Wittgenstein Research Articles

John Rawls: The Path to A Theory of Justice by Andrius Gališanka

Reviewed by: John Rawls: The Path to A Theory of Justice by Andrius Gališanka Alyssa R. Bernstein Andrius Gališanka. John Rawls: The Path to A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 261. Cloth, $45.00. Although Andrius Gališanka’s well-written book is interesting as a work of psychological and intellectual history based on archival research as well as speculation, and although it has considerable merits, it appears to overreach the limits of the author’s expertise. Since he has published a book on Wittgenstein and normative inquiry, and also an article on game theory in relation to Rawls, he seems well qualified to write chapters 2, 3, and 4 (“Drawing on Logical Positivism,” “Engagement with Wittgensteinian Philosophy,” and “The Fair Games of Autonomous Persons”), which I found informative and helpful. However, the shortcomings of the last chapters of the book prevent the achievement of some of its main aims. Gališanka purports to vindicate, or at least significantly support, the communitarian interpretation and critique of Rawls’s first book, A Theory of Justice (1971), offered by Michael Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). However, Gališanka does not discuss criticisms of communitarians’ interpretations of A Theory of Justice. Rawls explicitly rejected Sandel’s account, which is rebutted by Samuel Freeman and by Paul Weithman, both of whom have authored books explicating and critically analyzing Rawls’s arguments (respectively, Rawls [New York: Routledge, 2007], and Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]). Gališanka was aware of Weithman’s book. He cites it once (in the epilogue), but unfortunately, and presumably unintentionally, creates the misleading impression that Weithman’s arguments support Gališanka’s view. The introduction does not announce that Gališanka aims to support Sandel’s interpretation, although after reading the book and then rereading the introduction, one can see that it does state this aim, albeit briefly, obscurely, and without mention of Sandel. The aim becomes more clearly evident late in the book, thanks to an endnote citing Sandel (170), and yet clearer in the epilogue, where Sandel is again cited. Instead of philosophical analysis and argumentation supporting this communitarian interpretation of A Theory of Justice, Gališanka offers eight chapters of intellectual history covering the years leading up to the book’s publication, and a single chapter (the ninth) briefly summarizing a small portion of its central ideas and arguments. Gališanka then concludes his own book with a ten-page epilogue that presents a brief overview of Rawls’s work between 1971 and 1993, and a controversial and unsupported account of Rawls’s reasons for writing his second book, Political Liberalism (1993). Although this account resembles a well-known communitarian one, Gališanka does not cite it, and he discusses neither Weithman’s nor Freeman’s critical analyses and rebuttals of it. Any reader who is unfamiliar with the academic literature about Rawls, or who is unwary, may get the (incorrect) impression that Gališanka’s book vindicates a communitarian interpretation of Rawls’s political philosophy. Gališanka says nothing about certain important changes Rawls made to early drafts of A Theory of Justice. For example, Gališanka reports that in 1962 Rawls wrote, “Roughly, I [End Page 171] want to say that an institution is just if those subject to it could have contracted into it from the original position” (157). By the time he published A Theory of Justice, Rawls had changed the word “could” to “would.” Gališanka neither explains this change of wording nor points it out, despite its being highly significant. Gališanka also reports that in 1963 Rawls wrote that “justice is owed to persons equal in capacity for moral personality” (164). By the time he published A Theory of Justice, Rawls had changed this wording, writing that “equal justice is owed to those who have the capacity [for moral personality],” that “the capacity for moral personality is a sufficient condition for being entitled to equal justice,” that this sufficient condition is “not at all stringent,” and that “provided the minimum for moral personality is satisfied, a person...

Language Games and Philosophy

In this article, Pierre Hadot examines the late philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the social sciences. Although certain interpreters of Wittgenstein have thought that Philosophical Investigations shows philosophy to be predicated on a series of confusions based on the misuse of language, Hadot argues contrarily that an understanding of Wittgenstein’s idea of “language games”—far from ending philosophy—allows us to see it anew and to discern the source of some of its deepest perplexities. Of particular concern is the notion of the ancient idea of philosophical discourse as intrinsically connected to various forms of apprenticeship or spiritual formation. It is in this context that the supposed inconsistencies and unusual repetitions of ancient philosophy can be understood. Only from the Middle Ages do philosophical language games begin slowly to become detached from certain kinds of training, of pedagogies connected to forms of life, and become texts—and “systems”—in the sense of being written for the purposes of merely conventional reading.

