Work Of Wittgenstein Research Articles

Wittgenstein's critical Philosophy of Mathematical Practice

AbstractOn the one hand, I show that the later Wittgenstein's practice‐based approach to meaning, including the idea that the meaningfulness of mathematics ultimately is rooted in the everyday ‘applications’ it emerged from, as well as his insistence on the variability in and contingency of mathematical and mathematics‐like practices, foreshadows more recent work in Philosophy of Mathematical Practice (PMP), although Wittgenstein's approach was more radically practice‐based than what is prevalent in present‐day PMP. On the other hand, I also show that Wittgenstein's work on mathematics is driven by a pervasive critical attitude towards some key characteristics (monism, foundationalism and exceptionalism) of mainstream philosophical discourse about mathematics (then and now), which is mostly absent from present‐day PMP, and I argue that this aspect of Wittgenstein's work on mathematics could inspire present‐day practitioners of PMP to rethink the identity of their discipline.

Wittgenstein and Theology: An Interplay of Appropriations

Ludwig Wittgenstein's work has appealed to audiences that feared that traditional Christian language was being bandied about with no real significance attached to the ostensibly pious words. Wittgenstein became increasingly attractive to many theologians because his attention to modern philosophical confusions about the nature of language shed light on the linguistic confusion in the churches. Wittgenstein's writings, particularly his later posthumously published notes, promised to be an antidote to the perceived vacuity and superficiality of much Christian discourse. However, Wittgenstein's influence on theology has not been uniform. The elusive and often aphoristic nature of his later reflections has guaranteed that his work has been appropriated in divergent ways. At least two different theological appropriations of his enigmatic remarks have emerged. One set has developed a rather formalistic interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks about “grammar” and used them to construe Christian doctrines as general rules governing thinking, feeling, and acting. A different variety, while also acknowledging the theme of the grammar of the faith, has emphasized his reflections on the “use” of concepts in the variegated “practices” of specific Christian communities. The first trajectory may best be represented by the Yale theologian George Lindbeck (1923–2018), and the second by another Yale theologian, Paul L. Holmer (1916–2004). In modified and sometimes surreptitious forms, both legacies continue to be influential, often intermingling in complex ways.

Hadot's later Wittgenstein: A critique

AbstractPierre Hadot is best known as a historian of ancient philosophy and for advocating the relevance of ancient thinking for contemporary lives. What is less well known is that he was one of the first French philosophers to take a serious interest in the work of Wittgenstein, publishing between 1959 and 1962 two essays on the Tractatus and two on the Philosophical Investigations, since republished as Wittgenstein et les limites de langage (Paris: J. Vrin, 2010). Only two of these essays are available (and not widely) in English translation. Part of my goal is to argue that they deserve the attention of anglophone readers. My focus here is on Hadot's remarks about the Philosophical Investigations. Hadot argues that this work produces a self‐defeating paradox because it claims that we can speak intelligibly only within a language‐game, but Wittgenstein, like the philosophers he criticises, tries to transcend language‐games in the presentation of his views. Despite this criticism, Hadot is inspired by Wittgenstein's discussion of the multiplicity of language‐games to argue that the texts of ancient philosophy are not part of the same language‐game as those of modern philosophy and must be approached as ‘spiritual exercises’, rather than as bodies of doctrine or theory. Wittgenstein is thus a key inspiration for Hadot's historiographical method. I argue that Hadot is too impressed by a faulty analogy between the Tractatus and the Investigations and that he gives a problematically reductive interpretation of Wittgenstein's talk of language‐games and implausibly attributes to Wittgenstein a reverence for ‘the ordinary’ that supposedly takes the place of his earlier wonder at the existence of the world. Many commentators since Hadot have made similar errors, so his case remains instructive. I conclude by suggesting, nonetheless, that something like Hadot's proposals about historiographical method may be justified by a better reading of the Investigations.

The Paradoxical Sources of Illiberalism: A Synoptic Approach to the Genealogies of Illiberalism

This paper aims to explore the implications of the essentially contested nature of the concept of liberalism in the conceptualization of illiberalism in order to understand the existence of misunderstandings and contradictions in the delimitation and definition of the concept within illiberalism studies. To this end, we seek to show that the contributions of linguistic political theory, inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, are are to describe and understand the conflicts that illiberalism can raise. Indeed, since liberalism is both an ideology and an analytical concept, it is difficult to define the latter without arbitrating the ideological conflicts between the “liberals pretenders”. As the synoptic comparison of the genealogies of illiberalism found in the literature shows, these conflicts are transcribed in the conceptualization of illiberalism, in a more or less imperceptible way, and are sometimes instrumentalized to invert the function and content of the concept. Consequently, our hypothesis is that the notion of "grammar" is useful in clarifying the fact that the concept of illiberalism has a different function and purpose depending on what is considered liberalism and the liberal tradition, which ultimately allows us to assess the coherence and relevance of the concept's use.

