Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Crary
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Universal Truth

In this chapter, Alice Crary argues that a truly ‘realist’ work of literature might be one that, instead of conforming to familiar genre-specifications, attempts by other means to expose readers to the real—that is, to how things really are. Crary highlights Coetzee’s efforts to elicit what she calls ‘transformative thought’: a process that involves both delineating the progress of individual characters in their quests for reality, and, in formal terms, inviting readers to, for instance, imaginatively participate in such quests. With regard to The Childhood of Jesus, she highlights resonances between these features of Coetzee’s writing and Wittgenstein’s procedures in the Philosophical Investigations. In doing so, Crary brings out a respect in which literature and philosophy are complementary discourses: literature can deal in the sort of objective or universal truth that is philosophy’s touchstone, and philosophical discourse can have an essentially literary dimension.

Wittgenstein on Representation, Privileged Objects, and Private Languages

1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Williams
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
Private Language ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
Private Language Argument

In this paper, I shall investigate Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument,’ that is, the argument to be found in Philosophical Investigations 243-315. Roughly, this argument is intended to show that a language knowable to one person and only that person is impossible; in other words, a ‘language’ which another person cannot understand isn't a language. Given the prolonged debate sparked by these passages, one must have good reason to bring it up again. I have: Wittgenstein's attack on private languages has regularly been misinterpreted. Moreover, it has been misinterpreted in a way that draws attention away from the real force of his arguments and so undercuts the philosophical significance of these passages.

scholarly journals Render or Reality? Virtuality and the Crysis of Distinction in Contemporary Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 18-24
Author(s):  
Nadia Petrunok
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Real ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
Philosophical Questions

Modern philosophy tends to consider human reality in more and more interdisciplinary contexts. Thanks to that, at first traditional, and now new media as well as IT, attract philosophers’ attention and provide material for thinking over a lot of so-called “eternal philosophical questions”. Among them, there are some of the broadest questions: a) catching the margins of the real; b) understanding, which phenomena and objects to constitute human might be called real. The key goal of this article is to research one of the crucial concepts, which brings us to understanding reality, – the notion of virtuality. The author of this paper outlines background of this notion, describes its characteristics and usage in modern philosophical discourse. First of all, virtual is described in its connotations to all three dimensions of time being: past, present, and future. It is argued that the notion of virtuality at first used to be “rediscovered” by Gilles Deleuze, but then it has experienced crucial changes in philosophy of the XXth and XXIst centuries. By means of that, virtual is discussed as a counterpart of the concept of reality. In particular, this article touches upon a variety of connotations between the notions of virtuality, reality and actuality. It also shows the context of juxtaposition of the aforementioned notions. What is more, this paper reveals moral aspects of virtuality both in transcendental and as immanent senses. This article shows the background of indistinguishability for “real” and “virtual”. Finally, it is stated that in the situation of so-called “substituted reality” the multiplicity of connotations of the notion of virtuality ought to be used to rediscover the notion of reality itself.

Joseph Conrad

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-86
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The Universe

Joseph Conrad famously declared a desire ‘above all, to make you see’, but he also repeatedly deploys abstract nouns—truth, beauty, the universe—to denote his representational ambitions. Discussing Conrad’s use of the idea of the real as an anchor for his fiction, this chapter works across literature and philosophy not by recourse to the model of a ‘lens’ or influence study, but instead examines the ways in which the particularly metaphysical dimension of the representational capacities and incapacities of language reveals the contradictions inherent in our desire to place the objects of our experience in a clear, vivid scheme. What demands do realities beyond our sensory experience make upon us for shape and conceptual clarity? In new readings of Nostromo and The Secret Agent, this chapter explores how Conrad’s use of metaphor and analogy fractures the metonymic chains through which realism moves between the known and the unknown.