Im Schatten von Bachmann und Aichinger: Die Netzwerkerin Elisabeth Löcker (1906–1961)

Elisabeth Löcker was an influential networker in the literary field of postwar Austria. Today she is remembered mainly as a footnote within the research literature on Ingeborg Bachmann. This biographical sketch attempts to explore the mechanisms of exclusion in literary historiography and the lack of "biographical awareness." Löcker was one of Karl Jaspers's few female doctoral students in Heidelberg (PhD in 1931). She moved to Vienna afterwards and became a key figure in a dissident circle at the end of World War II ("Hochrotherd Kreis"). In 1945 Löcker played a significant role in the aspired intellectual and moral renewal after the Third Reich. She became an important promoter, friend, and landlady to Ilse Aichinger and Ingeborg Bachmann. After both had left Vienna, Löcker was the Viennese "hub" within the triangular correspondence. The devout left-wing Catholic always published under a pseudonym—mostly reviews and essays. Just before her untimely death in 1961, she tried to promote the memory of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the German-speaking region.

Wittgenstein

My purpose here is to focus on an aspect of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy which has not yet been fully explored, namely the way in which his insights border on being as much aesthetic as they are philosophical. I am suggesting that his work can be seen as an effort to redirect our attention away from the usual issues of linguistic philosophy and towards a broader perspective on the task of thinking about the nature of the relationship between language and the world. I shall draw briefly on the writings of J. L. Austin in order to amplify this perspective.

Zur Bedeutung der Wörter in der Rechts- und Sprachtheorie der frühen Neuzeit

In the middle of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein developed the thought that the meaning of a word is its »use in language«. In fact, in the late 17th century, this idea was absolutely dominant and undisputed. In contrast to older theories, the first conferral of meaning (imposition) and etymology were no longer considered decisive. The reason for the transition to the usage theory was the awareness of the historicity, i. e. the changeability, of language. Furthermore, the authority of a linguistic creator was now considered relevant only in technical languages, but not in colloquial language. This was possibly due to the rise of the vernacular languages. Recommended citation: Schröder, Jan, Zur Bedeutung der Wörter in der Rechts- und Sprachtheorie der frühen Neuzeit, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 30 (2022) 46-63, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg30/046-063

History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader

Initially in college and then throughout my career, the writings of the German philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg (1920 – 1996) have been my secret talisman, warding off the tedium of routine academic labor by conjuring, with poetry and precision, higher powers of thought. I read him first for his fabulous, inimitable German style, which blurs the boundaries between historical survey, philosophical meditation, and creative fiction. Then I found how consistently useful his writings could be for taking a new viewpoint on one's own work, whatever one might be working on. The phrase work on itself figures in the title Arbeit am Mythos, one of Blumenberg's many enormous and forbidding tomes. Jewish on his mother's side, he spent the war in forced labor, then in hiding, and he so resented the time lost for work that he slept only six nights a week and lived and taught reclusively, refusing (except once) even to be photographed. But it is impossible to summarize what Blumenberg, through five decades of ceaseless labor, worked on. Most famously, he undertook a fundamental reevaluation of the “modern,” rescuing it from attempts (by Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, and others) to strip it of its legitimacy as something authentically new. Blumenberg also rethought ideas about time (human and cosmic), myth, legibility, reality, science, theory, and philosophy, the last of which he himself pursued by way of a sustained, sometimes antiphilosophical attention to metaphor. His interlaced projects often took the form of sprawling, eccentric histories that visited, usually in chronological succession, thinkers both great and obscure. His legendary Zettelkasten method allowed him to weave together memoires of an obscure nineteenth-century German school reformer with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and to connect Ludwig Wittgenstein's “fly bottle” with Plato's cave as stations on a picaresque itinerary leading from our troglodyte past into the posthuman future. Such itineraries are impossible to survey from above, as Blumenberg's chapter titles are cryptic, and the material covered is best gleaned from footnotes, which are brief and sparse.Few readers will travel the whole of even one of Blumenberg's journeys, but to tag along even briefly is always dazzling and rewarding. History, Metaphors, Fables is a perfect place to begin. Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll have gathered, in the best translation this great prose stylist has received, fundamental short texts by Blumenberg that were the seeds of his later encyclopedic volumes. Also represented are a number of essays written for a general audience, for example on Franz Kafka, Aesop, William Faulkner, pensiveness, and Goethe (Blumenberg's patron saint). A lesser-known 1964 piece on Paul Valéry's objet ambigu, included among a group of texts on “Nature, Technology, and Aesthetics,” grabbed me with the same force that arrested me, now forty years ago, browsing through some pages on the Rosetta Stone contained in Blumenberg's (untranslated) Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (The Legibility of the World). Once again, I felt torn between continuing to read and rushing back to my desk to what I had been trying to write. Blumenberg is hard to read not because of the length or difficulty of his books, but because, while reading him, one becomes both refreshed and envious.

