Bøker i Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein-serien

This book brings together Constantine Sandis's essays on Wittgenstein's approach to understanding others.

Wittgenstein and AI (Volume I): Mind and Language. This is the first of two edited collections, exploring Wittgensteinian themes in AI. The issues covered by the various chapters of this volume range over a number of topics, with a specific focus on mind and language.

This book is a collection of 15 essays on important themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, such as linguistic normativity, the concepts of understanding, reasons, and knowledge, questions of value in aesthetics, ethics, and religion.

This work is guided by the idea that Wittgenstein's thought opens the door to a more profound break with the philosophical tradition than has been generally recognized. It brings this insight to bear on some basic problems of philosophy. Wittgenstein's work has been assimilated to the analytic tradition in such a way that its radical character has been made nearly invisible. In fact, Wittgenstein formulates a basic critique of a predominant conception in contemporary analytic philosophy, according to which language can be seen as a formal structure describable in general terms. This conception neglects the profound context-dependence of the way things said are to be understood, thus imposing a schematic view of the connections between words and life. By distancing us from the life we live with language, it makes the problems of philosophy come to appear intractable. In this work, the attempt is made to show how philosophical confusions are to be overcome through attending to the actual use of words in conversation. The questions discussed belong to what would commonly be called the philosophy of language and of logic, ethics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion and aesthetics.The formal view of language is connected with a tendency, deeply entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition, to view human life in terms of dichotomies such as that between thought and behaviour, between the intentional and the non-intentional, between the mental and the corporeal, dichotomies which have given rise to philosophical bewilderment. The road to liberation from that bewilderment goes through the dissolution of those dichotomies by taking note of the variety of ways in which human thought and speech are bound up with human action and reaction.Several of the essays will contain attempts at interpreting key passages from Wittgenstein's work, but they will also contain some criticisms of Wittgenstein as well as of certain common ways of reading him; however, their main purpose is not to interpret Wittgenstein but to address the problems raised in their own right.

The papers in this volume can be roughly divided between 'the philosophy of mind' and 'the philosophy of language'. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard philosophical classification stands in the way of clear thinking about many of the core issues. With this, they are united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical discussion of issues in this area, and by an insistence on an inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of these issues. None of the papers is well described as 'exegetical', but most of them are, in one way or another, papers about Wittgenstein, and all of them are discussions of themes central to his later work and strongly influenced by it. While the debt to Wittgenstein is enormous, many of the papers involve significant criticisms of ideas widely drawn from him, and some of these criticisms may have application to Wittgenstein himself.The discussions of 'the philosophy of mind' are marked by an emphasis on the individual's relations with others and, with that, by a detailed attention given to the human bodily form. Within the bodily form, the face is, both visually and through the voice, the locus of expression of our thoughts and feelings, and so central to our recognition of each other as beings who have thoughts and feelings. With this, it is central to the 'attitude towards a soul' of which Wittgenstein speaks: a phrase that highlights the centrality of an ethical dimension to any adequate philosophical treatment of our understanding of others. My relation to other creatures - both human and non-human - is distorted by the idea of an underpinning of the kind proposed in 'the argument from analogy'; but it is distorted, too, by the idea (that we may take from Wittgenstein) that our seeing similarities between we human beings and dogs or giant squids is a condition of our ability to ascribe pain or fear to such creatures. A 'phenomenological' treatment of our perception of faces may be helpful in breaking down pervasive philosophical prejudices here. The irreducible sense in which the smile that we see is a smile on this face is intimately connected with Wittgenstein's insistence on the importance of context for an ascription of thoughts and feelings: an insistence that brings out a fundamental incoherence in dominant, 'reductive', treatments of the notion of a persisting individual. This incoherence is intimately tied to a failure to leave a place for the notion of a particular individual, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those whom we know and care for; and, with that, a failure to leave a place for anything recognisable as love.The notion of a human being links the discussions of mind and language through the relation between two themes in Wittgenstein: (i) the way in which the human enters into our thinking ('The human body is the best picture of the human soul'); (ii) the way in which our thinking is a reflection of our humanity. These relations are distorted by the emphasis on 'rule following' and the appeal to the idea of continuing an arithmetical series that has had a central place in discussions of language originating from Wittgenstein. Approaches from this perspective fail to do justice to the idea of speech as a form of interaction between people. Rush Rhees suggests that conversation provides a better model for thinking about language. To share a language with someone is to be able to speak with her. One aspect of Wittgenstein's 'attitude towards a soul' is the demand to seek forms of contact with others: including, centrally, interaction in speech with others. Such interaction is crucially dependent on trust, and on the effort to sustain conversation in the face of the unlimited possibilities of its collapse: possibilities that find expression in philosophy in various forms of scepticism. Wittgenstein's appeal to the idea that 'justification comes to an end' is potentially misleading in that it may obscure the possibilities of sustaining discussion in the face of such potential collapse. While much of what we say may run into the sand if pursued in certain directions, we may take one of the tasks of philosophy to be that of bringing out possibilities of a sense of forms we would not have anticipated: and so enhancing the links between us that are involved in conversation. We do well here to shift from the familiar question 'What conditions must something satisfy in order to be a language?' to the question 'What is it seriously to think of - to acknowledge in practice - an individual or group as speaking?' A focus on this question may cast in a clearer light the character and importance of questions about the language capacities of non-human creatures. The issues here are only well understood if we recognize the primacy of the ethical in our relations to such creatures: a point well illustrated by a remarkable study of the language capacities of bonobo.

