Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution explores the relation between language and reality without embracing Linguistic Realism and without courting any form of Linguistic Idealism either. It argues that this is precisely what Wittgenstein does. This book also examines some well known contemporary philosophers who have been concerned with this same question.

What is the place of human free will in our lives if all our actions are the result of some other cause? Does our processing unconscious beliefs or desires make us less free? Is our free will necessarily restricted if we do not choose our own beliefs? The debate between free will and its opposing doctrine, determinism, is one of the key issues in philosophy. _Free Will: An historical and philosophical introduction_ provides a comprehensive introduction to this highly important question (...) and examines the contributions made by sixteen of the most outstanding thinkers from the time of early Greece to the twentieth century: *Homer *Sophocles *Platto *Aristotle *St Augustine *St Thomas Aquinas *Descaartes *Spinoza *Hume *Kant *Schopehauer *Freud *Sartre *Weil *Wittgenstein *Moore Ilham Dilman brings together all the dimensions of the problem of free will with examples from literature, ethics and psychoanalysis. Drawing out valuable insights from both sides of the free will-determinism divide, and he provides an accessible and highly readable introduction to this perennial problem. (shrink)

Writing clearly and avoiding jargon, Dilman investigates Wittgenstein's understanding of the relation between language and reality - i.e. between "the realities" we refer to, speak about and try to understand. Dilman discusses this topic in depth and at the same time covers a broad ground. He appreciates the following different aspects: philosophical skepticism about the existence of the various categories of things and our knowledge of them, about the reality of the logic of the language we speak and of the (...) forms of our reasoning, philosophy's contribution to our understanding of the world and of ourselves, and the contributions of the arts to such an understanding. (shrink)

If there is an inherent connection between love and generosity, between love and creativeness, as this book argues there is, then how can love itself be selfish, destructive and tyrannical? Concerned with questions about love in its different forms, this book seeks and discusses the views of writers--Plato, Proust, Sartre, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Erich Fromm, C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Kahlil Gibran--who have suggested distinctive solutions to the problems which love poses in the face of its obstacles. (...) The enquiry which the book undertakes emcompasses both the conceptual and existential experience of love. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that a human being has a soul, whereas animals and lifeless things do not. The distinction made is of significance probably for most religions. Although it sets man apart and places him in a unique category, it should not be taken to imply that there is no difference between what is alive and has sentience, apart from man, and what is lifeless and unconscious. This was Descartes' error. For he ran together several distinctions and equated the (...) soul with consciousness. (shrink)

Fulke Greville speaks of the will as inevitably divided between reason and passion. Shakespeare takes such a division seriously but, through Hamlet, he recognizes the possibility of reason and passion being united in a man's will and purpose.

This article is concerned to say something about what the study of logic meant to wittgenstein. It is concerned to bring out why the kind of questions wittgenstein raised about logic and mathematics cannot be pursued in a purely formal and abstract manner-As russell pursued them to a very large extent. It tries to understand the prominence wittgenstein gave to a study of these questions in his philosophical investigations and to appreciate the sense in which he regarded a study of (...) logic to be fundamental in philosophy. Part I is largely about the sense in which russell's study of logic is philosophical in character though it differs very considerably, In both style and conception, From wittgenstein's study of it. Part ii is concerned to indicate wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with russell's view that mathematics are indistinguishable from logic and to say something about why he thought that russell's formal proof, Even if valid, Did not establish the philosophical thesis for which he argued. Part iii is concerned to indicate wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with russell's approach to the contradictions in the foundations of mathematics and to say something about his very different treatment of this question. (shrink)

JOHN WISDOM AND THE BREADTH OF PHILOSOPHY hham Dhman 1. THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME The essays following the two pieces by John Wisdom have all been written by philosophers who are former students or friends of Wisdom or who have a high regard for his work. Their contributions were all written with him in mind and to be discussed at a conference honouring his work. This conference was held in August 1983 at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Wisdom has (...) been a fellow since 1935. Wisdom is a master of discursive reasoning and one of his distinctive contributions in philosophy has been to examine its various forms and their interconnections, particularly the form it takes in philosophical inquiry and the way it advances our understanding there. His concern to bring out the links between all that is abstract in such reasoning and the concrete and particular is well known and represented in many of the essays in this volume. But Wisdom has also a deep appreciation of the kind of understanding that is advanced non-discursively. As he puts it in the first piece in this volume: However skilled a good critic 'I am sure that much of what makes "Hamlet" "Hamlet" will run between his fingers'. He has himself advanced our understanding on many questions in philosophy in this way, not simply by what he has said, but also by what he has suggested 'between the lines'. (shrink)

This is a reply to nielsen's discussion in "philosophical investigations" (vol. 3, No. 4, Fall 1980) of my two papers 'wisdom's philosophy of religion' ("c. J. P." dec. 1975). In it I attempt to correct some misunderstandings and reply to some criticisms regarding what I said in my papers about 'religious transcendence', 'the relation between religion and life', 'religious truth', 'religion and myth', 'experience of god', And 'philosophy and religious belief'.