Kripke against Kripkenstein

What was Saul Kripke’s personal stance on the sceptical challenge that he famously attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein? It will be argued that despite his statements to the contrary, we can, in fact, outline at least a rough sketch of Kripke’s own views on the challenge and its aftermath on the basis of the remarks he left in the text. In summary, Kripke (a) rejected the sceptical solution to the challenge and (b) leaned towards a non-sceptical primitivist solution. If this is correct, it follows that there is a way in which Kripke's view makes his causal-historical picture of reference potentially able to solve the sceptical challenge.

Невыразимость как условие: трансцендентальное в философии М. Мамардашвили и Л. Витгенштейна

Merab Mamardashvili repeatedly mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein in his writ­ings. But even when there are no direct references, there are recognizable echoes of his Austrian colleague in his reflections. This article shows the close­ness of their philosophical approaches and determines in what sense both thinkers can be attributed to the tradition of philosophical transcendentalism. In particular, we will show in what sense the Wittgensteinian critique of the idea that consciousness is “put forward” to the world appears in Mamardashvili. According to Wittgenstein, the subject does not belong to the world, but to the boundary that forms the world. We find a similar idea in Mamardashvili: when we “speak of consciousness and not of anything else, we speak of such things for which we cannot show (substitute) their empirical and finite number of operations controllable equivalents”. Wittgenstein, for his part, compares consciousness with the eye, which is unable to see itself. Mamardashvili calls the same phenomenon “minimum-transcensus”. “Minimum-transcensus” cannot be found within experience itself, “put forward” within that which constitutes the objectivity and objective manifestation of our experience, because it is on the border of the empirical.

Философия религии Дж. Уиздома и философская теология в раннем витгенштейнианстве

The article deals with the question of whether and how the early Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion could be related to the idea of philosophical theology. Despite the bearing the Wittgensteinian tradition has had on a variety of theological developments, it remains unclear what from its philosophical practice and which of its philosophical hinges could be connected to theology in the first place. The argument proposed in the article is that philosophical theology within the early Wittgensteinian tradition (1930s–1940s) was concerned with the philosophical problems which were irrelevant to the theological ones. Outlining the context of the Wittgensteinian reasoning on religion and showing that it was crucial for a few of Wittgenstein’s followers, especially for John Wisdom (1904–1993), gives additional ground to this argument. It appears that the hinges Wisdom adopted from Wittgenstein – most importantly the descriptivist attitude and the idea of language as the only appropriate field for being observed philosophically – follow philosophical, rather than religious, commitments. One can see this by comparison of Wisdom’s views, esp. “the garden” argument, with those of Antony Flew, Richard Hare, and Basil Mitchell, who participated in the discussion, which can be regarded as the rise of the new philosophical theology. Whereas each of these philosophers developed one of Wisdom’s ideas – the discursive, the referential, and the contextualist aspects of God-talk – Wisdom had held the combination of these ideas. Paradoxically, this complexity came from Wisdom’s uncertainty as to the existence of a strict line between the analytic and the empirical propositions in real language. However, as a result, the philosopher understood the ontological dimension of God-talk, and yet could not make ontological verdicts, which makes this type of reasoning philosophically insightful yet theologically insignificant.

FILSAFAT ANALITIKA BAHASA: Urgensi Filsafat Bahasa Dalam Landasan Filosofis Pembelajaran Bahasa Arab

The emergence of the analytic philosophy of language that developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein focused that the problem of philosophy is a problem of language. Philosophy of language as a linguistic discipline has a strategic position related to the development of language learning, including Arabic. By using library research methods, this study aims to describe the urgency of the philosophy of language and Arabic learning which resulted in several conclusions. First, in essence, language is a symbol system that is not only a sequence of empirical sounds but has a non-empirical meaning. Second, the relationship between philosophy and language occurs when philosophers most often use language analysis to solve philosophical problems. Third, the position of philosophy as the basis for analyzing language concepts and considering the central role of language in verbally expressing philosophical thoughts. Fourth, Arabic learning is in dire need of a philosophical foundation

