What nonsense might be, and what Wittgenstein thought that nonsense might be, are two of the central questions in the current debate between those—such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Michael Kremer—who favour a “resolute” approach to Wittgenstein’s work, and those—such as P. M. S. Hacker and Hans-Johann Glock—who instead favour a more “traditional” approach. What answer we give to these questions will determine the nature and force of his criticisms of traditional philosophy, and so the very shape Wittgenstein’s work (...) has for us, as well as, to some extent, what the lesson of the Tractatus might be. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed defence of the austere view of nonsense, that lies at the heart of the resolute approach, against a range of influentialcriticisms developed by Hans-Johann Glock and which focus on Wittgenstein’s contextualism. In so doing, I hope also to shed some light on the kind of view the austere view is, as well as how it might relate to certain other crucial aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought. (shrink)

A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism ...

The foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, Croce's influence extended to every aspect of Italian intellectual life. This collection explores the depth, originality, and significance of his thought.

If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of (...) such an approach to the Tractatus (TLP). But he also introduces some novel and interesting lines of criticism that merit serious attention. Foremost among the latter is White's treatment (in Section III of his paper) of three engaging examples that he sees as making trouble for resolute readers, and for their opposition to the standard idea that the lesson of the Tractatrrs could consist in its communicating, and our grasping, ineffable insights by way of its nonsense-sentences. (shrink)

What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically (...) or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought. (shrink)

This paper is about what might be called the philosophical tradition of ethics, and Wittgenstein’s opposition or hostility to that tradition. My aim will be to argue that ethics, or a large part of what we think of as ethics, is nonsense, and in doing so I shall be developing the line of argument that I take to lie behind Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that there can be no ethical propositions. That argument has its basis in the simple (...) thought that value is not arbitrary or accidental, and what I shall show is how thinking through what is involved in that thought leads to a radically different conception of the possibilities open to ethical thinking than that which is assumed within the prevailing conception of ethics today. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein holds that ethical propositions are nonsense, in that they lack any meaning whatsoever, that they are redundant, in that the work they are intended to do is already being done by other features of our language, and that they are harmful, insofar as they prevent us from appreciating what is of genuine ethical significance in our lives. Its aim is to outline a sense in which Wittgenstein can be seen to be trying, through the elimination (...) of “ethical propositions”, to reconnect us with the ethical commitments embodied in our ordinary “non-ethical” language, and so the ways in which ordinary language might be taken to be ethically revealing. (shrink)

Suppose one is persuaded of the merits of noncognitivism in ethics but not those of expressivism: in such a case, a form of moral fictionalism, combining a descriptivist account of moral sentences with a noncognitivist account of the attitudes involved in their acceptance or rejection, might seem an attractive alternative. This paper argues against the use of moral fictionalism as a strategy for defending noncognitivism in ethics. It argues, first, that the view is implausible as it stands and, second, that (...) it does not enjoy the benefits over standard—expressivist—noncognitivism both that it claims to enjoy and that make up the principal rationale for the view. The paper then turns to the grounds for noncognitivism itself before showing how far the criticisms developed extend to alternative forms of moral fictionalism and developing independent objections to each. (shrink)

We tend to take for granted that we know what is involved in belief in other minds, and that the real problem lies in justifying that belief. By contrast, this chapter argues that we misunderstand what belief in other minds involves, and that the problem of other minds has its source in that misunderstanding. My aim is to rethink what belief in other minds involves in terms of what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’. Doing so not only undermines (...) the problem of other minds as traditionally formulated, but also has significant consequences for our understanding of the mind itself. One such consequence is that ethical considerations have a much more fundamental role to play in thinking about the mind than is typically believed. (shrink)

abstract Using as a background the ongoing crisis afflicting the international cricket scene over whether or not to boycott Zimbabwe, this paper seeks to explore the moral complexities surrounding the case of the sporting boycott in general as a response to morally odious regimes. Rather than attempting to provide some easy formula by which to determine justifiable from unjustifiable boycotts, we take as our starting point many of the arguments raised in the national press and explore and develop these arguments (...) in order to shed light on the fundamental problems underlying the use of sporting boycotts as moral tools. The paper thus aims to show the inadequacy of the standard responses on both sides of the fence and, hopefully, clears the ground for future, more informed approaches to the issue. (shrink)

