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.

Language Use in Mathematical Practice: An Ethnographic Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-232
Author(s):  
Saumya Malviya
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Mathematical Language ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Action Knowledge

Mathematics is often seen as an epitome of cold objectivity and astounding infallibility. Particularly for the outsiders, it comes across as an extremely rigid and closed system which seems impenetrable owing to its very specific and technical language. This article problematises these assumptions and seeks to study mathematics as a social practice with insights drawn from an anthropology of language and concepts, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics and semiotics. Using the anthropological insight that a language is always embedded in a form of life, this article shows how mathematical practice generates its own conventions and forms of language use. In particular, two dimensions of language use in mathematics are delineated and their consequences for further research are drawn out. In the first part of the article, the role of concepts in the discourse of mathematics is explored and in the second it is shown how applying a rigid distinction between syntax and semantics to mathematical language obstructs our understanding of its fluid and dynamic character. The argument unfolds through an analyses of interviews, texts and classroom sessions and shows how mathematical practice is heavily context bound and mathematicians often display an ethnographic attentiveness towards their work. The general tenor of the description is such that it attempts to trace the ethical dimension latent in mathematical practice and suggests a possibility of exploring it as a form of life. Connected to this thought is the argument that like any other practice, mathematical practice generates its own forms of reflections which cannot simply be assimilated to philosophical/theoretical knowledge. The question whether this action knowledge regarding mathematics has some relation to the South Asian location where the ethnography unfolds is also tentatively explored.

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 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.

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.

Demos distracted

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-162
Author(s):  
Sergei Prozorov
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Human Condition

In Chapter 5 Prozorov argues that the ontological contingency that defines democracy is accessible in our lived experience in states of distraction, characterized by the alternation between captivation and boredom. This alternation makes it possible for us to dwell within plural forms of life in a non-definitive manner, retaining our potentiality for being otherwise. He develops this argument by critically re-engaging with Heidegger’s discussion of curiosity and distraction in Being and Time. Prozorov argues that democracy is existentially experienced in the potentiality for perpetual alternation between captivation and boredom in whatever form of life we dwell in, which constitutes our lives as freeform, always manifesting the possibility of being otherwise than they are. In this manner he grounds the possibility of democratic biopolitics in the aspect of the human condition familiar and available to all, thus demonstrating its realizability.

The Language-Game View of Religion and Religious Certainty

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kellenberger
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Chess Playing

There is a certain view of religion, deriving from Wittgenstein’s thought, that might be called the language-game view of religion. It has many parts, but in essence it holds–in its own terms–that religion is a language-game (or cluster of languagegames) in fact engaged in by men; or, what seems to be an alternative way of saying the same thing, or very nearly the same. thing, religion is a form of life participated in by men. As such it is in order. Although one needs to enter into the torm ot lite and engage in the language-game to learn its grammar or logic and to see the order that it has. For its order has internal criteria: what count as, e.g., rational and meaningful within religion are determined not by criteria appropriate to physics or chess playing but by criteria appropriate to religion as it is lived by the religious.

Swansong biospheres: refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack T. O'Malley-James ◽  
Jane S. Greaves ◽  
John A. Raven ◽  
Charles S. Cockell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Model ◽  
Cold Trap ◽  
Sequence Evolution ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Earth Like Planets ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Complex Forms ◽  
End Stage ◽  
Micro Organisms ◽  
Host Stars

AbstractThe future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular micro-organisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of life capable of surviving on the planet in the far future, when the ageing Sun causes environmental conditions to become more hostile to more complex forms of life. Therefore, it is statistically more likely that habitable Earth-like exoplanets we discover will be at a stage in their habitable lifetime more conducive to supporting unicellular, rather than multicellular life. The end stage of habitability on Earth is the focus of this work. A simple, latitude-based climate model incorporating eccentricity and obliquity variations is used as a guide to the temperature evolution of the Earth over the next 3 Gyr. This allows inferences to be made about potential refuges for life, particularly in mountains and cold-trap (ice) caves and what forms of life could live in these environments. Results suggest that in high latitude regions, unicellular life could persist for up to 2.8 Gyr from present. This begins to answer the question of how the habitability of Earth will evolve at local scales alongside the Sun's main sequence evolution and, by extension, how the habitability of Earth-like planets would evolve over time with their own host stars.

Radical Botany

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Life Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Set

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. The French authors with whom the work begins turn to plants to think through the problems and paradoxes that face all forms of life considered first as matter. Within this framework, plants are ascribed an agency and vitality that might otherwise seem foreign to them, but they are also envisioned as beings that resist incorporation into human contexts and thus have something to teach humans about their limitations and vulnerabilities. Classically, the botanical sciences that develop over the course of the long eighteenth century function as a project for ordering, visualizing, labeling, and classifying life. In Radical Botany, the authors unearth an alternative set of engagements with the plant as a life form—a tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability even as it participates in the production of new representational modes—including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality—and new affects—including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right.

Wittgenstein’s Remarks Concerning the Accessibility of Foreign Cultures

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Intrinsic Feature

AbstractWittgenstein (1889-1951) was highly disapproving of scholars whom he thought unable to properly acknowledge diversity amongst cultures or take due note of the enormous differences separating them from tribes living in radically heterogeneous cultural environments. The best known and paradigmatic example of his attitude to such differences is to be found in his Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, where he wrote: “[…] how impossible for him [Frazer, J.B.] to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time”. But to cut a long story short, whether Wittgenstein saw this “impossibility” as an intrinsic feature of the task or not is by no means unambiguously clear. To resolve this question, I shall take as my point of departure the socio-anthropological writings of B. Malinowski (1884-1942), who spent several years amongst one of the Pacific island tribes - the Trobriands. In his “field studies”, Malinowski focused on the tribe’s “form of life”: i.e. on their belief in ritual and magic, and on how their customs interlinked with kinship and with their economy. Taking into account Malinowski’s own pragmatic conception of language and his notion of the divergent character of scientific and magical forms of belief, I then outline Wittgenstein’s notions of “language game”, “family resemblance” and “form of life”. The usage of these concepts will show in what sense Wittgenstein would have recognized the similarities within and between different cultures and human societies - but, equally, just how far we can understand a human way of life deeply different from our own.

Nature of dignity and human dignity

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasil Gluchman
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Life Form ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Right

AbstractThis paper argues that the concept of dignity should be understood as a concept that we use to describe an aggregate of values and qualities of a person or thing that deserves esteem and respect. The primary value that creates the right to have dignity is life. The degree of dignity a life form has depends on its place in the evolutionary scale. Human beings are the highest form of life so they possess the highest degree of dignity.

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