People sometimes ask whether their lives are meaningful or not, whether or not their lives add up to anything. Sometimes they also ask whether life as such is meaningful or not. These are not unconnected questions. Still they are not questions which everyone asks himself. Nor do we always readily recognise what one who asks these questions wants to know. There are some people who will not even find such questions sensible. Some will regard them not as questions but simply (...) as symptoms of something having gone wrong somewhere. Thus in the Diary of the Student Kostya Ryabtsev we find the following words. (shrink)

Sometimes when artists talk about painting one finds what they have to say interesting: because they are talking about something they have lived with, something in which they find meaning. At other times one feels that it would be better for them to paint rather than talk about painting.

John Wisdom studied ‘moral sciences’ in Cambridge under G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad. His first post as a teacher of philosophy was at St Andrew's University under F. G. Stout. His early books Interpretation and Analysis and Problems of Mind and Matter and a series of articles on ‘Logical Constructions’ in Mind 1931-33, later published as a book, belong to this time.

There is a difficulty about past emotions, motives, etc., especially if they are in the distant past and I have forgotten what I then felt like, or if I was not aware of my feelings at the time. In the case of physical objects or events in the past I need not be the only witness; but in the case of past mental phenomena the corroboration of the supporting evidence is characteristically different. No doubt, here too we can have the (...) evidence of diaries and of other people's testimony; but the subject's report today plays a peculiar role, this peculiarity varying according to the case in question. E.g., I remember now that I was in love with Mary in my youth. I can see now, for the first time, that as a baby I felt envious of my mother for what she could give. The difficulty in grasping properly the detail that is brought together in talking about other people's past unconscious phantasies, the difficulty in grasping how we distinguish between the case of a person finally assenting to such an interpretation because he has genuinely remembered and that of a person who assents under suggestion, have led some people to say that in these cases we only seem to remember, and what we experience belongs solely to the present. (shrink)

In a lecture on ‘Science and Psychology’ Dr Drury distinguishes between ‘a psychology which has insight into individual characters’ and ‘a psychology which is concerned with the scientific study of universal types’, one which comprises ‘those subjects that are studied in a university faculty of psychology’. The former, and not the latter, he says, is psychology in ‘the original meaning of the word’. ‘We might say of a great novelist such as Tolstoy or George Eliot that they show profound psychological (...) insight into the characters they depict … In general, it is the great novelists, dramatists, biographers, historians, that are the real psychologists.’. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

Ilham Dilman; III*—Universals: Bambrough on Wittgenstein, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 35–58, https://doi.org.

Much of the popular attraction of as well as hostility to psycho-analysis, as represented in Freud's ideas, come from its iconoclastic, debunking character. What we regard as the higher things of life are, or seem to be, lowered, much of what passes as the normalities of human life are so represented as to appear under a disturbing aspect. Love is reduced to sex, human freedom is represented as an illusion, the human psyche is pictured as forever divided into warring factions (...) with the poor ego trying to keep peace by appeasements, compromises and, where these fail, by evasions and defensive manoeuvres, but without a will or convictions of its own beyond its own preservation. Moral conscience is said to be the internalized voice of a repressive authority in perpetual conflict with unruly instincts. Freud, who named it the super-ego said that it was ‘the representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection’. He added that it was ‘as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the “higher” things in human life’. (shrink)

Some people do not find much sense in talk about meaning in life. Some people think that such talk cannot have or express any sense, that those who find sense in it must be under an illusion. Some others think that if one is inclined to think that such talk cannot have any sense that is because one misconstrues its logic. So they set off to show us how it is to be construed if what is said here is to (...) make sense. However, there may not really be anything wrong with what they thus set themselves the task of putting right. Their idea that the logic of discourse on meaning in life has been misconstrued may itself come from limitations in their view of logic and its relation to language, from ‘misunderstandings about the logic of our language’. Therefore, as Professor Hepburn rightly points out, such philosophers, in their attempt to ‘prune and rationalise and redefine the vocabulary’ in question, will merely succeed in misleading themselves in their appreciation of its logic and, worse still, in their understanding of life. In his article Hepburn opposes such simplifications and distortions of logic which may confine our understanding of life. I am in sympathy with his programme, with his desire to fight superficiality, his caution in rejecting brashness. What I want to do is to remark on some of its limitations and to open up some new questions—though it is not my intention here to pursue any of them. (shrink)

The question about ‘identity’ under consideration in this paper is different from the one discussed in some of the other papers—for instance by Geoffrey Madell and Lars Herzberg. That question arises from the fact that human beings change in appearance and behaviour in the course of their life. By and large we have no trouble in recognizing them but we may wonder what it is that remains the same in them or about them so that we recognize them, address them (...) by the same name, respond to them as to someone we know. What is it for a person to be the same person through these changes? By virtue of what do we call them by the same name? (shrink)

I want to ask: what is knowledge of human beings and can it be acquired by experimental methods? It is a widespread assumption in academic psychology that the methods which have been applied with great success in the physical sciences are applicable to investigations in other areas and hence to psychological investigation. The history of experimental psychology is the history of the adjustments psychologists have made to their subject to be able to apply the experimental method of the sciences to (...) it. In the process of trimming the head to fit the cap on it they have emasculated psychology. (shrink)