WITTGENSTEINIAN (adj.)


Book Description

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.




Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein


Book Description

This volume showcases contemporary, ground-up ethical essays in the tradition of Wittgenstein’s broader philosophy and Wittgenstein-inspired ethical reflection. It takes the ethical relevance of Wittgenstein as a substantial and solid starting point for a broad range of ongoing thinking about contemporary ethical issues. The texts are organised in two sections. The first consists of chapters exploring questions around what could be called the “grammar” of our moral forms of life, and thus represents a more traditional approach in ethics after Wittgenstein. The second part represents a recent turn in the tradition towards investigating moral conceptions, perspectives and concepts that are undergoing change, either because the world itself is changing (for instance with new technologies) or because human agency, such as social movements, has brought us to reconsider previously unquestioned ideas and structures. Within the book, the authors’ contributions are inspired, in their ways of working with ethical questions, by Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language, understanding and the nature of philosophical inquiry. This book is of interest to philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, as well as to all ethicists seeking ideas for how to do philosophy in a manner close to lived experience and practice.




The Radial Method of the Middle Wittgenstein


Book Description

Spanning the period between Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929 and the first version of Philosophical Investigations in 1936, Piotr Dehnel explores the middle stage in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical development and identifies the major issues which engrossed him, including phenomenology, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of language. Contrary to the dominant perspective, Dehnel argues that this period was intrinsically different from the early and late stages and should not be viewed as a mere transitional phase. The distinctiveness of Wittgenstein's middle work can be seen in his philosophical thinking as it unfolds in a non-linear trajectory: thoughts do not follow upon each other, ideas do not appear sequentially one by one, and insights do not form a straight chain. Dehnel portrays the diffused and multifarious quality of Wittgenstein's middle thinking, enabling readers to form a more comprehensive view of his entire philosophy and acquire a better grasp of his conceptual trajectory, complete with the intricacies and challenges that it poses.




The Creation of Wittgenstein


Book Description

Making extensive use of unique archival resources this collection presents, for the first time, an in-depth study of the work and influence of Wittgenstein's original literary heirs, Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright as editors of Wittgenstein's posthumous writings. Presenting philosophical portraits of Rhees, Anscombe and von Wright, a team of international contributors provide a history of their collaboration and discuss how the individual philosophical views of the literary heirs shaped what we now know as the works of Wittgenstein. They consider the link between philosophically relevant aspects of their biography, their friendship with Wittgenstein and the development of their philosophical personalities, offering us a new appreciation of the dynamics of their editorial collaboration and how each of the heirs worked individually as an editor to create Wittgenstein's philosophy. Each chapter reveals what the editors did to enrich and shape our understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophical contribution on topics such as rule-following, logical necessity, aesthetics and the methods and aims of philosophy. This thorough critical analysis of the editorial history of Wittgenstein's works allows us to finally appreciate the profound impact the editors have had on our understanding of his philosophy, his views and his cultural significance.




Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language


Book Description

The limit of language is one of the most pervasive notions found in Wittgenstein’s work, both in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later writings. Moreover, the idea of a limit of language is intimately related to important scholarly debates on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, such as the debate between the so-called traditional and resolute interpretations, Wittgenstein’s stance on transcendental idealism, and the philosophical import of Wittgenstein’s latest work On Certainty. This collection includes thirteen original essays that provide a comprehensive overview of the various ways in which Wittgenstein appeals to the limit of language at different stages of his philosophical development. The essays connect the idea of a limit of language to the most important themes discussed by Wittgenstein—his conception of logic and grammar, the method of philosophy, the nature of the subject, and the foundations of knowledge—as well as his views on ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The essays also relate Wittgenstein’s thought to his contemporaries, including Carnap, Frege, Heidegger, Levinas, and Moore.




