scholarly journals Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, Patterns of Life, and Ways of Living

2015 ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
Forms Of Life

This paper aims to distinguish Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘form of life’ from other concepts or expressions that have been confused or conflated with it, such as ‘language-game’, ‘certainty’, ‘patterns of life’, ‘ways of living’ and ‘facts of living’. Competing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘form(s) of life’ are reviewed (Baker & Hacker, Cavell, Conway, Garver), and it is concluded that Wittgenstein intended both a singular and a plural use of the concept; with, where the human is concerned, a single human form of life characterized by innumerable forms of human life.

scholarly journals Tractarian Form as the Precursor to Forms of Life

2015 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Chon Tejedor
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Shed Light

Interpreters are divided on the question of whether the phrase ‘form of life’ is used univocally in Wittgenstein’s later writings. Some univocal interpreters suggest that, for Wittgenstein, ‘form of life’ captures a uniquely biological notion: the biologically human form of life. Others suggest that it captures a cultural notion: the notion of differently enculturated forms of human life. Non-univocal interpreters, in contrast, argue that Wittgenstein does not use ‘form of life’ univocally, but that he uses it sometimes to highlight a cluster of biological notions and sometimes a cluster of cultural ones. The debate between univocal and non-univocal readers has generated a raft of intricate, illuminating literature on both sides. If it remains to an extent open, it is partly as a result of the fact that the textual evidence available on this matter, in Wittgenstein’s later published and unpublished writings, is so limited. In this paper, I argue that considering Wittgenstein’s earlier treatment of ‘form’ can help to shed light on his later treatment of ‘form of life’. More specifically I argue that revisiting the Tractatus’ treatment of ‘form’ gives us – perhaps surprisingly – reasons to support a non-univocal later reading of ‘forms of life’.

scholarly journals Playing ethics and teaching morality: how wittgenstein could help us to apply games to the moral living

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Janyne Sattler
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Moral Engagement

ABSTRACT: In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations the notion of a 'language game' gives human communication a regained flexibility. Contrary to the Tractatus, the ethical domain now composes one language game among others, being expressed in various types of sentences such as moral judgments, imperatives and praises, and being shared in activity by a human form of life. The aim of this paper is to show that the same moves that allow for a moral language game are the ones allowing for learning and teaching about the moral living, where persuasion takes the place of argument by means of a plural appeal. For this purpose, literature would seem to be one of the best tools at our disposal. As a way of exemplifying our moral engagement to literature I proceed at last to a brief analysis of Tolstoy's Father Sergius, to show how playing this game would help us accomplish this pedagogical enterprise.

scholarly journals The Pragmatic Connotation of Wittgenstein's Assertion "Language Game is a Form of Life"

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peilan Peng
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Life Form ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Forms Of Life

This paper introduces the concept of "language game", and on the basis of this background, illustrates the two important concepts of the later philosophy Wittgenstein: "language game" and "life form", and emphatically discusses the "language game" and "life form" of the dialectical relations. The paper also reveals the pragmatic connotation of the assertion "language is a kind of life form", which is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: language use is unique to human social practice; the context of linguistic games is life; the rules of the language game are rooted in the forms of life.

Human Life: Our Essentially Biological Nature and the Role of Mental Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-391
Author(s):  
Gerson Reuter
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Core ◽  
Natural Function

Animalism is the view that we are primarily living beings of the species Homo sapiens. Being alive consists in the realization of biological processes. Accordingly, our conditions of existence and persistence have nothing to do with things like mental continuity. Hence, mental capabilities seem to be irrelevant to understanding the core of our nature as human beings. In recent years, the debate on animalism has focused on certain intractable ontological puzzles. However important these puzzles may be, they do not get to the heart of the widespread reluctance to accept animalism. One crucial reason lies in the fact that this view does not seem to respect our deeply entrenched understanding of ourselves as mental beings. The aim of my paper is thus to provide a stronger conception of the ontological relevance of our mental capabilities – without giving up the cen- tral claims of animalism. In particular, I discuss three proposals: first, the idea that being a human being involves the potential to develop mental capabilities; second, the idea that it is an essential feature of human beings to have a brain with the natural function of developing mental capabilities; and third, the idea that the ontological relevance of mental capabilities may emerge in the context of specifying something like the general human form of life.

scholarly journals Fundamental issues and indices: Aesthetics of architecture

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
City Planners

The author asks the fundamental questions on aesthetics of architecture. Architecture, as the strategic dispositive of a building, and urbanism, as the strategic dispositive of a city, transform the spatial (geographic) and temporal (historical) condition into the dispositive of a form of life whereby we process ourselves as human individuals and communities of people in our spatiotemporal phenomenality at a given point in time. It is therefore necessary to politicise the different aspects of engineering-architectural and artistic-architectural practice. That means showing where the organisation of living space confronts the organisation of individual and collective forms of life. The politics of architecture is anthropologised and that means that architects/city planners work to orient architecture toward the object or relationship of objects that intervene in human life in its everyday flexible and complex intimate, private, and public appearance.

scholarly journals Natural goodness and the political form of human life

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-592
Author(s):  
Jan Müller
Keyword(s):  
Explicit Form ◽  
Life Form ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Natural Goodness ◽  
Human Practices ◽  
Political Form

Ethical Naturalism attempts to explain the objective normativity effective in human practices by reference to the relation between a living individual and the life-form it exhibits. This explanation falls short in the case of human beings (1) - not merely because of their essential rationality, but because the idea of normativity implicit in practice is dependent on the form of normativity?s being made explicit (2). I argue that this explicit form of normativity?s force and claim - the law in general - implies a tension between an explicit norm?s claim to absoluteness and the particularity of the situational case it is applied to. This tension may seem to produce an inherent violence corrupting the very idea of objective normativity inherent in the human form of life (3); in fact, it shows that the human form of life is essentially political. That the human form of life is essentially political does not contradict the idea of objective normativity - provided that this objectivity is not derived from a conception of ?natural goodness?, but rather from the actuality of human practice and its principle, justice (4).

Movement in Repose

Qui Parle ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-49
Author(s):  
Aaron Frederick Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Modern Concept ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Philosophical Ethic ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

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