Can we perceive others' mental states? Wittgenstein is often claimed to hold, like some phenomenologists, that we can. The view thus attributed to Wittgenstein is a view about the correct explanation of mindreading: He is taken to be answering a question about the kind of process mindreading involves. But although Wittgenstein claims we see others' emotions, he denies that he is thereby making any claim about that underlying process and, moreover, denies that any underlying process could have the significance it (...) is claimed to have for this debate. For Wittgenstein, the question is not “Is this perception?” but “What do we mean by ‘perception' here?” and that question is answered by investigating the grammar of the relevant concepts. That investigation, however, reveals similarities and differences between what we call “perception” here and elsewhere. Hence, Wittgenstein's answer to the question “Can we perceive others' mental states?” is yes and no: Both responses can be justified by appeal to different concepts of perception. Wittgenstein, then, has much to contribute to our understanding of mindreading, but what he has to contribute is nothing like the view typically attributed to him here. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat explains the difference between a proposition and a mere list of the words it contains, presented in the same order? What unites the parts of a proposition to form a whole? José Zalaba...

It is a simple truth about the English language that we can see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling. But it is tempting to think that there is a deeper sense in which we cannot really see or hear or feel these things at all. Rather, what is involved must be a matter of inference or interpretation, for instance. In these remarks, I argue against a variety of ways in which that thought, the thought that we (...) cannot really see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling, might be developed. (shrink)

Central to a new, or 'resolute', reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus is the idea that Wittgenstein held there an 'austere' view of nonsense: the view, that is, that nonsense is only ever a matter of our failure to give words a meaning, and so that there are no logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Resolute readers tend not only to ascribe such a view to Wittgenstein, but also to subscribe to it themselves; and it is also a feature of some (...) readings which in other respects are clearly not Resolute. This paper forms part of a reply to Hans-Johann Glock's work in which he argues (in part) that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus held a view of nonsense other than the austere view. Instead, Glock argues, Wittgenstein there held that there are many logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Here, I outline and defend the austere view, together with its attribution to the early Wittgenstein, against a number of Glock's criticisms, and focussing especially on Wittgenstein's reformulation in the Tractatus of Frege's context-principle. (shrink)

Two views are central to ‘New’ or ‘Resolute’ readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: that Wittgenstein did not hold that some insights are ineffable; and that Wittgenstein did hold an austere view of nonsense . Adrian Moore, in his paper ‘Ineffability and Nonsense’, offers an argument that seems to show that austerity in fact involves a commitment to the existence of ineffable understanding, and so that Resolute readers cannot hold both and . Hence, Resolute readers would have to give up one or (...) other core commitment. Neither option is attractive. Against Moore’s argument, I show that austerity does not involve commitment to ineffable understanding. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on 'New' or 'Resolute' readings of Wittgenstein's work, early and later, as presented in the work of, for instance, Cora Diamond and James Conant. One of the principal claims of such readings is that, throughout his life, Wittgenstein held an 'austere' view of nonsense. That view has both a trivial and a non-trivial aspect. The trivial aspect is that any string of signs could, by appropriate assignment, be given a meaning, and hence that, if such a string (...) is nonsense, that will be because we have failed to make just such an assignment. The non-trivial aspect is this: that there is no further, non-trivial story to be told, and so nonsense is only ever a matter of our failure to give signs a meaning. Hence, too, logically speaking, all nonsense is on a par. That view, both of nonsense and of Wittgenstein, has attracted a great deal of controversy. It is particularly controversial in relation to Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus', where Wittgenstein famously declares, in the penultimate remark, that the reader is to recognise Wittgenstein's own elucidatory propositions there as nonsensical, and must eventually throw them away in coming to understand Wittgenstein himself. I defend the austere view and its attribution to Wittgenstein, early and later (but focussing primarily on the earlier), against a number of exegetical and substantial criticisms put forward by, for instance, Peter Hacker, Hans-Johann Glock and Adrian Moore. (shrink)

This book offers a radical reappraisal of the nature and significance of Wittgenstein’s thought about ethics from a variety of different perspectives. The book includes essays on Wittgenstein’s early remarks on ethics in the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,_ on his 1929 "Lecture on Ethics", and on various aspects of Wittgenstein’s later views on ethics in the _Philosophical Investigations_ and elsewhere. Together, the essays in this volume provide a comprehensive assessment of Wittgenstein’s moral thought throughout his work, its continuity and development between his (...) early and later work, and its connections with other aspects of his thought. Featuring fourteen original contributions written by internationally renowned Wittgenstein scholars, _Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought _opens up a new understanding of ethics that diverges from prevailing views prominent in contemporary discussions of the subject. (shrink)

A review of _Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought,_ edited by Reshef Adam-Segal and Edmund Dain.

