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 Wittgenstein on ethics: Working through Lebensformen

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Floyd
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Significant Step

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics cannot be located in an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse, true or false. At the same time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose, and his attitude was not that of the emotivist. The trajectory of this conception of the normativity of philosophy as it developed in his subsequent thought is traced. It is explained that and how the notion of a ‘form of life’ ( Lebensform) emerged only in his later thought, in 1937, earmarking a significant step forward in his philosophical method. We argue that the concept of Lebensform represents a way of domesticating logic itself, the very idea of a claim or reason, supplementing the idea of a ‘language game’, which it deepens. Lebensform is contrasted with the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt through a reading of the notions of ‘I’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ as they were treated in the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. Finally, the notion of Lebensform is shown to have replaced the notion of culture ( Kultur) in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s spring 1937 ‘domestication’ of the nature of logic is shown to have been fully consonant with the idea that he was influenced by his reading Alan Turing’s 1936/1937 paper, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’.

scholarly journals Rules, understanding and language games in mathematics

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
V. V. Tselishchev
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Logical Necessity ◽  
Foundations Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Inherent Ambiguity

The article is devoted to the applicability of Wittgenstein’s following the rule in the context of his philosophy of mathematics to real mathematical practice. It is noted that in «Philosophical Investigations» and «Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics» Wittgenstein resorted to the analysis of rather elementary mathematical concepts, accompanied also by the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of his presentation. In particular, against this background, his radical conventionalism, the substitution of logical necessity with the «form of life» of the community, as well as the inadequacy of the representation of arithmetic rules by a language game are criticized. It is shown that the reconstruction of the Wittgenstein concept of understanding based on the Fregian division of meaning and referent goes beyond the conceptual framework of Wittgenstein language games.

Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (1919–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Wiseman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Mental Event ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Philosophy Of Psychology ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001) is recognized as one of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century. She is also well known as the translator and editor of Wittgenstein’s later writings, including his Philosophical Investigations. The work Anscombe undertook between 1956 and 1958, during which time she was concerned with the content and foundations of moral philosophy, has been extremely influential in philosophy of action and ethics. Her 1957 monograph, Intention, seeks to give an account of the psychological concepts she thought necessary for moral philosophy to be possible – intention, desire, reason, motive – and is one of the most significant philosophical works on action. Her much anthologized paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) marks the beginning of the revival of virtue ethics. Anscombe’s work attempts to recover for a contemporary audience the premodern conception of human nature, action and ethics that is found in the writings of Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas. Anscombe held that the bifurcation of man into mind and body which arose during the seventeenth century – and replaced the Aristotelian dichotomy of form and matter – had disastrous consequences in the philosophy of psychology and ethics. She subjected concepts along the fault line created by this change – cause, substance, mental event, intention, subject, object, freedom, sensation, self-consciousness – to detailed analysis using the method of grammatical enquiry. This method, learnt from Wittgenstein, involves describing the complex use of language in the context of our human form of life. In Anscombe’s work, this analysis reveals that the picture of the human subject that our Cartesian intellectual inheritance makes intuitive is profoundly mistaken.

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.

Later Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophical Therapy

Philosophy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Jacquette
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Philosophical Grammar

AbstractThe object of this essay is to discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks inPhilosophical Investigationsand elsewhere in the posthumously published writings concerning the role of therapy in relation to philosophy. Wittgenstein's reflections seem to suggest that there is a kind of philosophy or mode of investigation targeting the philosophical grammar of language uses that gratuitously give rise to philosophical problems, and produce in many thinkers philosophical anxieties for which the proper therapy is intended to offer relief. Two possible objectives of later Wittgensteinian therapy are proposed, for subjectivepsychologicalversus objectivesemanticsymptoms of ailments that a therapy might address for the sake of relieving philosophical anxieties. The psychological in its most plausible form is rejected, leaving only the semantic. Semantic therapy in the sense defined and developed is more general and long-lasting, and more in the spirit of Wittgenstein's project on a variety of levels. A semantic approach treats language rather than the thinking, language-using subject as the patient needing therapy, and directs its attention to the treatment of problems in language and the conceptual framework a language game use expresses in its philosophical grammar, rather than to soothing unhappy or socially ill-adjusted individual psychologies.

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