Wittgenstein on Realism and Idealism


Book Description

This Element concerns Wittgenstein's evolving attitude toward the opposition between realism and idealism in philosophy. Despite the marked – and sometimes radical – changes Wittgenstein's thinking undergoes from the early to the middle to the later period, there is an underlying continuity in terms of his unwillingness at any point to endorse either position in a straightforward manner. Instead, Wittgenstein can be understood as rejecting both positions, while nonetheless seeing insights in each position worth retaining. The author traces these “neither-nor” and “both-and” strands of Wittgenstein's attitude toward realism and idealism to his – again, evolving – insistence on seeing language and thought as worldly phenomena. That thought and language are about the world and happen amidst the world they are about undermines the attempt to formulate any kind of general thesis concerning their interrelation.




The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence


Book Description

This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decision-making, agency or authenticity, emotions, and social or political metacognition. It is also relevant to a variety of larger debates in philosophy and psychology, including nature vs. nature, objectivity vs. subjectivity, or nomothetic vs. idiographic. The essays in this book offer novel and wide-ranging perspectives on this emerging philosophical topic. They will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and social cognition.




Certainty in Action


Book Description

In Certainty in Action, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock describes how her encounter with Wittgenstein overturned her previous assumptions that the mind is a product of brain activity and that thought, consciousness, the will, feelings, memories, knowledge and language are stored and processed in the brain, by the brain. She shows how Wittgenstein enables us to veer away from this brain-centred view of intelligence and behaviour to a person-centred view focusing on ways of acting that are both diversely embedded across forms of human life and universally embedded in a single human form of life. The book traces the radical importance of action as the cohesive thread weaving through Wittgenstein's philosophy, and shows how certainty intertwines with it to produce new ways of engaging in epistemology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. This selection of Moyal-Sharrock's essays vividly illustrates some of the ways in which Wittgenstein's pioneering enactivism has impacted – and can further impact – not only philosophy, but also neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, primatology, evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Certainty in Action is essential reading for students and researchers of these disciplines, and for anyone interested in getting a grasp of Wittgenstein's lasting genius and influence.




The Enigma of Meaning


Book Description

This work focuses on humanity's first technology--language--by placing the views of two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century in direct confrontation on the topic of language/sign communication. It addresses the dominant role of language by the unexpected means of exposing the limits of words and signs for conveying meaning. Identifying these limits leads to the surprising realization that such limits are also precisely what make communication possible. Wittgenstein strives to shore up the foundation of meaning through a deeper understanding of the tension between rules and practice in the use of signs--while Derrida strives to expose the tension in the nature of the sign itself. This tension underscores the presence of the sign as intimately bound up with its absence. As a result, these two approaches feature contrasting roles for interpretation between a sign and its meaning. Highlighting the differences between these approaches reveals the play of hazards and benefits for language users when faced with alternative ways of understanding and accessing the power and potential of language.




Concept Analysis in Nursing


Book Description

Concept analysis is an established genre of inquiry in nursing, introduced in the 1970s. Currently, over 100 concept studies are published annually, yet the methods used within this field have rarely been questioned. In Concept Analysis in Nursing: A New Approach, Paley provides a critical analysis of the philosophical assumptions that underpin nursing’s concept analysis methods. He argues, provocatively, that there are no such things as concepts, as traditionally conceived. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Construction Grammar, the book first makes a case for dispensing with the traditional concept of a ‘concept’, and then provides two examples of a new approach, examining the use of ‘hope’ and ‘moral distress’. Casting doubt on the assumption that ‘hope’ always stands for an ‘inner’ state of the person, the book shows that the word’s function varies with the grammatical construction it appears in. Similarly, it argues that ‘moral distress’ is not the name of a mental state, but a normative classification used to bolster a narrative concerning nursing’s identity. Concept Analysis in Nursing is a fresh and challenging book written by a philosopher interested in nursing. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of nursing, health, philosophy and linguistics. It will also interest those familiar with the author’s previous book, Phenomenology as Qualitative Research.