Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language, and Poeticity

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding for the first time; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks of modern logics—and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins seem to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special rôle that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science.

The Phenomenon of Simone Weil as “Excess” and “Lack” in the Symbolic Structure of Philosophical Language: a Personalist Approach

Simone Weil as a subject of philosophizing is the effect of excess, vacuum, or scarcity in the harmoniously coordinated system of paradigms that make up the indicators of intellectual language. Her concept of “God-absence” (silence) as the negative presence of God in the sacred experience of the atheist is a paradox of meeting with God through a metaphysical break with religious orthodoxy. The article analyzes the synchrony and diachrony of S. Weil’s views from materialism to spiritualism in interdisciplinary discourse outside the linear stages and sectoral fragmentation on the methodological basis of personalism. The author pays special attention to reading S. Weil’s autobiographical essay Waiting for God and her Diaries. In these works, S. Weil as an expression of the semiotic unity of the life and the text describes his own experience of emptiness, the Other, attention, desire, faith, dis-belief, love, encounter with Christ. Analysis of the works of famous philosophers and theologians gives grounds to conclude that the views of S. Weil had an impact on modern psychoanalysis, philosophy of dialogue, critical theory, traditionalism, phenomenology.

“Good translating is very hard work”

Upon immigrating to New Zealand in 1937, Austrian-born philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper lived and worked in the English-speaking world, where he published his major works in English. Life events forced him to engage in various forms of self-translation around the same time that he began earnestly working on translating Presocratic philosophical fragments into English. While he rejected language wholesale as an object of philosophical reflection, translation became an exception, a privileged occasion for philosophical reflection on language. This article reads Popper’s thoughts on translation in the context of previously unpublished correspondence between Popper and potential translators of Conjectures and Refutations (1963, third edition 1968) from English to German. The article thereby mediates the tension between Popper’s outspokenly perfectionistic demands on potential translators and his general thesis that scientific or philosophical language need only be as precise as the problem at hand requires.

Nearness to the Real

This article presents the theory of sainthood found in the writings of Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), a major commentator on the Sufi thought of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Building on previous philosophical interpretations of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought to systematize the worldview now known as the “Oneness of Being” (waḥdat al-wujūd), Qayṣarī also developed a sophisticated theory of sainthood that not only described, but explained in detail what a saint was, how to become one, and what made the methods for doing so effective. After a historical introduction, I examine the principles of Qayṣarī’s hagiology in the broader context of his worldview, with special attention to his innovative use of philosophical language. Finally, my analysis of the spiritual path in Qayṣarī’s writings shows the consistency with which his account of Sufi wayfaring reflects these principles, according to which the acquisition of sainthood was a journey from the particular to the universal.

A FASCINATING SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY: ST. GREGORY PALAMAS

As a prominent Church father, mystical theologian and incisive polemicist, St. Gregory Palamas has realized a «Summa Theologica» of his epoch, but one that has surpassed not only the thinking of contemporaries, but remained, to this day, a synthesis of philosophical and theological knowledge, at least for the Eastern Christianity. He pointed out with clarity the independence of theology from philosophy or from any other field of research. One of the most important instruments with a view to knowing God is prayer and Palamas began to write under the pressure of defending the hesychastic method of prayer. He proves that true communion with God was possible through sanctification and that God's vision through prayer was a sign of this spiritual communion. In Palamas' very coherent theological thinking, Christology corresponds to his anthropology, and both to his mysticism. St. Gregory strongly depreciated the value of intellectual effort, maintaining the primacy of direct illumination over scientific reasoning. Thus, prayer and asceticism engender love, which leads to illumination by God and participation in the divine life. He tries to make sense of mystical experience in the scientific and philosophical language of his day. Paradoxically, almost every attempt arrives at establishing that the spiritual cannot be grasped by man's natural intellectual capacity, nor expressed in philosophical language. But the spiritual man can be the partaker of this experience through the experience of grace, as divine uncreated energy, the true "face" of God accessible to human contemplation. The Archbishop of Thessaloniki, who realized a synthesis of Science, Theology, and Spirituality outlines the relation between them as follows: Science explores the world and leads to technological inventions; Theology interprets reality within the Christian framework, evidencing the glory of God as reflected throughout his creation; and Spirituality is the privileged path toward personal transformation. The debate about Palamism is likely to continue for some time. His version of theosis (deification) was enshrined in Orthodox teaching as a result of his canonization, but among the intellectuals for whom it was intended it remained controversial, despite its grandeur.

