Specters of Meaning: Deconstructing Wittgenstein and Reconstructing Ethics Ami H
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Rethinking Fideism Through the Lens of Wittgenstein's Engineering Outlook
University of Dayton eCommons Religious Studies Faculty Publications Department of Religious Studies 2012 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad Kallenberg University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Christianity Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons eCommons Citation Kallenberg, Brad, "Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook" (2012). Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 82. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/82 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Note: This is the accepted manuscript for the following article: Kallenberg, Brad J. “Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71, no. 1 (2012): 55-73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11153-011-9327-0 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad J. Kallenberg University of Dayton, 2011 In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes an false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.”1 But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. -
A Guide to Deconstruction
A GUIDE TO DECONSTRUCTION January 2003 Prepared by: Bradley Guy, Associate Director University of Florida Center for Construction and Environment M. E. Rinker, Sr., School of Building Construction College of Design, Construction and Planning 101 FAC PO Box 115703 Gainesville, FL 32611-5703 [email protected] And Eleanor M. Gibeau, Environmental Specialist Resource Management Group, Inc. 1143 Central Avenue Sarasota, FL 34236 [email protected] This “Guide for Deconstruction” was made possible by a grant to Charlotte County Florida from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Innovative Recycling Grant Program. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.........................................................................................................7 Deconstruction Overview...................................................................................9 Safety First ...................................................................................................................9 Survey ..........................................................................................................................9 Environmental Health and Compliance ........................................................................9 Asbestos Abatement ..................................................................................................10 Contracts and Specifications......................................................................................10 Historic Preservation ..................................................................................................10 -
The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt
The Architecture o f Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt Mark Wigley The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Fifth printing, 1997 First M IT Press paperback edition, 1995 © 1993 M IT Press Ml rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information stor age and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was printed and bound in the United States o f America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wigley, Mark. The architecture of deconstruction : Derrida’s haunt / Mark Wigley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-23170-0 (H B ), 0-262-73114-2 (PB) 1. Deconstruction (Architecture) 2. Derrida, Jacques—Philosophy. I. T itle . NA682.D43W54 1993 720'. 1—dc20 93-10352 CIP For Beatriz and Andrea Any house is a fa r too com plicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counter feit of the human body . The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects . The whole life o f the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion. A body in ill repair, suffering indispo sition—constant tinkering and doctoring to keep it alive. It is a marvel, we its infesters, do not go insane in it and with it. Perhaps it is a form of insanity we have to put in it. Lucky we are able to get something else out of it, thought we do seldom get out of it alive ourselves. —Frank Lloyd Wright ‘The Cardboard House,” 1931. -
6 X 10.5 Long Title.P65
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-83843-6 - Seeing Wittgenstein Anew Edited by William Day and Victor J. Krebs Frontmatter More information Seeing Wittgenstein Anew Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. These essays show that aspect-seeing was not simply one more topic of in- vestigation in Wittgenstein’s later writings, but, rather, that it was a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy’s attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. Arranged in sections that highlight the pertinence of the aspect- seeing remarks to aesthetic and moral perception, self-knowledge, mind and consciousness, linguistic agreement, philosophical therapy, and “seeing connections,” the sixteen essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, demonstrate the unity of not only Philosophical Investigations but also Wittgenstein’s later thought as a whole. They open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human conscious- ness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena and concepts surrounding aspect- seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy. William Day is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has written articles on aesthetics and moral per- fectionist thought, with particular focus on the work of Wittgenstein, Cavell, Emerson, and Confucian thinkers. Victor J. Krebs is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. -
Another Look at the New Wittgenstein
The Quest for Purity: Another Look at the New Wittgenstein «The Quest for Purity: Another Look at the New Wittgenstein» by Martin Stokhof Source: Croatian Journal of Philosophy (Croatian Journal of Philosophy), issue: 33 / 2011, pages: 275-294, on www.ceeol.com. Croatian Journal of Philosophy Vol. XI, No. 33, 2011 The Quest for Purity: Another Look at the New Wittgenstein MARTIN STOKHOF ILLC/Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, Universiteit van Amsterdam This short note takes another look at the ideas proposed by the ‘New Wittgen steinians’, foCusing on a feature of the disCussion these ideas have generated that hitherto seems to have received comparatively little atten- tion, viz., Certain assumptions about the ConCeption of philosophy as an intelleCtual enterprise, inCluding its relation to the sCienCes, that seem to be adopted by both the New Wittgensteinians and (many of) their critics. Introduction The debate about the ‘New Wittgenstein’ is primarily one about the proper exegesis of Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late. A key ele- ment in the discussion is the nature of philosophical method. Directly, since the aim and nature of Wittgenstein’s method is one of the central topics that is being discussed. But also indirectly, since the debate re- fl ects an old, yet still relevant dispute about the nature of philosophy, a topic that itself is intimately related to question of method. It is this last aspect of the discussion that has received comparatively little at- tention so far and that I will focus on in what follows. First I will give a very brief sketch of some of the main claims that the ‘New Wittgenstein’ interpretation makes, and indicate how these differ from more standard readings of Wittgenstein’s early work. -
