a kind of philosophical myth in his attempt to dispel structuralist accounts of action. Section 2 is a summary of Bourdieu’s use of the concept of habitus against intellectualism and structuralism. Schatzki’s criticism of Bourdieu from a purportedly Wittgensteinian perspective is also examined. Section 3 relates Bourdieu’s use of habitus to a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in action. (...) Section 4 shows how McDowell’s rejection of foundationalist elements in Dreyfus’s account of action also raises problems for Bourdieu’s account of action. Diamond’s recent criticism of Winch is shown to have an interesting connection to this debate. (shrink)

We often speak about religious experience, and sometimes we speak about metaphysical experience. Yet we seldom hear about philosophical experience. Is philosophy purely a matter of theories and theses, or does it have an experiential aspect? In this article, I argue for the following three claims. First, there is something we might call philosophical experience, and there is nothing mystical about it. Second, philosophical experiences are expressed in something quite similar to what Kant called "aesthetic judgements." Third, philosophical experiences are (...) expressed by using words in what Wittgenstein called "secondary sense." Finally, I try to show the educational significance of pursing philosophical experiences. Through articulating them one might find one's ground, and through articulating them in a less private and more universal form one might raise oneself to universality. Thus, in expressing philosophical experiences one aspires to speak in a universal voice. (shrink)

Although the expression “form of life” and its plural “forms of life” occur only five times in Philosophical Investigations, and generally few times in his works, it is commonly agreed that this is one of the most relevant issues in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Starting from the analysis of the contexts in which Wittgenstein makes use of this concept, the paper focuses on the different interpretations that have been given in secondary literature, and proposes a classification based on two axes of (...) debate: the monistic versus pluralistic interpretation, and the empirical versus transcendental interpretation. After placing some well-known readings in the resulting scheme, an attempt will be made to offer an evolutionary reading of Wittgenstein’s own ideas about forms of life. It will be argued that the empirical and plural view that seems characteristic of his writings in the Thirties, slowly appears to turn towards a monistic view, sometimes with transcendental tones, although within a pragmatic perspective. This turn remains nevertheless rooted in Wittgenstein’s general attitude towards philosophy intended as a conceptual inquiry with clarifying and therapeutic aims. (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)

This article analyses the Italian philosopher and anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s The Land of Remorse from a philosophical viewpoint. After having presented the main Demartinian concepts (e.g. ‘presence’ and ‘crisis of presence’) and examined the phenomenon of ‘tarantism’ (that is a magical-religious ritual practiced in southern Italy), the author interprets ‘ritual symbols’ as useful ‘fictions,’ which permit to resolve the problem of ‘indeterminacy’ (that refers to vague objects and unknown events), and rescue the human Self from psychological and existential crisis.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 120 - 142 This paper aims to contribute to the debate over epistemic versus non-epistemic readings of the ‘hinges’ in Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_. I follow Marie McGinn’s and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s lead in developing an analogy between mathematical sentences and certainties, and using the former as a model for the latter. However, I disagree with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations concerning Wittgenstein’s views of both relata. I argue that mathematical sentences as well as certainties are (...) true and are propositions; that some of them can be epistemically justified; that in some senses they are not prior to empirical knowledge; that they are not ineffable; and that their primary function is epistemic as much as it is semantic. (shrink)

Explores the stable core of Wittgenstein's philosophy as developed from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

This chapter takes inspiration from Wittgenstein’s thinking to formulate a non-reductive toolbox for the study of religion associated with generative modelling, specifically as applied in complex adaptive systems theory. It converges on a communal perspective on religion as multiscale active inference that contrasts starkly with common ‘straw person’ perspectives on religion that reduce it to ‘erroneous’ theorising generated by the brain. In contrast, we argue, religious practices at the enculturated level of description involve implicit and explicit meanings, experienced both individually (...) and collectively. Firstly, we characterise these in terms of Wittgenstein’s notions of rule-following and language games. Secondly, we discuss how the collective and perspectival aspects of religion in enculturation with morals, doctrines, rituals, and expressions can be formalised in terms of deep active inference in multi-agent systems. This approach describes how religions are incommensurable with scientific methods due to the epistemic separation between the different kinds of language games of religious and scientific practices. Their touchpoints tend to give rise to perpetual confusion and unproductive discussions, requiring perspicuous presentations that can be formulated with our toolbox. In this sense, our account has implications for tackling complex societal challenges such as ethical policy-making. (shrink)