Wittgenstein on Mathematical Proof

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 79-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Proof ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Foundations Of Mathematics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Investigations

To be asked to provide a short paper on Wittgenstein's views on mathematical proof is to be given a tall order (especially if little or no familiarity either with mathematics or with Wittgenstein's philosophy is to be presupposed!). Close to one half of Wittgenstein's writings after 1929 concerned mathematics, and the roots of his discussions, which contain a bewildering variety of underdeveloped and sometimes conflicting suggestions, go deep to some of the most basic and difficult ideas in his later philosophy. So my aims in what follows are forced to be modest. I shall sketch an intuitively attractive philosophy of mathematics and illustrate Wittgenstein's opposition to it. I shall explain why, contrary to what is often supposed, that opposition cannot be fully satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to the discussions of following a rule in the Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Finally, I shall try to indicate very briefly something of the real motivation for Wittgenstein's more strikingly deflationary suggestions about mathematical proof, and canvass a reason why it may not in the end be possible to uphold them.

Happiness after death? Demetrios Capetanakis on philosophy and Proust

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Emmanouela Kantzia
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
German Version ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Joint Approach

Demetrios Capetanakis was one of the first writers to introduce Marcel Proust to the Greek public in the 1930s. His study of Proust's philosophy (hitherto known only in the English and Greek translations of a lecture he delivered in French) survives in manuscript form, both in French and in an earlier German version. An examination of these texts in the context of Proust's early reception allows us to follow Capetanakis’ intellectual trajectory, as well as to sketch his particular joint approach to literature and philosophy, which is largely indebted to the works of Plato and Kierkegaard. Capetanakis seeks Proust's philosophy not in the universal laws put forth in his novel, but in the writer's attempt to conceal behind them the real pain and agony that marked his own life. This leads him to a rather unusual philosophical reading of Proust's novel and, in the process, of Plato's Phaedrus.

The Internet – Proposing an Infrastructure for the Philosophy of Virtualness

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Katrina Burt ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Real ◽  
Virtual Interactive ◽  
Philosophical Nature

This paper proposes a preliminary infrastructure for future philosophical discourse on the virtual, interactive, visual, top layer of the Internet. The paper begins by introducing thoughts on such words as real, virtual, reality, knowledge, and truth. Next, news summaries are provided illustrating some effects from the “real world” on the virtual part of the Internet, and vice versa. Subsequently, nine major categories of Internet variables are identified. Finally, over one hundred questions about the philosophical nature of the virtual part of the Internet are listed and are organized into fourteen categories.

Familiar or strange? Rediscovering the ‘real’ child of educational policy through film

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 953-963 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Educational Policy ◽  
Faithful Representation ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Real ◽  
Children's Films ◽  
Object Of Knowledge

The working thesis of my latest research is that cinema can offer a viewer something of a ‘re-education in education’. In the case of policymakers and researchers in the field of education, this means looking again at the reality of the conceptual phenomena with which we occupy ourselves in writing to see whether the two groups are aligned. This article will first look at how the figure of the child is commonly constructed as an object of knowledge within policy and philosophical discourse, suggesting that this approach affirms frameworks in which it is possible to know what a child is, but may fail to do justice to the child of our ordinary experience. I then turn to a discussion of some of Iran’s so-called ‘children’s films’, exploring how their presentation of a world, and the representation of children within that world, allow for a re-education in the lived reality of children. It is suggested that this aesthetic turn in observing the child's behaviour may encourage a more faithful representation of that reality within educational policy and research also.

The Real Private Language Argument

Philosophy ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 55 (211) ◽  
pp. 85-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Candlish
Keyword(s):  
Private Language ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Private Language Argument

It verges on the platitudinous to say that Wittgenstein's own treatment of the question of a private language has been almost lost to view under mountains of commentary in the last twenty years—so much so, that no one with a concern for his own health would try to arrive at a verdict on the question by first mastering the available discussion. But a general acquaintance with the commentaries indicates that opinion on the matter can be roughly divided into two categories: that of the Old Orthodoxy (both defenders and attackers of Wittgenstein are included), most recently represented by Robert Fogelin in his book Wittgenstein; and that of what may be termed the New Guardians of the Wittgenstein Tradition, apparently based in Oxford and headed by Anthony Kenny, who in his book Wittgenstein has proposed a new account of the argument of Philosophical Investigations §§256–271. The important difference between the old and new orthodoxies will be considered later.

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