This book offers the first introduction to a major Japanese philosophical movement through the interests and arguments of its founder, Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), his successor, Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and student-turned-critic, Tosaka Jun (1900-1945). Focusing on their contributions to thinking about place, space, and dialectics, this concise introduction brings these influential thinkers to life by connecting their work to issues still debated in the philosophy of science and physics today. Beginning with an overview of the reception of quantum (...) physics and relativity theory in Japan and concluding with an account of the direct relevance of the Kyoto School to the development of world philosophy in a posthuman age, each clearly-written chapter engages historical contexts and includes: · Carefully-chosen excerpts and original translations of Nishida, Tanabe, and Tosaka · Focus boxes explaining complex concepts and problems of contextualization. A timeline, glossary and index. Further reading lists featuring relevant and significant articles and books in English. This introduction is an ideal starting point for students and lecturers looking to become better acquainted with three central Japanese philosophers and learn why their work impacts our current thinking about science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911–1951Newton GarverBrian McGuinness, editor. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911–1951. Malden, MA-Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. vii + 498. Cloth, $134.95.This volume includes nearly everything contained in Cambridge Letters (Blackwell, 1995), supplemented by Wittgenstein’s exchanges with Sraffa (not available in 1995), by correspondence with many of his students, and by various documents pertaining to his status in the University (...) and to the Moral Sciences meetings. Throughout, there are notes by McGuinness that provide details about persons, places, and events mentioned in the texts. Altogether, the volume offers rich rewards for both students of Wittgenstein and those interested in the interplay of the times.Wittgenstein was Austrian to the core, as is evident in his admiration for such distinctly Viennese cultural icons as Nestroy, Grillparzer, Labor, Weininger, and Kraus—none of whom was familiar in the circles within which he moved in Cambridge. In his introduction, however, McGuinness makes clear that Cambridge, not Vienna, was the place where Wittgenstein could work. There were no roots in Cambridge, compared to those in Vienna, but growth, it seems, had to take place away from the roots. During his first stay in Cambridge (1912–14) Wittgenstein established connections with the giants of the time: Russell, Moore, and Keynes, all of whom had been active members of the Apostles, and who therefore put him in touch with the Bloomsbury-flavored younger elite of the University. Although none of these relationships was smooth, they all served in 1929 to ease Wittgenstein’s re-entry into Cambridge.Once back at Cambridge, and back at work in philosophy, Wittgenstein established his own circle, composed of younger scholars who attended his lectures. The only contact from the early period with whom he remained close through the 1930s and ’40s was Moore, although neither Russell nor Keynes disappeared entirely. Moore attended Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1930–33, and the two met regularly whenever Wittgenstein was in Cambridge. Among his peers, the big addition was Piero Sraffa, the Italian economist who was, as McGuinness puts it, first a protegé and then a successor of Keynes. It is difficult to reconstruct the content of the conversations between these two powerful intellects, but the letters and notes included here make it plain that the conversations were intense and had continuing themes. The Sraffa documents have been available elsewhere, but the chronological order of the documents in this volume means that we can now see them in the wider context of Wittgenstein’s ongoing activity.Wittgenstein and Sraffa were both equals and opposites—equal in genius, in honesty, in forthrightness, in stubbornness, and in commitment to dialogue, but opposite in opinions and convictions. Time and again, the letters and notes show evidence of tough, wrenching discussions, at times suspended because of exhaustion and weariness. Wittgenstein lists Sraffa last (chronologically, we presume) of ten people who influenced his thought. The letters and notes in this volume confirm a powerful influence, but offer scant clues as to the direction of the influence in Wittgenstein’s later thought.One of the younger scholars was the physicist W. H. Watson, who became Distinguished Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His On Understanding Physics is, [End Page 115] McGuinness reports, a reliable guide of Wittgenstein’s thinking on these matters. In their correspondence we find many instances of what they both regarded as nonsense penned by the great scientists of the day (Jeans, Eddington, and Einstein). The nonsense appears to have presented grand pronouncements in everyday language, concerning mundane rather than distinctively philosophical matters. By providing new insight into how Wittgenstein relished nonsensical items, the correspondence with Watson helps us appreciate Wittgenstein’s nose for nonsense as part of his philosophical genius.For Wittgenstein, happiness