This volume addresses, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the philosophical question of how to understand other cultures. We approach this question in a manner that emphasises the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects, bringing into discussion Wittgensteinian and other cultural and philosophical traditions, notably from the West African Yoruba community, Japan, China and India.

Hinge epistemology is a rising trend in epistemology. Drawing on some of Wittgenstein's ideas in On Certainty, it claims that knowledge always takes place within a system of assumptions, or "e;hinges"e;, that are taken for granted and are not subject to verification and control.This volume brings together thirteen papers on hinge epistemology written by Annalisa Coliva, the coiner of the term and one of the leading figures in this trend, and published after her influential monographs Moore and Wittgenstein. Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense (2010), Extended Rationality. A Hinge Epistemology (2015). By mixing together Wittgenstein scholarship and systematic philosophy, they illuminate the significance of hinge epistemology for current debates on scepticism, relativism, realism and anti-realism, as well as alethic pluralism, and envision its possible extension to the epistemology of logic.Along the way, other varieties of hinge epistemology, such as Moyal-Sharrock's, Pritchard's, Williams' and Wright's are considered, both with respect to Wittgenstein scholarship and in their own right.

Julia Tanney's Meaning, Mind, and Action mounts an overarching challenge to widely held presuppositions within the practice of philosophy in its classical 'analytic' forms as well as in its 'naturalist' and 'cognitivist' turns, expanding upon those introduced in Rules, Reason and Self-Knowledge (2013).Influenced by arguments of Wittgenstein, Ryle, and others, Tanney confronts the 'platitudes' or unalterable starting points that implicitly or explicitly ground mainstream, philosophical theorising, beginning with the ideas first, that the meaning of a complex, natural language expression such as a sentence is determined by its structure and second, that the meaning of its constituents and that such content-which must remain stable across contexts-is needed to accommodate logical transformations (embeddings in, say, negational, conditional, or propositional attitude contexts) and inferential reasoning. Opposing the ideas that this semantic or propositional content is the bearer of truth or falsehood and that to grasp a concept is to be equipped with rules which fix the relation between an expression and its reference or extension, Tanney argues, by contrast, that our practices are logically prior to their codifications. Explanations, justifications, or the appeal to principles, rules, norms are not on the same logical footing as the moves they endorse; in particular, our successful linguistic practices are not causally explained by a prior grasp of 'meanings'. Further, to appreciate the indefinite elasticity of most, if not all, natural language expressions is to accept that there may be nothing in common by which we call a thing by the same name. Not only does this subvert the idea that the essence of our concepts can be revealed by contextually transcendent application conditions; it undermines the idea that they function to signify facts, properties, events, or relations whose nature is to be revealed by metaphysical or philosophical-scientific speculation. Construing them so would destroy the saying and explanatory power of the expressions subsumed by these concept-nouns in natural language discourses.

The essays in Logos and Life, the earliest written in 2001 but mainly dating from 2014 and later, cover topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics and philosophy of language. There are discussions of the voluntary and the involuntary; reasons for action; the idea of an 'inner state'; pleasure; the nature of ethics; justice; necessity and possibility; and a number of other topics. Numerous strands connect these four areas, which Roger Teichmann highlights: in this sense the collection exhibits thematic unity as well as diversity.Several of the essays take as their starting points the ideas and philosophical methods of Wittgenstein and of Elizabeth Anscombe, and so will be of interest to anyone studying those philosophers. Anscombe was a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein, and Teichmann was fortunate enough to be a friend and pupil of Anscombe. He is now a leading authority on her philosophy.A newly written Introduction serves to indicate the main themes and arguments of the book, and provide an overall statement of Teichmann's philosophy.