‘Quid vero fit, quod poeta hanc plantam, tanquam munus locustae inprimis gratum, commemoret, nemo dixit; nee ego dicere possum’—so Jacobs in his note on the seventh line of this epigram. Among later commentators, Mackail thinks ‘can hardly mean “leek” here’ and he assumes it to be ‘groundsel’; Dain in the Budé edition is satisfied with the rather prosaic explanation that it is an ‘observation très juste … la cigale ne se nourrit que des sues des plantes’. I hope to (...) show that the diet of leeks and dewdrops from the mouth is promised by the love-sick swain of Meleager's poem for the same specific reason—to refresh the grasshopper's ‘voice’ for a new day's beguilement by song and persuasion to the sleep which will again free him from the cares of love. Although the ancients were aware of the means by which such insects produced their incessant sound, they remained faithful to the poetic tradition, which made them drink dew as a prelude to their singing, first found in Hesiod, Scut. 395, and clearly expressed in a couplet of Antipater of Thessalonica. (shrink)

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)One of the objects of a (...) comparative history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form. (shrink)

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social rela- tions between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking (...) that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis- dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole. (shrink)

L'œuvre de René Magritte est très populaire, c'est sûr. Pourtant, les théoriciens de la peinture affichent parfois à son égard un certain dédain. Mauvaise peinture, ose-t-on dire. Chacun en juge comme il l'entend... mais ces critiques ont-ils saisi l'intention attachée à cette œuvre? Car un travail de la pensée la traverse. J'irais jusqu'à dire que l'œuvre de Magritte est cela même : l'exercice d'une pensée en images. Dans ce livre, je propose une enquête. Prenant appui sur les dits et écrits (...) du peintre, je tente de retrouver cette pensée en images. En eux-mêmes les tableaux 'y donnent pas accès : on aurait beau les interpréter, on ne découvrirait pas encore leur nécessité. Alors je les mets en rapport avec des concepts philosophiques. Je montre, à partir de sept études, que les images créées par Magritte sont comparables à des arguments et qu'elles témoignent, au sein de l'œuvre, d'une ressemblance avec la réflexion de philosophes tels que Platon, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein ou Sartre, sans compter Michel Foucault."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Parisinus suppl. gr. 256 was written, to judge from the hand, not long after 1300. As far as the end of book VI the writer copied both text and scholia from a descendant of M. At that point another MS. came into his hands. This was no other than that ancestor of J which, as we saw on p. 87, had received valuable readings from the source ω. From this MS. the scribe now corrected what he had already written, copied (...) the two remaining books, and added the two Lives before the text and the Epistula Dionysii ad Ammaeum after it. From 1—for so, after Dain , I shall style our MS.—was copied the MS. from which, after it had been perfunctorily corrected from another source, was copied X. (shrink)

Jebb renders the last clause as follows: ‘The warrior of the white shield, who came from Argos in his panoply, hath been stirred by thee to headlong flight, in swifter career.’ ‘In swifter career’ is a discreet rendering of ., Jebb says, ‘does not mean “in flight swifter than their former approach“ nor “the reins are shaken ever faster on the horses' necks”.’ ‘The Argives’, he writes, ‘began their retreat in the darkness : when the sun rises, the flashing steel (...) of their bridles shows them in headlong flight’. Cf. P. Mazon, R.E.G. xxv , 13. This view is shared by all modern scholars, except that Dain and Mazon put commas after and translate accordingly; which I do not think is an improvement. How to Cite This Article. (shrink)

Critical study of of the addresses of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938 from philosophical and religious point of view.

Book Information Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge. By Jacques Bruschwig and Geoffrey, E. R. Lloyd. MA, Belnap Press. Cambridge. 2000. Pp. xv + 1024. Hardback, US$49.00.