BACK TO THE FUTURE: FROM ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY TO WITTGENSTEIN ABSTRACT

At first, one "naked and lonely" fact: nobody saw that philosophy was over. So, at least by induction, we can argue that philosophy never ends. This is regardless of the fact that throughout the history of philosophy, it is accompanied by announcements of the final conclusion, of the end, of philosophy death. From this point of view, Ludwig Wittgenstein does not seem to me to be a figure of the "past," a figure of the archive ― a figure of historical reconstruction. Moreover, the figure of "internal" conceptual deconstruction ― of an influential and respectful way/means of philosophical work ― analytical philosophy. Just the opposite. Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to be a figure of the future of philosophy, a figure of her pure authentic movement. Symbolic figure, but also, actual figure ― a figure of "never-not-complete" philosophy. A figure who signs not a word, spoken in philosophy. But which signs the point of “potential field voltage” of implementation philosophical displaying ― of not indicating things, but of registering traces of truth in individual states, to the limit brought... It is important to understand that this article is not about the philosophical tradition of analytical philosophy. And not about the philosopher himself, about the philosophy of L. Wittgenstein ― in terms of chronology, doxography, the "history of ideas" or theoretical reconstruction in the context ― one or another ― of the "philosophical present", or even, not about "universal with a signature." In this article, in fact, an attempt is opened to show, that analytical philosophy, as a definite way of acting to realize the event of thinking ― all analytical philosophy, as an attempt, as a beginning, as a movement, as a matter, as an activity, ― is phenomenal "natura naturans." It is such as a "topos of reproduction of thinking" in a purely ontological sense. In exchange with it (topos), in fact, Ludwig Wittgenstein, also, unique and one and only here, again, in a completely ontological sense, "demonstrates," that is, it is the actual, "living," perhaps irreplaceable "key" to the problem of limb, access, philosophical content and act. Perhaps having access is it correctly to put an access problem? Therefore, speaking with the help of Maître himself, philosophy is a work and luck to choose the right examples.

Terminology of Theatre: Objectives and Methods of Research

The paper summarizes the practical experience and observations ofthe author that were accumulated in the process of decades-long research of theterminology of theatre and assembling the theatre terminology dictionaries.From the theoretical viewpoint, it is an attempt to implement the ideas of«uncovering the language» and its inherent social phenomena. This ideasimultaneously emerged in the minds of the two most influential authors of thetwentieth century—Ludwig Wittgenstein (language games) and Bertolt Brecht(Verfremdungseffekt, an estrangement effect). Each of them uses these ideas toaddress different tasks—theoretical and artistic ones—nevertheless, they havethe same aim (despite varying fields of application). That is, determining thevalue of language (objectivity and potential risks of manipulation), i. e. the termsand systems of terms, on the basis of which theatre studies (or, in a broaderscope, art studies and some part of the humanities) solve its tasks.

Television Series as Critical Theories: From Current Identitarianism to Levinas. American Crime, The Sinner, Sharp Objects, Unorthodox

Abstract Critical theory with emancipatory aims today to find a source of regeneration in ordinary cultures, and in particular, in TV series. Certain series can play a role in reinventing critical theories, drawing on the tradition of the Frankfurt School but shifting some of that School’s formulations through contact with current forms of interpretive sociology and pragmatic sociology. This requires a cross-border dialogue between the “language game” of TV series and the “knowledge game” of political theory, to use concepts inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this article, I will focus on four series: seasons 1 of American Crime (2015) and The Sinner (2017); Sharp Objects (2018); and Unorthodox (2020). The resources provided by these cultural works can help us formulate a critical decoding of important aspects of the current ideological context, in particular, the intersecting identitarian and ultra-conservative tendencies we find in France, Europe, the United States, and Brazil. These critical resources bear affinities to a political philosophy of the opening of being inspired by the ethical reflections of Emmanuel Levinas.

Notes on Contributors

Other| December 01 2021 Notes on Contributors Poetics Today (2021) 42 (4): 659–661. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356994 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Poetics Today 1 December 2021; 42 (4): 659–661. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356994 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search Graham Allen is a professor in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (1994), Intertextuality (2000, 2nd ed. 2001, 3rd ed. 2021) and Roland Barthes (2003).Józef Bremer teaches at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow (Akademia Ignatiaum w Krakowie). The main focus of his research is on cognitive science and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. In connection with Wittgenstein, he has published the following articles, among others: “Wittgenstein's Remarks Concerning the Accessibility of Foreign Cultures” (2017), “Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘[. . .] My Thoughts Are One Hundred Percent Hebraic’” (2013), “‘An Artistic rather than a Scientific Achievement’: Frege and the Poeticality of Wittgenstein's Tractatus” (2020), and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Picture Theory in the Context of Philosophy, Mechanical Engineering, Music, and Architecture (2018, in Polish).Maksymilian Del Mar is professor of legal theory at Queen... You do not currently have access to this content.