The proposed volume covers Christopher Winch's work over a period of 37 years and illustrates four interconnected themes that have informed his thinking over that period. Writing from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Winch is primarily interested in applying Wittgenstein's general approach to philosophising to educational problems and puzzles of a variety of different kinds. Throughout the collection there is an emphasis on the complexity and subtlety of many of the philosophical problems associated with education, the importance of appreciating differences and the contestability of many educational judgements. Thus the volume starts with a section on rationality and argument and a discussion of some of the perplexities about the nature of literacy and whether it represents a cognitive 'leap forward' for the human race or whether it is more of an enabling technology. It is followed, in a reply to David Cooper, by an article that emphasises the importance of charitable interpretation in understanding reasoning and looks at some of the difficulties involved in understanding reasoning in informal contexts.Winch's interest in rule-following and concept formation is the theme of the next few articles. Winch has long been interested in philosophical aspects of professional action and judgement. The third section of this book focuses on that preoccupation. Gilbert Ryle's ideas as well as Wittgenstein's have been a significant influence on this. This section closes with a discussion of the sense we can make of the claim that theoretical knowledge can inform agency in professional contexts. The fourth section gathers together seven papers on learning and training that Winch has published over the last 25 years. The overarching theme of this section is the highly variegated nature of the phenomena of learning and the difficulty of constructing a 'grand theory' of learning.

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment shows how early twentieth-century economic and social upheaval prompted new ways of conceptualizing the purposes and powers of language. Scholars have long held that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century reflect how the period's material crises-from world wars to the spread of industrial capitalism-call into question the capacity of language to picture the world accurately. This book argues that this standard scholarly narrative tells only a partial story. Even as signal modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment. They show how language might matter less as a medium for representing reality than as a tool for recognizing others. The book develops this claim by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Writing in 1945, in the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein laments, "e;It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another-but, of course, it is not likely."e; Worrying that "e;the darkness"e; of this historical moment renders his words unintelligible, Wittgenstein echoes the linguistic skepticism that scholars have found in literary modernism. But the Investigations ultimately pushes back against such skeptical doubts by offering a vision of language as a set of shared human practices. Even when it comes to a word like "e;pain,"e; which seemingly gestures toward something absolutely private and individual, Wittgenstein indicates that we learn what "e;pain"e; means by familiarizing ourselves with the contexts in which people use the term. In his pioneering reading of the Investigations as a "e;modernist"e; work, Stanley Cavell argues that Wittgenstein's distinctive response to the problem of skepticism consists in the view that "e;other minds [are] not to be known, but acknowledged."e;The book argues that this concept of acknowledgment, as articulated implicitly by Wittgenstein and explicitly by Cavell, enables a broader reconceptualization of modernist fiction's stance toward the referential capacities of language, and it bears out this claim by reading a series of modernist novels through the lens of Wittgenstein's philosophy. From the residence halls of Cambridge to the farmsteads of rural Mississippians, the early decades of the twentieth century sowed serious doubts about the ability of individuals to find shared criteria for the meanings of words: the greater convenience of travel led to increased cross-cultural misunderstandings; technological developments facilitated new modes of race-, class-, and gender-based oppression, and two world wars irrevocably shattered an earlier generation's optimism about the inevitability of political and moral progress. In this light, Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction contends that modernist representations of consciousness strive to capture the inner lives of socially marginalized figures, seeking to facilitate new forms of intimacy and community amongst those who have survived crushing losses and been subject to deeply isolating social forces.

This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein originally published between 1996 and 2019, with a new introduction. The essays defend and develop a central Wittgensteinian idea: 'grammatical rules' for the use of expressions hold the key to understanding linguistic meaning, as well as its connections to necessary propositions, conceptual thought, and the nature of philosophy.

This book sets out to adjudicate the scholarly controversy surrounding Wittgenstein¿s May¿June 1913 critique of Russell¿s multiple-relation theory of judgement. It also aims to familiarize readers with the historical events, textual evidence, letters, working notes and diagrams which are crucial to a correct appreciation of Wittgenstein¿s criticisms.