Philosopical Relativism and Experience of the Second Person

The article is a retrospection of the internship, that me, as a young yet-to-be graduate of Applied Anthropology studies in John Paul’s II Catholic University of Lublin undertook in Zambia. As a student, it always baffled, are there are ways to compare a world views, in order to evaluate which one is better? Is it even possible, in the world where so many people from so many cultures exist, to find some universal values on which everyone can agree? Why would one stand by his statement that a given thing is right, while so many things are just “encoded” to us whether we like it or not. That is when I have found out about the idea of “relativism”, and amazed by it, decided to make it my main field of interest. Now, as a full-fledged graduate, I look back at my experience and contemplate the nature of the interaction with the second person. I reflect on the idea of relativism, while supporting myself with the works of Wittgenstein and Maria Baghramian. I also formulate my own ideas based on what I have experienced during my work in Africa as an foreigner in a territory I knew very little about.

Hoe de auteur verdween uit Wittgensteins Tractatus

How the Author Disappeared from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus In this essay, I investigate the status of the written word in the (early, mostly) work of Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tends to imagine language as written rather than spoken. This focus on writing goes together with a sense that the author is absent from the text. I argue that the problem is not with writing in general but specifically with books, and more specifically with the fantasy of a book of everything, the importance of which to Wittgenstein’s early work was brought out by Eli Friedlander. On my account, such a book, by pretending to contain the whole world, leaves no place for an author. Since the early Wittgenstein imagines subjectivity in the form of a book of everything, he is unable to place subjectivity – subjects: you and I – in the world. I end by briefly suggesting that in his later work, Wittgenstein gives up on the fantasy of a book of everything and is in a better position to address the problem of finding subjectivity in the world.

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine

Reviewed by: Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine Caleb Bernacchio PERREAU-SAUSSINE, Émile. Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Nathan Pinkoski. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. xvii + 216 pp. Cloth, $40.00 This book is the much anticipated translation of the author's doctoral dissertation completed under the direction of Pierre Manent and Charles Taylor in 2000. Manent also contributes a foreword to this edition. Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography comes in the wake of Perreau-Saussine's untimely death in 2010, during which time he was translating a portion of his dissertation (chapter 2, part 1), which is included in the present text. Accordingly, the book does not discuss works published by MacIntyre after 2000. The book provides a detailed account of MacIntyre's intellectual development. Besides the introduction and epilogue, its three chapters cover politics, philosophy, and theology, respectively. [End Page 557] In chapter 1, Perreau-Saussine recounts the impact of British political debates during the 1950s and 1960s on MacIntyre's early intellectual development. Sharing a disdain for the Labour Party's embrace of a "reformed capitalism" and welfare state politics with other members of the New Left such as Charles Taylor, MacIntyre connected this political stance with a theoretical critique of utilitarianism, foreshadowing his later criticisms of bureaucracy in After Virtue. However, unlike Taylor, who "places himself on the field 'culture,'" focusing on the articulation of a richer account of modern values, "in MacIntyre's eyes, virtue and wisdom are more fragile than Taylor thinks." Perreau-Saussine not only insightfully explains the contrasting views of MacIntyre and Taylor in terms of their estimation of the prospects inherent within postwar liberal politics but also explains how MacIntyre's pessimistic take on postwar politics led him to embrace elements of conservatism, especially the theme of the individual as "embedded" within a community and tradition, which thus provide an essential context for understanding individual freedom. As such, the author argues, for MacIntyre, Burke and Marx come together in their critique of the abstractions of liberalism. However, "[u]nlike Burke's conservatism," the author argues, "MacIntyre's is not a liberal conservatism but one that tends toward an antiliberal conservatism." We might also note that this skepticism of the market places MacIntyre in opposition to many contemporary conservatives. Perreau-Saussine shows how MacIntyre's early affinity with conservative ideas, originally as a source of criticism of the Labour Party's embrace of the welfare state, links with MacIntyre's later work, especially his notion of a practice, which connects with Ruskin's discussions of the craftsman, and his account of the natural law, which, like Burke, he takes to be embedded within communities and traditions. Chapter 2 shows how MacIntyre's participation in postwar politics overlaps with various philosophical debates of the time, including those concerning the role of morality within Marxism, the adequacy of analytic moral philosophy, and the impact of the late Wittgenstein's work. For MacIntyre and other Marxists, Stalin's brutality highlighted Marxism's need for an adequate account of ethics. Whereas some appealed to Kantian themes to address this problem, MacIntyre rejected this path. Accordingly, Perreau-Saussine notes "MacIntyre's unceasing interest with Hegelian philosophy of action," especially Hegel's critique of Kant's appeal to an abstract notion of "humanity," a theme that returns in After Virtue. This recognition of the lack of an adequate moral perspective within Marxism, made apparent by Stalin's consequentialism, along with MacIntyre's refusal to embrace Kant's "abstract universalism" was another avenue leading him from Marx to Aquinas, as the author adeptly illustrates. Perreau-Saussine's comparison of MacIntyre and Lyotard is also insightful. For both, Stalinism and the theoretical failures of Marxism lead to a rejection of this political tradition; but where Lyotard, rejecting universalism altogether, turns to Nietzsche, MacIntyre turns to Aristotle and then Aquinas, seeking a more adequate conception of reason rather [End Page 558] than rejecting it. Like Hegel, the late Wittgenstein's emphasis on the role of communal standards for individual thought and action also made an important impact on MacIntyre's thought, further informing his focus on local communities and traditions. As the...