This paper outlines a solution to what can be called “the problem of domination by reason”, “conceptual domination” or “clarificatorory injustice”, connected with how a philosopher may appear to be in a position to legitimately coerce, by means of arguments, an interlocutor who shares with her a concept or a conceptual system to accept a philosophical characterization of a concept or whatever the concept concerns. The proposed solution is based on a particular interpretation of what Wittgenstein means by agreement in (...) his later philosophy, when he says that philosophy only states what anyone grants to it. Wittgenstein’s view and the proposed solution are characterized by their continued recognition of the value of logic and reason, truth and knowledge, as opposed to attempting to solve the problem by embracing relativism and questioning the value of the logic, reason, truth and knowledge. Relevant kind of disagreements licence no relativistic conclusions, because problems relating to them can be solved without going this far. Keywords: domination, relativism, Wittgenstein, method, agreement. (shrink)

Scientists working on the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are eager to have us believe that they have recently uncovered the unconscious origins of religious beliefs and practices. Though their theories differ in detail, CSR researchers generally agree that religion is the product of faculties of mind that evolved to serve our adaptive needs, but which sometimes produce the false beliefs and incoherent practices of religious life. Pascal Boyer, a leading figure and a reasonable representative of the mode of thinking (...) that dominates CSR, claims, for example, that religious beliefs are produced by “cognitive misfires” of systems evolved to help us avoid predators, find mates, cooperate and compete with group members, etc. In fact, CSR is undermined by the same conceptual mistakes that Wittgenstein spotted in the psychology of the early twentieth century. Wittgenstein’s insights reveal that Boyer and most of his fellow CSR researchers fail to properly apply the logic of evolutionary theory itself to the language of psychology and so they misunderstand the real nature of their own subject matter and their own theories of mind. The result is a calamitous repetition of mistakes and prejudices made by James G. Frazer in his Golden Bough, an enormous compendium of “primitive” religious beliefs and rituals published in the late nineteenth century. To really understand religious beliefs and practices, we need to correct these mistakes, and, ultimately, we need an entirely different mode of explanation from what Frazer, Boyer and CSR offer. (shrink)

Wittgenstein compares philosophical explanations with explanations in aesthetics and ethics. According to him, the similarity between aesthetics and philosophy ‘reaches very far’, and as I aim to show, the comparison can be used to elucidate certain characteristic features of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach. In particular, it can explain how his approach differs from metaphysical philosophy as well as clarifying the sense in which there are no theses or theories in philosophy, as Wittgenstein conceives it. In the last section of the essay, (...) I examine certain consequences of Wittgenstein’s view, including the lack of conclusive arguments in philosophy. Rather than implying that philosophy falls short of its rational aspirations, I argue, Wittgenstein’s explanation of why there are no conclusive arguments in philosophy can help us to see in the right light the lack of agreement in philosophy, as well as explaining why this is not a defect. (shrink)

In this article, I show and discuss the relevance of Wittgenstein's arguments as to the spatial structure of sight to recent issues in the philosophy of mind. The first, bearing upon the dimensionality of the manifolds at play in depiction, plays a critical role in Clark's attempt to provide an independent account ofqualiaand of their differentiative properties. The second, pertaining to the properly spatial structure formed by the data of sight, is explicitly appealed to in the debate on the realistic (...) character of any genuinely spatial scheme. I argue that if Wittgenstein rightly assumes that the simultaneous presence of sensible places in vision is a key condition for objectivity, he fails nevertheless to warrant the allegedly realistic character of the scheme employed in his own search for a phenomenological description of the visual field. (shrink)