From Reality without Mysteries to the Mystery of the World: Marilena Chaui’s Reading of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

This article offers an overview of Marilena Chaui’s reading of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). Chaui has published numerous books and essays on Baruch Spinoza. Her two-volume study The Nerve of Reality is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with the Dutch philosopher, and her research has been a valuable resource for generations of Latin American scholars. From this extensive output, we focus on Chaui’s main texts on the theological-political, concentrating on her analysis of the concept of superstition and the philosophical language of the TTP, which Chaui calls a “counter-discourse”. Spinoza’s enduring relevance for the interpretation of contemporary phenomena is clarified by Chaui’s analysis of the TTP, which establishes a fundamentally political understanding of superstition.

Conclusion

Seneca’s description of the social dimensions of philosophy, and his use of social background in clarifying and defending his conception of what philosophy is and can be, marks not a retreat from but rather a vindication and extension of the Socratic ideal of philosophy as a critical practice. Seneca does not simply encode social norms in philosophical language, but rather in his writings stages a subtle interplay between the two that shows both how philosophy necessarily takes its beginnings from an existing social world and how philosophy’s scrutiny of that world can yield challenging and unexpected conclusions. Seneca gives us a philosophy that is neither a complacent recapitulation of the given nor an arid abstraction decoupled from social practice, but rather a genuine art of living.

Philosophical empathy (in the Style of Merleau-Ponty)

Is there a sense in which we can be said to empathize with a philosophical position and, if so, what does empathy consist of here? Drawing on themes in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I sketch an account of the relationship between philosophical language and philosophical thought, according to which the task of understanding, evaluating, and building upon an explicit philosophical position can involve engaging with the experiential world of its author. If accepted, this account has broader implications for how we conceive of both empathy and philosophical thought.

Digital reality and ontological status of digital technologies

In the article, based on the analysis of the definition of the category of reality, as well as the main trends in the development of non­classical philosophy, the legitimacy of introducing the concept of digital reality into the scientific and philosophical language is substantiated. The basis for asserting the existence of digital reality in the structure of the universe is a specific set of properties of digital technologies (digital objects), which distinguishes them from other objects of the universe and determines their special existence. In the article, based on the highlighted properties of digital technologies, they are defined as functional objects that perform operations with information presented in discrete form (measured in bits) by executing programs (algorithm) on a physical medium.

El devenir-animal. La filosofía de Gilles Deleuze aplicada a la obra artística de Francis Bacon.

Este artículo expone el concepto del devenir-animal de Gilles Deleuze en el arte te Francis Bacon. Se trata de un pasaje peculiar que no termina y no empieza nunca, es una particular condición del ser humano, algo que pasa a través de nuestro propio cuerpo y expresa la deformación de este. Analizaremos el idioma filosófico que Deleuze emplea para describir este arte, un arte hecho de sensación y no de imitación. El extranjero, el intruso es alguien que parece vivir en los protagonistas que viven en las pinturas de Bacon; pronto descubrimos que, según la filosofía del pintor, solo podemos ver una zona indiscernible, esta es la sensación que vive entre el hombre y el animal. This text wants to expose the Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming-animal in Francis Bacon’s art. This peculiar passage, that never ends and never begins, is a special condition of human being, something that pass through is own body and express itself as a deformation. We will analyze the philosophical language that Deleuze uses to describe this art, something that is made of sensation and not of imitation. The stranger, the intruder is someone who seems to live within the characters that inhabit Bacon’s paintings; soon we will discover that, as per the philosopher’s theory, what we only can see is an indiscernibility zone, that is the sensation lived between man and animal.