5 Derrida's Critique of Husserl and the Philosophy
5 DERRIDA’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRESENCE David B. Allison* Now would be the time to reject the myths of inductivity and of the Wesenschau, which are transmitted, as points of honor, from generation to generation. ...Am I primitively the power to contemplate, a pure look which fixes the things in their temporal and local place and the essences in an invisible heaven; am I this ray of knowing that would have to 1 arise from nowhere? SÍNTESE – O autor reexamina a crítica de Derrida ABSTRACT – The author reexamines Derrida’s à fenomenologia de Husserl de forma a mostrar critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to como a sua coerência estrutural emerge não show how its structural coherency arises not so tanto de uma redução a uma doutrina particular, much from the reduction to a particular doctrine, mas antes das exigências de uma concepção but rather from the demands of a unitary concep- unitária, especificamente impostas pelas deter- tion, specifically from the demands imposed by minações epistemológicas e metafísicas da the epistemological and metaphysical determina- presença. tions of presence. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Desconstrução. Derrida. KEY WORDS – Deconstruction. Derrida. Husserl. Fenomenologia. Husserl. Presença. Significado. Meaning. Phenomenology. Presence. * Doutor. Professor, State University of New York, Stony Brook, EUA. 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964), Eng. tr., Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). pp. 113-116. VERITAS Porto Alegre v. 50 n. 1 Março 2005 p. 89-99 It is practically a truism to say that most of Husserl’s commentators have in- sisted on the rigorously systematic character of his writings. -
CRITICAL NOTICE Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy
CRITICAL NOTICE Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy Sandra Laugier, Translated by Daniela Ginsberg, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, pp. 168, £ 24.50. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47054-2 (cloth). Reviewed by Derek A. McDougall Originally published in French in the year 2000, the English version of Sandra Laugier’s short book of 10 Chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion, has a 7 page Preface, 9 pages of Notes, a brief Bibliography and 121 pages of actual text. The reading of Wittgenstein and Austin that she provides is distinctly Cavellian in character. Indeed, Stanley Cavell in a dust-cover quote, remarks that her work is already influential in France and Italy, exciting as it does a new interest in ‘language conceived not only as a cognitive capacity but also as used, and meant, as part of our form of life’. Cavell goes on to say that this new translation is not merely welcome but indispensable, and has at least the capacity to alter prevailing views about the philosophy of language, so affecting what we have come to think of as the ‘analytic-continental divide’. Toril Moi of Duke Uni., in another dust-cover quote, states that Laugier’s reading of Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell shows how their claim that ‘to speak about language is to speak about the world is an antimetaphysical revolution in philosophy that tranforms our understanding of epistemology and ethics.’ She concludes with the thought that anyone who wishes to understand what ‘ordinary language philosophy’ means today should read this book. This is a large claim to make, and anyone who is inclined to read Wittgenstein and Austin strictly in their own terms, and with their own avowed intentions - where discernible - steadily in view, is almost bound to conclude that it is simply not true. -
Introduction to Philosophy of Science
INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE The aim of philosophy of science is to understand what scientists did and how they did it, where history of science shows that they performed basic research very well. Therefore to achieve this aim, philosophers look back to the great achievements in the evolution of modern science that started with the Copernicus with greater emphasis given to more recent accomplishments. The earliest philosophy of science in the last two hundred years is Romanticism, which started as a humanities discipline and was later adapted to science as a humanities specialty. The Romantics view the aim of science as interpretative understanding, which is a mentalistic ontology acquired by introspection. They call language containing this ontology “theory”. The most successful science sharing in the humanities aim is economics, but since the development of econometrics that enables forecasting and policy, the humanities aim is mixed with the natural science aim of prediction and control. Often, however, econometricians have found that successful forecasting by econometric models must be purchased at the price of rejecting equation specifications based on the interpretative understanding supplied by neoclassical macroeconomic and microeconomic theory. In this context the term “economic theory” means precisely such neoclassical equation specifications. Aside from economics Romanticism has little relevance to the great accomplishments in the history of science, because its concept of the aim of science has severed it from the benefits of the examination of the history of science. The Romantic philosophy of social science is still resolutely practiced in immature sciences such as sociology, where mentalistic description prevails, where quantification and prediction are seldom attempted, and where implementation in social policy is seldom effective and often counterproductive. -
British Journal of Chinese Studies, Vol. 10, July 2020 ISSN 2048-0601 © British Association for Chinese Studies