The paper argues that an internal debate within Wittgensteinian philosophy leads to issues associated rather with the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Rush Rhees's identification of the limitations of the notion of a “language game” to illuminate the relation between language and reality leads to his discussion of what is involved in the “reality” of language: “anything that is said has sense-if living has sense, not otherwise.” But what is it for living to have sense? Peter Winch provides an interpretation (...) and application of Rhees's argument in his discussion of the “reality” of Zande witchcraft and magic in “Understanding a Primitive Society”. There he argues that such sense is provided by a language game concerned with the ineradicable contingency of human life, such as (he claims) Zande witchcraft to be. I argue, however, that Winch's account fails to answer the question why Zande witchcraft can find no application within our lives. I suggest that answering this requires us to raise the question of why Zande witchcraft “fits” with their other practices but cannot with ours, a question of “sense” which cannot be answered by reference to another language game. I use Joseph Epes Brown's account of Native American cultures (in Epes Brown 2001) as an exemplification of a form of coherence that constitutes what we may call a “world”. I then discuss what is involved in this, relating this coherence to a relation to the temporal, which provides an internal connection between the senses of the “real” embodied in the different linguistic practices of these cultures. I relate this to the later Heidegger's account of the “History of Being”, of the historical worlds of Western culture and increasingly of the planet. I conclude with an indication of concerns and issues this approach raises, ones characteristic of “Continental” rather than Wittgensteinian philosophy. (shrink)

The Structure of Scientific Revolution is the famous work by Thomas Kuhn which challenged traditional understanding of science and philosophy of science. His research activities are wide-ranging; central to his notion of incommensurability are the ideas of meaning variance and lexicon, and the impossibility of translation of terms across different theories. It is closely related to the linguistic analysis of scientific language. The schematic nature of Kuhn’s work and his ongoing clarification of its key concepts fostered additional problems of understanding, (...) interpretation, and attribution. This paper analyses the notion of scientific language in the context of incommensurability with special reference to the theory of meaning. Linguistic experts have not attempted to incorporate Kuhn’s incommensurability to address the issues related to epistemology. This Paper shows how Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability can be applied to linguistics to overcome the problems that arise due to similar lexical terms. It argues that Kuhn’s epistemological analysis of incommensurability, particularly the challenge of understanding the process of symbolization in scientific theories, when applied to linguistics can revolutionize the discipline itself which fills the existing knowledge gap. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article puts judicial perception at the centre of adjudication and of what makes a judge a good judge. It offers a philosophical and empiricist account of judicial perception. Judicial perception is presented as a special ethical, character-dependent skill that a judge needs in order to adequately attend and respond to the cases he is confronted with. In this account ‘thick concepts’ play a vital role. Throughout the text Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act is used as an illustrative source.

Questions of style are often deemed of marginal importance in philosophy, as well as in metaphilosophical debates concerning the analytic/Continental divide. I take issue with this common tendency by showing how style – suitably conceived not merely as a way of writing, but as a form of expression intimately linked to a form of life – occupies a central role in philosophy. After providing an analysis of the concept of style, I take a fresh look at the analytic/Continental division by (...) examining the various stylistic differences between philosophers on each side. Despite these differences, I argue, both sides of the divide suffer from a common stylistic deficiency, and if this deficiency were rectified the gulf separating the two traditions may not appear as insurmountable as it presently does. To show this, I draw principally from the philosophy of religion, a field that has recently experienced a renewal in both the analytic and Continental traditions. (shrink)

Since the rise of modern natural science there has been deep tension between the conceptual and the natural. Wittgenstein's discussion of how we learn a sensation-language contains important resources that can help us relieve this tension. The key here, I propose, is to focus our attention on animal nature, conceived as partially re-enchanted. To see how nature, so conceived, helps us relieve the tension in question, it is crucial to gain a firm and detailed appreciation of how the primitive-instinctive, a (...) central part of animal nature, actually serves the conceptual. I offer such an appreciation by closely examining §244 of the Philosophical Investigations and Peter Winch's discussion of it. The general aim is to bring out a certain kind of Wittgensteinian “naturalism”, a “naturalism” that is fully alive to the rootedness of conceptuality in nature. A concomitant aim is to illustrate the truth of Wittgenstein's saying that in philosophy one often has to pay close attention to details. (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)