Dogtoothand Wittgenstein's builders: A future in language?

AbstractThis article grows out of the conviction that (some) films can philosophise. It looks to juxtapose the filmDogtoothand Wittgenstein's builders' example, such that they are seen as philosophising in similar ways over similar issues. Both strike me as probing the possibility—or denial—of a future with language. Using Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees' responses to Wittgenstein's builders, I register the significance and meaning of themes from the film and Wittgenstein's work in a mutually enlightening way: language, games and breaking free. This results in two different pictures of our hope of a future in and with language.

Normativity between philosophy and science

ABSTRACT Recent decades are marked by the upswing of the use of the term “normativity“ not only in philosophical discussions, but increasingly also within reports of empirical scientists. This may invoke the question how far these developments overlap and in how far they go past each other. A significant overlap might lead to an interesting coalescence of the two approaches to norms, which may provide for a ”naturalization” of some philosophical speculations about normativity, putting them on a firmer foundation, while offering the empirical scientists some new impulses for directing their research. In this paper I give an overview of some recent empirical results concerning human normativity and I point out a certain philosophical tradition, rooted especially in the works of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Brandom, which treats normativity so that it becomes more or less compatible with these results.

The Problem of action and the problem of language: the "late" Wittgenstein as an anthropologist

The theoretical gap with the action actually performed is one of the fundamental problems of anthropology and the theory of action. To understand it, it is worth turning to the antitheoretical and anti-formalist pathos of the "late" Wittgenstein, which opposes all attempts to describe action and language (understood as activity) in terms of rules and abstract structures. A critical analysis of the assumptions of intellectualism borrowed from simple common sense (for example, about following a rule) allows us to show that the logical analysis of action and language deals not with a real language, but with an artificially created abstraction. The article attempts to show the positive significance of this criticism. The main conclusion of the study is that a thinker is able to adequately understand action and language if he also makes his own scientific attitude to them the subject of his analysis. Only in this way can we hope to transform Wittgenstein's antitheoretical pathos into the basis of a constructive study of action and language. The tools of scientific analysis are often much more rigorous and logical than its subject. Wittgenstein's analysis of language games and the life form behind them is an attempt to avoid such too strict and too logical methods and constructions in anthropology, philosophy of action and philosophy of language. The novelty of the research lies in the application of Wittgenstein's ideas to clarify the weaknesses and difficulties faced by the humanities (linguistics, anthropology) in the XX century and today, as well as to find a way out of these difficulties. The relevance of the work is connected with the great interest of modern logicians and philosophers in Wittgenstein's work, with the urgent need to identify new ways of developing philosophical anthropology.

