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This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress, and profundity. Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they work to shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conducive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat diffe...
This book is a study of Wittgenstein’s descriptive, improvisational, and performative art of philosophical investigation. In addition to clarifying the nature of Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations, this study highlights several neglected aspects of his work: its humour and playfulness, its collaborative nature, and its emphasis on the imagination. These aspects often become distorted under the pressure of theory and argumentation, resulting in interpretations that equate grammatical investigation with confession, therapy, or a common sense view of the world. After presenting Wittgenstein’s art of investigation in part one, this study challenges these dominant and influential int...
This monograph examines the private annotations that Ludwig Wittgenstein made to his copy of G.H. Hardy’s classic textbook, A Course of Pure Mathematics. Complete with actual images of the annotations, it gives readers a more complete picture of Wittgenstein’s remarks on irrational numbers, which have only been published in an excerpted form and, as a result, have often been unjustly criticized. The authors first establish the context behind the annotations and discuss the historical role of Hardy’s textbook. They then go on to outline Wittgenstein’s non-extensionalist point of view on real numbers, assessing his manuscripts and published remarks and discussing attitudes in play in the philosophy of mathematics since Dedekind. Next, coverage focuses on the annotations themselves. The discussion encompasses irrational numbers, the law of excluded middle in mathematics and the notion of an “improper picture," the continuum of real numbers, and Wittgenstein’s attitude toward functions and limits.
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This book reviews Iris Murdoch’s thought as a whole. It surveys the breadth of her thinking, taking account of her philosophical works, her novels and her letters. It shows how she explored many aspects of experience and brought together apparently contradictory concepts such as truth and love. The volume deals with her notions of truth, love, language, morality, politics and her life. It shows how she offers a challenging provocative way of seeing things which is related to but distinct from standard forms of analytical philosophy and Continental thought. Unlike so many philosophers she does offer a philosophy to live by and unlike many novelists she has reflected deeply on the kind of novels she aimed to write. The upshot is that her novels and her philosophy can be read together productively as contributions to how we can see others and the world.
This volume showcases contemporary, ground-up ethical essays in the tradition of Wittgenstein’s broader philosophy and Wittgenstein-inspired ethical reflection. It takes the ethical relevance of Wittgenstein as a substantial and solid starting point for a broad range of ongoing thinking about contemporary ethical issues. The texts are organised in two sections. The first consists of chapters exploring questions around what could be called the “grammar” of our moral forms of life, and thus represents a more traditional approach in ethics after Wittgenstein. The second part represents a recent turn in the tradition towards investigating moral conceptions, perspectives and concepts that a...
Wittgenstein influenced a generation of philosophers and theologians, with works such as Fergus Kerr’s Theology After Wittgenstein showing the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for contemporary questions in theology. Nature as Guide follows many of the insights of this earlier generation of Wittgenstein influenced scholars, to bring Wittgenstein into conversation with contemporary Catholic moral theology. The first four chapters of the book provides a reading of key themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and draw among others on G.E.M. Anscombe to situate Wittgenstein in relation to the Platonic tradition. Understanding the relationship between grammar, metaphysics and nature is cen...
Through his innovative study of language, noted Heidegger scholar Lawrence Hatab offers a proto-phenomenological account of the lived world, the “first” world of factical life, where pre-reflective, immediate disclosiveness precedes and makes possible representational models of language. Common distinctions between mind and world, fact and value, cognition and affect miss the meaning-laden dimension of embodied, practical existence, where language and life are a matter of “dwelling in speech.” In this second volume, Hatab supplements and fortifies his initial analysis by offering a detailed treatment of child development and language acquisition, which exhibit a proto-phenomenological world in the making. He then takes up an in-depth study of the differences between oral and written language (particularly in the ancient Greek world) and how the history of alphabetic literacy shows why Western philosophy came to emphasize objective, representational models of cognition and language, which conceal and pass over the presentational domain of dwelling in speech. Such a study offers significant new angles on the nature of philosophy and language.
Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity of a kind that is instructively resistant to simplification; reduction to a single element that would constitute literature's defining essence would be no more possible than it could be genuinely illuminating. Yet one dimension of literature that seems to interweave itself throughout its diverse manifestations is still today, as it has been throughout literary history, ethical content. This striking collection of new essays, written by an international team of philosophers and literary scholars, pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. After a first section setting out...
This book shows that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favorite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. United by a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations, the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.