I criticize Carpendale and Lewis's attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory, as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein's whole latter philosophy is inimical to such an aim. His concern is not with theories but with descriptions—which can be (...) explanatory, but in a relational or orientational rather than a causal fashion. Below, I give some initial examples to show what Wittgensteinian investigations in developmental psychology might look like. (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread interpretation, Wittgenstein did not regard credal statements as merely metaphorical expressions of an attitude towards life. He accepted that Christian faith involves belief in God's existence. At the same time he held that although as a hypothesis, God's existence is extremely implausible, Christian faith is not unreasonable. Is that a consistent view? According to Wittgenstein, religious faith should not be seen as a hypothesis, based on evidence, but as grounded in a proto‐religious attitude, a way of (...) experiencing the world or certain aspects of it. A belief in religious metaphysics is not the basis of one's faith, but a mere epiphenomenon. Given further that religious doctrine is both falsification‐transcendent and that religious faith is likely to have beneficial psychological effects, religious doctrine can be exempt from ordinary standards of epistemic support. An unsupported religious belief need not be unreasonable. However, it is hard to see how one could knowingly have such an unsupported belief, as Wittgenstein seems to envisage. How can one believe what, at the same time, one believes is not likely to be true? This, I argue, is the unresolved tension in Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this article, I want to do two things. The first is to conduct a sympathetic yet critical review of some of the salient features of the ideas in the notes that have come to us from Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief. This requires close reading, analysis and critique. The second, which comes out of the first, is to give some indication of Wittgenstein's failure to apply to his thinking about religious and moral matters some of the insights that he (...) had already achieved as his philosophical thinking progressed. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a (...) way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isolation. (shrink)

In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...) (tailors and architects) absorbed in action to introduce situated normativity. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of embodied cognition in unreflective skillful action. I develop Wittgenstein’s insight that a peculiar type of affective behaviour, ‘directed discontent’, is essential for getting things right without reflection. Directed discontent is a reaction of appreciation in action and is introduced as a paradigmatic expression of situated normativity. In the second part I discuss Wittgenstein’s ideas on the normativity of what he calls ‘blind’ rule-following and the ‘bedrock’ of immediate action. What matters for understanding the normativity of (even ‘blind’) rule-following, is not that one has the capacity for linguistic articulation or reflection but that one is reliably participating in a communal custom. In the third part I further investigate the complex relationships between unreflective skillful action, perception, emotion, and normativity. Part of this entails an account of the link between normativity at the level of the expert’s socio-cultural practice and the individual’s situated and lived normativity. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation for Wittgenstein`s treatment of mathematical identities. As it is widely known, Wittgenstein`s mature philosophy of mathematics includes a general rejection of abstract objects. On the other hand, the traditional interpretation of mathematical identities involves precisely the idea of a single abstract object – usually a number –named by both sides of an equation.

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)

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical-therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody (...) hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy. (shrink)

In "The History of Sexuality", Foucault maintains that "Western man has become a confessing animal" (1990, 59), thus implying that "man" was not always such a creature. On a related point, Wittgenstein suggests that "man is a ceremonial animal" (1996, 67); here the suggestion is that human beings are, by their very nature, ritualistically inclined. In this paper I examine this crucial difference in emphasis, first by reconstructing Foucault's "genealogy" of confession, and subsequently by exploring relevant facets of Wittgenstein's later (...) thinking. While there are significant correlations between Foucault and Wittgenstein, an important disparity emerges in relation to the question of the "natural." By critically analyzing this, I show how Wittgenstein's minimal naturalism provides an important corrective to Foucault's more extravagant claims. By implication, we see why any radical relativist, historicist, and/or constructivist position becomes untenable on Wittgensteinian grounds, even though Wittgenstein himself is often read as promoting such views. (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)

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 143 - 164 In §513 of _On Certainty_ Wittgenstein asks “What if something _really unheard-of_ happened?” But with this question he is not asking us to make a forecast, a prediction, or some sort of empirico-psychological prophecy about our possible reactions. As I will attempt to show, the question regarding the unheard-of is part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method—which is to say, it is one of the instruments with which he combats what he sees (...) as the principal source of the confusions of philosophy: mistaking the grammatical for the empirical or, as he also says, the conceptual for the factual. In this sense the question regarding the unheard-of can shed some light on the grammatical status of what he calls “hinges.”. (shrink)