Las nociones de Sinn y Sprache en Sein und Zeit de Heidegger y en las Philosophische Untersuchungen de Wittgenstein

The philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein —without a doubt— constitute the most important and influential theoretical elaborations of the philosophical field of the 20th century and that they remain relevant weight even in this century. The intention of this paper is put both philosophies in dialogue regarding certain categories that are common. In particular, the notions of Sinn (sense) and Sprache (language), but only in two relevant writings by both authors: Sein und Zeit by the so-called Germany’s teacher and Philosophische Untersuchungen by the Viennese philosopher, namely, what is regularly known as "First Heidegger" and "second Wittgenstein". What is intended with this dialogue is to draw certain conclusions about the positions that each one of the authors assumes regarding the aforementioned issues, showing advances, setbacks, reductions or expansions in the treatment of the themes.

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Better Problems

Better Problems

Вітґенштайн та феноменологія: контроверзи французької інтерпретації

The author of the article focuses on the matter of Wittgenstein's philosophy reception in France. The reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy was quite late and led to different, sometimes opposite interpretations of his thought, even among French analytical philosophers. Applying a sociological approach to the problem of reception, the author identifies factors that hindered the penetration of the ideas of analytical philosophy in France, including the powerful institutionalization of philosophy in France with its inherent traditionalism and conservatism, fully expressed national character of French philosophy, as well as the extremely polemical character of French analytical philosophy, the transformation of the choice of this tradition of philosophizing into an ethical and political choice. These factors are illustrated by an analysis of Wittgenstein's conflicting interpretation of Jacques Bouveresse and Sandra Laugier. If the first creates an image of Wittgenstein as Anti-Husserl, blaming the phenomenologist for ignoring ordinary language, the second proposes a phenomenological reading of Wittgenstein's ideas using the philosophy of ordinary language. The article shows how opposing interpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy reproduce the internal conflicts of the French philosophical field.

Language games with ‘Manifesto’

ABSTRACT What happens when ‘manifesto’, as the emblem of a committed artistic or political action, is used as the title of consumer products such as perfume? What do critics mean when they say that a certain work is ‘a manifesto’ rather than literature? When does this label appear as a superlative, and when, in contrast, is it a form of denunciation? What does J. L. Austin mean when he wishes, in the conclusion of ‘How to Do Things with Words’, that his work is not seen as ‘an individual manifesto’? The variations of the word ‘manifesto’ in popular discourse are one of the things that makes the manifesto, as Luca Somigli asserts, ‘notoriously so difficult to define’. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language game’ and the rich scholarly literature on the manifesto genre, this essay offers a reflection on ‘manifesto’ as a multilayered, performative concept which enables multiple cultural agents to perform various discursive actions. Examining its contemporary pragmatic and rhetorical meaning in light of its history helps in understanding how the term ‘manifesto’ is actually manifested.

An articulation of geopolitics otherwise? Indigenous language‐use in spaces of Arctic geopolitics

AbstractThis paper takes up the call for political geographers to engage more directly with Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language, namely his emphasis on language as activity and practice. In particular, it considers his approach to linguistic demonstration over representation, whereby the reader is not ‘told’ but ‘shown.’ This arguably instructive conceptualisation of the functioning of language is here applied to a space of geopolitics, focusing on the political potentialities of articulating an Arctic otherwise through selective bilingualism and language‐use. More specifically, the paper centres on the particular use of North Sámi language in a conference space otherwise dominated by English and Norwegian. The act of ‘articulating otherwise’ is not here an act of defiance but rather an invitation for re‐conceptualisation. In making Indigenous voices heard on their own terms, it is not only the words but even more so the act of their utterance that carries political power. The paper therefore argues that political geographers ought to (re)direct attention to language‐use and the socio‐political practices of linguistic world‐making. By drawing on Wittgenstein's approach to language‐use, what here becomes clear is that geopolitical questions too are negotiated not through given answers but rather through the interactive process of reaching these together – insights that in turn allow us to consider how agency and change may play out through language‐use, potentially articulating geopolitics otherwise.