British Journal of Chinese Studies, Vol. 10, July 2020 ISSN 2048-0601 © British Association for Chinese Studies China’s Rise and “Responsibility” in the 21st Century Astrid H. M. Nordin Graham M. Smith Abstract In recent decades “responsibility” has become a prominent idea in international political discourse. Against this backdrop, international policy and scholarly communities contemplating China’s rise regularly address themselves to “whether, when, and how” China will become a “responsible” great power. This article reviews, unpacks and questions understandings of responsibility in the debates about China. One strand of these debates argues that China can become responsible by adopting and promoting the existing “status quo”; the other argues that China acts responsibly when it challenges the unfair hegemony of the status quo. This article argues that both debates operate with remarkably similar understandings of responsibility. Whether China adopts existing rules and norms or establishes rules and norms of its own responsibility is understood to be rule and norm compliance. The article explores the possibility of an alternative understanding of responsibility suggested by Jacques Derrida. It is argued that a Derridian approach does not dispense with rules and norms but is conscious of the irresolvable dilemma when faced with the demands of multiple others. Such an understanding is helpful insofar as it reminds those who would call for responsibility that such responsibility, and politics itself, is more than simply following rules and maintenance of norms. Keywords: responsibility, Derrida, China as a great power, Xi Jinping, Chinese thought, rules and norms. Introduction In recent decades “responsibility” has become an important trope in international political discourse. -
The Practical Turn' David G
8 The Practical Turn' David G. Stern What is Practice Theory? What is a Practice? What is "practice theory"? The best short answer is that it is any theory that treats practice as a fundamental category, or takes practices as its point of departure . Naturally, this answer leads to further questions . What is meant by "practices" here? What is involved in taking practices as a point of departure or a fundamental category, and what does that commitment amount to? And what is the point of the contrast between a practice-based theory and one that starts elsewhere? Perhaps the most significant point of agreement among those who have taken the practical turn is that it offers a way out of Procustean yet seemingly inescap- able categories, such as subject and object, representation and represented, con- ceptual scheme and content, belief and desire, structure and action, rules and their application, micro and macro, individual and totality . Instead, practice the- orists propose that we start with practices and rethink our theories from the ground up. Bourdieu, for instance, insists that only a theory of practice can open up a way forward : Objective analysis of practical apprehension of the familiar world . teaches us that we shall escape from the ritual either/or choice between objectivism and subjectiv- ism in which the social sciences have so far allowed themselves to be trapped only if we are prepared to inquire into the mode of production and functioning of the practical mastery which makes possible both an objectively intelligible practice and also an objectively enchanted experience of that practice . -
Three DECONSTRUCTION and HERMENEUTICS. on THE
Three DECONSTRUCTION AND HERMENEUTICS. ON THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN JACQUES DERRIDA AND HANS-GEORG GADAMER Piotr Dehnel In his Songs of Experience, Martin Jay1 cites Jacques Derrida’s critical assessment of the fact that experience has always been referred to in terms of metaphysics of presence, which he finds both in Edmund Husserl’s experience of meaning and in Emmanuel Levinas’s utterances about experiencing the other or a difference. Jay reflects also on the 1981 debate between Derrida and Hans- Georg Gadamer and stresses Derrida’s objections to the hermeneutical reliance on the dialogic experience. In this paper I would like to have a closer look at the aforementioned debate and shed some light on the question whether Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be grasped in the categories of the metaphysics of presence. Gadamer, the founding father of philosophical hermeneutics, and Derrida, the founding father of deconstruction, met in April 1981 in the Goethe Institute in Paris during the Text and Interpretation Symposium organized by Philippe Forget.2 Inaugurating the symposium with an eponymous paper, Gadamer discussed various elements of his own intellectual biography, which commenced with a critique of idealism and methodologism of the prior epistemological theory and was decisively influenced by his encounter with Martin Heidegger’s philosophical thought. Heidegger, namely, broke with Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of understanding as a method of humanities and made it into an existential, i.e. into a basic determinant of the human Dasein. For Heideggger, understanding is simply a certain mode of being, and not a mode of knowledge. Such formulation enabled Gadamer to include the experience of art and the experience of history into the sphere of hermeneutics, both types of experience culminating in the concept of historically effected consciousness (wirkunggeschichtliches Bewußtsein). -
Derridean Deconstruction and Feminism
DERRIDEAN DECONSTRUCTION AND FEMINISM: Exploring Aporias in Feminist Theory and Practice Pam Papadelos Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Discipline of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry Adelaide University December 2006 Contents ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................III DECLARATION .....................................................................................................IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................V INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 THESIS STRUCTURE AND OVERVIEW......................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 1: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS – FEMINISM AND DECONSTRUCTION ............................................................................................... 8 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 8 FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF PHILOSOPHY..................................................................... 10 Is Philosophy Inherently Masculine? ................................................................ 11 The Discipline of Philosophy Does Not Acknowledge Feminist Theories......... 13 The Concept of a Feminist Philosopher is Contradictory Given the Basic Premises of Philosophy.....................................................................................