Wittgenstein demystified the notion of 'observational self-knowledge'. He dislodged the long-standing conception that we have privileged access to our impressions, sensations and feelings through introspection, and more precisely eliminated knowing as the kind of awareness that normally characterizes our first-person present-tense psychological statements. He was not thereby questioning our awareness of our emotions or sensations, but debunking the notion that we come to that awareness via any epistemic route. This makes the spontaneous linguistic articulation of our sensations and impressions nondescriptive. (...) Not descriptions, but expressions that seem more akin to behaviour than to language. I suggest that Wittgenstein uncovered a new species of speech acts. Far from the prearranged consecration of words into performatives, utterances are deeds through their very spontaneity. This gives language a new aura: the aura of the reflex action. I argue, against Peter Hacker, that spontaneous utterances have the categorial status of deeds. This has no reductive consequences in that I do not suggest that one category is reduced to another, but that the boundary between them is porous. This explodes the myth of an explanatory gap between the traditionally distinct categories of saying (or thinking) and doing, or of mind and body. (shrink)

In “Wittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism,” Peter Hacker addresses what he takes to be misconceptions of Wittgenstein's philosophy with respect to (1) the periodisation of his thought and to what should properly be counted as part of his work; (2) his conception of grammar since the Big Typescript (1929–33); and (3) his conception of philosophy as grammatical investigation. I argue that Hacker's restrictive conception of what ought to be considered part of Wittgenstein's philosophy and his conservative view of Wittgensteinian (...) grammar are unjustified and prevent him from appreciating the revolutionary importance of On Certainty for epistemology. Finally, while agreeing that Wittgenstein views philosophy as grammatical elucidation, I suggest some reasons for the resistance that this view has generated.In “Wittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism,” Peter Hacker deals with three of the “many misunderstandings, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy” (2012, 1); the first of which concerns “the periodisation of Wittgenstein's thought”; the second, the supposition that what Wittgenstein called “grammar” in PI differed fundamentally from, and was more limited than, his conception of it when he was writing the Big Typescript; and the third, the claim that what Wittgenstein took to be grammatical statements are, in fact, dogmatisms, theories or doctrines inconsistent with his meta‐philosophical remarks in PI. I address each of these concerns seriatim. (shrink)

Symbols enable people to organize and communicate about the world. However, the ways in which symbolic knowledge is learned and then represented in the mind are poorly understood. We present a formal analysis of symbolic learning—in particular, word learning—in terms of prediction and cue competition, and we consider two possible ways in which symbols might be learned: by learning to predict a label from the features of objects and events in the world, and by learning to predict features from a (...) label. This analysis predicts significant differences in symbolic learning depending on the sequencing of objects and labels. We report a computational simulation and two human experiments that confirm these differences, revealing the existence of Feature-Label-Ordering effects in learning. Discrimination learning is facilitated when objects predict labels, but not when labels predict objects. Our results and analysis suggest that the semantic categories people use to understand and communicate about the world can only be learned if labels are predicted from objects. We discuss the implications of this for our understanding of the nature of language and symbolic thought, and in particular, for theories of reference. (shrink)

This paper articulates a deflationary interpretation of the notions of meaning and necessity in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. This interpretation is developed through a new account of the socalled color‐exclusion problem and of why the formalism of the Tractatus fails to solve it. According to my analysis, this failure calls into question whether the limits of the sayable and the thinkable can be drawn from within language and thought by means of a purely formal logical analysis. I argue that the lesson to (...) learn from the color‐exclusion problem concerns the limitations of a formal logical analysis of language in eliminating the philosophical mythologies formed around the notions of meaning and necessity, and more generally the limitations of formalism as a deflationary strategy in philosophy. (shrink)