WITTGENSTEIN’S DISAPPEARING IDEALISM

The article examines some well-known attempts to consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in the context of transcendental idealism. The main purpose of these attempts is to protect Wittgenstein’s later philosophy from the relativistic interpretation of such concepts a “language games” and “forms of life.” Thus, Bernard Williams, noting the ambiguity of the pronoun “we” in Philosophical Investigations, believes that such a “we” has a transcendental rather than empirical character. This approach allows Williams to argue that there is no meaningful alternative to the general perspective on the world that is embodied in this “we.” However, the main disadvantage of this approach is that Williams views such a “we” in much the same way as a conceptual schema. However, as many authors point out, this idea does not find its confirmation in the later works of Wittgenstein. Jonathan Lear, in turn, suggests that we should consider such a non-empirical “we” as a special kind of “mindedness.” Such a mindedness could be considered as analogous to a Kant’s analytical principle of apperception. Lear believes that it is this principle that gives meaningful unity to human behaviour and makes possible any communication with other people. Following Williams and trying to correct the shortcomings of his position, Lear proposes to consider the ambiguous status of “we” in Philosophical Investigations as an argument in favour of the “disappearance” of the transcendental “we,” and with it the disappearance of the threat of relativism. John McDowell, however, agreeing with the need to get rid Wittgenstein's philosophy of relativistic interpretations, critically assesses the idea of using transcendental idealism for this purpose. Instead, McDowell proposes to return to Hegel’s thesis about the unboundedness of the conceptual, which makes it unnecessary to appeal to the transcendental justification of harmony between reason and the world. The article, therefore, also examines McDowell’s arguments against attributing to Wittgenstein any versions of transcendental idealism.

The Use of Examples in Philosophy of Technology

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein (standard metre), Foucault (panopticism), and Agamben (paradigm), we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies.

Düşünce Deneyleri Doğallaştırıldı

Thought experiments have long been utilized in science and philosophy. They come in various forms, from Schrödinger's cat in physics to the Chinese room argument in philosophy. Although thought experiments are used widely, scant attention has been paid to how thought experiments actually work. In philosophy literature, it has been argued that thought experiments are a disguised form of meaning analysis. Thought experiments rely on the notion of analyticity on their basis, and therefore they should be abandoned. In this paper, I argue that if we distinguish conceivability type thought experiments commonly found in philosophy from factive thought experiments widely used in science, a viable methodological alternative can be found. I propose a set of criteria to define factive thought experiments precisely. I show how factive thought experiments can be successfully used in philosophical reasoning by giving examples, mainly from Wittgenstein's work. In this way, I argue, it is possible to naturalize thought experimentation.

Wittgenstein and Dilthey on Scientism and Method

Abstract While Wittgenstein’s work has been extensively investigated in relation to many other important and influential philosophers, there is very little scholarly work that positively investigates the relationship between the work of Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Dilthey. To the contrary, some commentators like Hacker (2001a) suggest that Dilthey’s work (and that of other hermeneuticists) simply pales or is obsolete in comparison to Wittgenstein’s own insights. Against such assessments, this article posits that Wittgenstein’s and Dilthey’s thought most crucially intersects at the related topics of scientism on the one hand and scientific and philosophical method on the other. In reconstructing Dilthey’s conceptions of understanding versus explaining and central points of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it becomes apparent that they share a staunch rejection of scientism and use the notion of understanding as a means to prevent methodologies from the natural sciences encroaching onto the human sciences (in Dilthey’s case) and philosophy (in Wittgenstein’s case). Notwithstanding a number of central ways in which these thinkers differ, this article closes by suggesting that there is some evidence according to which Wittgenstein, like Dilthey, can reasonably be understood as championing some central tenets of the hermeneutical tradition.

