The ‘Middle’ Wittgenstein (and the ‘Later’ Ramsey) on the Pragmatist Conception of Truth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Boncompagni
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Ordinary Language

This chapter examines some remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed on pragmatism in manuscripts and lectures during the first half of the 1930s. These remarks focus principally on the Jamesian conception of truth, according to which, roughly, a belief or a proposition is true if it is useful. Wittgenstein acknowledges that this conception is able to capture some characters of ordinary language, but at the same time, he criticizes some aspects of it, and his criticism strongly resembles Frank Ramsey’s attitude towards the same topics. In this sense, it is argued that Ramsey had a role both for Wittgenstein approaching pragmatism, and for the partly negative attitude with which he came to judge it. Yet, the two thinkers’ general perspectives diverge when it comes to the place of theory in philosophical activity.

Revolutions of the Ordinary: Victorian Studies and the Turn to Ordinary Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
As If

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

Hedda’s Words

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Moi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

For ordinary language philosophy—the philosophical tradition after Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, as constituted and extended by Stanley Cavell—meaning arises in use. Utterances are actions and expressions. This philosophy, therefore, is closely attuned to the work of language in theater. This paper shows that ordinary language philosophy gives rise to a kind of literary criticism that considers reading an practice of acknowledgment, as en effort to understand exactly why the characters say precisely these words in precisely this situation. By paying close attention to Hedda’s interactions with three different linguistic worlds—the Tesman world, the Brack world, and the world she shared with Løvborg in the past—this chapter brings out the contrast between the conventionality and brutality of Hedda’s surroundings and Hedda’s ideals of courage and freedom, and shows that Hedda is more vulnerable, and more damaged, than previous readings have assumed.

scholarly journals Form(s)-of-life: agamben's reading of Wittgenstein and the potential uses of a notion

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matías Leandro Saidel
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relation ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Specific Trait ◽  
The Common

Giorgio Agamben and Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have very little in common: the former is concerned with traditional ontological issues while the latter was interested in logics and ordinary language, avoiding metaphysical issues as something we cannot speak about. However, both share a crucial notion for their philosophical projects: form of life. In this paper, I try to show that, despite their different approaches and goals, form of life is for both a crucial notion for thinking ethics and life in-common. Addressing human existence in its constitutive relation to language, this notion deconstructs traditional dichotomies like bios and zoé, the cultural and the biological, enabling both authors to think of a life which cannot be separated from its forms, recognizing the commonality of logos as the specific trait of human existence. Through an analogical reading between both theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the notion of form-of-life, elaborated by Wittgenstein to address human production of meaning, becomes the key notion in Agamben's affirmative thinking since it enables us to consider the common ontologically in its relation to Human potentialities and to foresee a new, common use of the world and ourselves.

scholarly journals Wittgenstein’s Concept of Language Games

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 641-647
Author(s):  
Shiva Zaheri Birgani ◽  
Mahnaz Soqandi
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Private Language Argument ◽  
Language Perception ◽  
British Philosopher

Austrian British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest philosophers in the 20th century. He mostly works in analytic philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethic and religion, aesthetic and culture. Philosophers often create their own vocabularies by giving special meanings to ordinary terms and phrases. Wittgenstein coinages the term of “language games” and the ‘private language argument”. His argument on the language is the rules of the use of ordinary language is neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false, the language is merely useful for the particular applications in which they are applied . Language is defined not as a system of representation but as a system of devices for engaging in various sorts of social activity, hence ‘the meaning of the word is its use in the language.

scholarly journals “Ludwig Wittgenstein” – A BBC radio talk by Elizabeth Anscombe in May 1953

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 225-240
Author(s):  
Christian Erbacher ◽  
Anne Dos Santos Reis ◽  
Julia Jung
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
First Time ◽  
Radio Talk

Presented here is the transcript of a BBC radio broadcast by Elizabeth Anscombe that was recorded in May 1953 – the month when Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared in England for the first time. In her radio talk, Anscombe provides some biographical and philosophical background for reading the Philosophical Investigations. She addresses the importance of the Tractatus and of the literary qualities of Wittgenstein’s writing. Anscombe warns that it would be fruitless to adopt slogans from Wittgenstein without insight. She also calls it a misunderstanding to think that Wittgenstein had championed something like the Ordinary Language Philosophy as it was practised at the time of the recording.

scholarly journals Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Language as universal medium and inexpressibility of semantics

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Milos Sumonja
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Special Method ◽  
Semantic Paradox ◽  
Semantic Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference

In this paper I will try to show that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger defended conception of language as a universal medium in both phases of their work. Both philosophers believe that we are ?prisoners? of the language that we speak, so that we can not step outside of it and describe the semantic relationships of language and the world from metalinguistic point of view. For both thinkers the basic problem is of methodological nature: for, if we can not speak about the relationships between language and the world, then how can we say that we can not speak about the relationships between language and the world? I will argue: a) that the universalism of early Wittgenstein and late Heidegger is transcendentally motivated, and that they both deal with the problem of inexperessibility of semantics by invoking the language of poetry as a way to express a universalist point of view, and b) that the universalism of late Wittgenstein and early Heidegger is pragmatically motivated, and that the difference between two philosophers is that early Heidegger accepts, while late Wittgenstein rejects semantic paradox of universalism. For early Heidegger inexpressibility of semantics is evidence that there is something that eludes the ordinary language and that that something has to be grasped by use of special method, for late Wittgenstein it is the evidence that there is nothing that can not be expressed in ordinary language and that the problem of inexpressibility of semantics is a pseudo-problem.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

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