An account of the intrinsic value of sport from previous work (McFee 2004; 2009) is sketched, presenting it as a ?moral laboratory?, as well as a scholarly attribution of such an account to Pierre de Coubertin, in explanation of his view of the moral educative potential of the Olympic Games (McFee 2011a).Then aspects of that account of intrinsic value are elaborated, and its educative possibility is defended, along with the possibility of its generalising beyond the sports field or stadium: these (...) are fundamental to its ascription to Olympism. Yet, for de Coubertin, the impact of the Olympic Games was understood primarily in terms of its participants: the modern-day Olympics, by contrast, have an immense impact through the size of their television audience. But how is that impact theorised? The paper urges that, despite key differences, some of the same resources for the ?moral laboratory? can be deployed by audience members, understood in terms of the narratives they construct to explain the sporting behaviour they observe. Although not strictly a consequence of the Olympic context, that context makes it more likely that ? from the audience's perspective ? the actions of sports players are explicable from a morally aware viewpoint. As such, Olympism has an additional possibility of delivering a kind of moral education; although the fact that there are only observers here (not agents), and hence that there is no responsibility for actions performed, means that this possibility is relatively weak. Some features of a research agenda here are introduced; and its Wittgensteinian pedigree defended. (shrink)

We argue that all general concepts are family resemblance concepts. These include concepts introduced by ostension, such as colour. Concepts of colour and of each of the specific colours are family resemblance concepts because similarities concerning an open-ended range of colour or of appearance features crop up and disappear. After discussing the notion of “same colour” and Wittgenstein's use of the phrase “our colours”, we suggest family resemblance concepts in one tradition can often be extended to family resemblance concepts in (...) another tradition, illustrated by Wittgenstein's use of the words Spiel and “game”. (shrink)

Annalisa Coliva (Int J Study Skept 10(3–4):346–366, 2020) asks, “Are there mathematical hinges?” I argue here, against Coliva’s own conclusion, that there are. I further claim that this affirmative answer allows a case to be made for taking the concept of a hinge to be a useful and general-purpose tool for studying mathematical practice in its real complexity. Seeing how Wittgenstein can, and why he would, countenance mathematical hinges additionally gives us a deeper understanding of some of his latest thoughts (...) on mathematics. For example, a view of how mathematical hinges relate to Wittgenstein’s well-known river-bed analogy enables us to see how his way of thinking about mathematics can account nicely for a “dynamics of change” within mathematical research—something his philosophy of mathematics has been accused of missing (e.g., by Robert Ackermann (Wittgenstein’s city, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988) and Mark Wilson (Wandering significance: an essay on conceptual behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). Finally, the perspective on mathematical hinges ultimately arrived at will be seen to provide us with illuminating examples of how our conceptual choices and theories can be ungrounded but nevertheless the right ones (in a sense to be explained). (shrink)

There is now an established literature on the link between later Wittgenstein and enactivist approaches in cognitive science. However, is this link not just a matter for card carrying Wittgensteinians? Can enactivists not manage perfectly well without Wittgenstein? In this paper, I show why some enactivists should care about Wittgenstein. Focusing on the enactivist view, “Sensorimotor Identity”. I argue that proponents of this view can use Wittgensteinian considerations to resolve an issue confronting their view and thereby shore up their proposed (...) dissolution of the explanatory gap. Some enactivists thus have in fact much to gain by engaging with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

While a considerable amount of effort has been expended in an attempt to understand Ludwig Wittgenstein’s enigmatic comments about silence and the mystical at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , very little attention has been paid to the implications of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for the study of ineffability. This paper first argues that, since Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations problematizes private language, emphasizes the description of actual language use, and recognizes the rule-governed nature of language, it contains significant implications for the study (...) of ineffability, inviting investigations of the ways in which putative ineffability actually gets expressed rather than speculation about whether there are ineffable objects or experiences. It then undertakes such an investigation in the Dionysian corpus, finding therein not only grammatical techniques that express inexpressibility at the referential, illocutionary, and semiotic levels but also rules that underlie and govern these techniques. Finally, it shows how a recovery of the ordinary uses of ineffability might help dissolve the metaphysical problem of ineffability, thereby bringing ineffability back to the everyday. (shrink)