A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

Reviewed by: A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé Greg Chase A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein. Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 342. $97.50 (cloth); $32.50 (paper). A Different Order of Difficulty makes an important and original contribution to modernist studies by engaging with the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus. The Tractatus appeared in English in 1922, that banner year of modernist literary production, and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé highlights striking points of contact between Wittgenstein's philosophical treatise and works of fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and J. M. Coetzee. Perhaps fittingly, given her title—drawn from the Ithaca chapter of Joyce's Ulysses (1922)—Zumhagen-Yekplé's interdisciplinary approach demands a lot from readers. Yet, as in many of the modernist touchstones she analyzes, the challenges presented by her book are more than justified by the insights at which it arrives: A Different Order of Difficulty is powerfully argued, thoroughly researched, and at times deeply moving. Zumhagen-Yekplé identifies three major topics that, she argues, are central to both Wittgenstein's work and that of his literary contemporaries: "difficulty, oblique ethical instruction, and a yearning for transformation" (1–2). With regard to the first of these, Zumhagen-Yekplé notes that praising the putative difficulty of modernist texts remains "a critical truism" with elitist overtones; however, she sets out to establish a productive new way of thinking about modernist difficulty (27). She does so by turning to George Steiner's essay "On Difficulty" (1978), focusing in particular on two of the types of difficulty Steiner outlines: "tactical" difficulty, whereby a text's formal difficulty serves an instructive purpose; and "ontological" difficulty, whereby a text "confronts us with unanswerable questions about the nature of human language, meaning, and significance" (30, 33). Zumhagen-Yekplé's first major example of a modernist text that exhibits these two modes of difficulty—really, the central example in her book—is the Tractatus. Zumhagen-Yekplé's approach to Wittgenstein builds on the work of other scholars who have recently sought to recuperate the philosopher's reputation within modernist studies by challenging the enduring misconception of him as a staid logical positivist.1 Zumhagen-Yekplé reads the Tractatus as a highly wrought aesthetic work with a significant, if notably implicit, ethical purpose. She does so by promoting the "resolute" reading of the Tractatus, an interpretive program pioneered by philosopher Cora Diamond.2 Resolute readings endeavor to make sense of the Tractatus's surprising conclusion: after providing a detailed account of the logical structure of language, Wittgenstein suddenly writes, in the work's penultimate proposition, "My propositions serve as elucidations in this way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder once he has climbed up it)" (quoted in Zumhagen-Yekplé, 53). In contrast to more traditional readings, [End Page 392] resolute readings suggest that we should take Wittgenstein seriously when he deems all his prior propositions "nonsensical." For Zumhagen-Yekplé, reading the Tractatus resolutely reveals it to be a "self-undermining pseudoargument," constructed deliberately by Wittgenstein "with the aim of disabusing readers of our confused tendency to succumb to the thrall of metaphysical systems that lead us to mistake nonsense for sense" (60). As such, Zumhagen-Yekplé understands the Tractatus as a "therapeutic" work, which seeks to guide readers up the ladder from confusion to "clarity" (47, 60). The Tractatus's project is an ethical one, Zumhagen-Yekplé emphasizes, insofar as it asks us "to take up the difficult work of self-transformation" that becomes necessary if we wish truly to understand its teachings (66). A Different Order of Difficulty first presents this account of the Tractatus in the introduction and then, more extensively, in chapter one. Although this chapter in particular has little to say about literature per se, its account of how the Tractatus replaces one kind of difficulty (the complex logical system it ostensibly erects) with another (the difficulty of meaningful self-examination) remains of interest to literary scholars, because it...

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S VIEWS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN

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

Introduction

Abstract In the lead essay to this special section, Talal Asad explores some of the avenues opened up by Wittgenstein's work for students of religion. Highlighting some of the philosopher's key insights on the life of language, Asad argues that, instead of taking the opposition between belief and practice as a starting point, scholars should attend to the variety of ways language comes to be used in contexts of embodied learning, contexts wherein the abilities and aptitudes germane to religious life are developed and honed. Turning his focus to what Wittgenstein called the “grammar” of such key concepts as conviction, persuasion, and critique, Asad points to some of the ways that our secular understandings of these notions are inadequate for grasping their place within religious lives. In the latter part of the essay, Asad brings a Wittgensteinian perspective to bear on a key debate within the Islamic tradition concerning the “rationality” of divine speech. The article is followed by five commentaries that take up and expand on different themes found in Asad's essay and developed elsewhere in his work.

Klossowski and Wittgenstein on Sensation and Privacy

This paper compares the treatment of private sensations in the works of Wittgenstein and Klossowski. Its aim is to show that, despite the differences between their traditions and methods, they align in at least one important respect: rejecting relations of reference between signs and private sensations. The paper briefly contextualises their lines of attack on these relations, situating the two thinkers’ commonalities amidst what are undeniably divergent wider purposes. It proceeds to argue for two more specific conclusions. Firstly, Klossowski’s own rejoinder directed at reference to private sensations is rooted in his comparison of linguistic meaning to economic valuation in Living Currency. Secondly, Klossowski goes beyond Wittgenstein in arguing that, regardless of the status of reference of this sort, no complete account of sensation can view it only as private.

Reviewing school leadership: from psychology to philosophy

ABSTRACT Arguably the notion of the school leader as the all-important person in school improvement in England still holds sway, despite the development of a huge range of leadership theories and perspectives which suggest a broader contextual approach may be appropriate. Reflecting on the development of a MA course in leadership and management, this paper argues that a philosophical approach based on the later work of Wittgenstein is helpful. The starting point for the approach used here is Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games, which gives recognition to the many different views, descriptions, definitions, and theories of leadership. Informed by Wittgenstein’s wider argument, it develops by bringing in the notions of family resemblance, social rules, and forms of life to suggest that Wittgenstein’s account of meaning is able to move us toward a better understanding of the range of views about school leadership.

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...