depended on work. This is evident in his Notebooks 1914–1916 and again in these documents. For example, on June 17, 1941, he writes to Moore, “About six weeks ago I suddenly... began to be able to write again. Quite possibly this will last only for a very short time; but it feels good while it lasts and has made a great deal of difference to me... (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. (...) In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Brief Introduction to a Philosophy of Music and Music Education as Social Praxis by Thomas A. RegelskiRoger MantieThomas A. Regelski, A Brief Introduction to a Philosophy of Music and Music Education as Social Praxis (New York: Routledge, 2016)ANSWERS WITHOUT QUESTIONSThomas Regelski has earned a place as a major figure in music education, if for no other reason than his role as co-convener of the MayDay (...) Group in 1993. Regelski’s contributions to the profession, however, go much beyond the MayDay Group. His many books and articles provide both practical advice and suggestions for music teachers as well as rigorous discussions of important issues for scholars. He is among the most frequently cited authors in music education today and I count myself among those who have been deeply impacted by his work.1Those familiar with Regelski’s oeuvre and the history of the MayDay Group know that “praxial philosophy” has been his central concern since the early 1990s. The idea of praxialism, a term more or less invented by a small group of music education academics,2 has been driven, at least in part, by a desire to counter what has been considered (by some) to be the music education profession’s misguided adherence to and emphasis on “music education as aesthetic education,” particularly as an outgrowth of its Charles Leonard-Bennett Reimer [End Page 213] lineage.3 Along with contemporaries Philip Alperson, Wayne Bowman, and David Elliott (among others), Regelski has been a major voice in adopting and adapting ancient Greek (especially Aristotelean) thought in order to challenge the presupposition, predominant in twentieth-century academic discourse, that a (or the) philosophy of music education should unquestioningly derive from philosophies of art or aesthetics. Through the deployment of concepts such as theoria, techne, poiesis, phronesis, and especially, praxis, Regelski has, along with a cadre of like-minded thinkers, attempted, in the tradition of Christopher Small, to encourage educators to place greater emphasis on the social aspects of music making rather than on the so-called “aesthetic properties” of the music itself. For almost three decades, Regelski has been consistent, if not relentless in his promotion of all things “praxial.”A Brief Introduction to a Philosophy of Music and Music Education as Social Praxis (hereafter A Brief Introduction) comprises seven short chapters. The first three (Part One: Ideology Critique) provide an historical, if editorialized, overview of the history of aesthetics, from its ancient Greek origins in aisthesis to what Regelski calls today’s “aesthetic rationale” for music education. The last four chapters (Part Two: Theory into Praxis and Praxis Informed by Theory) provide arguments for why a praxial philosophy provides a superior basis for music education, along with illustrations of what music teaching based on praxialism might look like in practice. Readers already acquainted with Regelski’s previous writings are unlikely to find anything new in A Brief Introduction. Many of the book’s themes, such as “automania,” “sacrilization of music,” “legitimation crisis,” “pragmatic difference,” “action learning,” and “breaking 100” will be familiar to those who have read his essays over the years. A Brief Introduction, however, is not intended for those already familiar with his previous writings, but for newcomers, such as upper level undergraduates, for whom A Brief Introduction provides, as the title appropriately suggests, a succinct summary of his ideas distilled into just over a hundred pages. Rather than a stand-alone textbook, Regelski imagines the book as a “complement” to other courses, such as introductory classes in music education, conducting classes, instrumental method courses, and so on. Although not stated explicitly, much of the book’s content is relevant primarily (though perhaps not exclusively) for an American/Canadian readership.Regelski explains from the outset that the ideas in the book “are intended as a corrective to current practices and traditions in music teaching” (xx), ones he considers based upon and reflective of “aesthetic ideology.” As he explains, he wishes to operate in the tradition of Critical Theory, where ideology means the imposition of a dominant group’s values over a subordinate group. Although he never discusses processes of social reproduction, established norms and practices [End Page 214] in institutional... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Language of the People: The Claims of Common Speech from Petrarch to Locke by Lodi NautaPatrick RysiewLodi Nauta. Philosophy and the Language of the People: The Claims of Common Speech from Petrarch to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 275. Hardback, $39.99.What type of language should philosophers use? Granted that such things as clarity and communicative efficacy are desiderata of a good language in (...) which to philosophize, are they best achieved by inventing a specialized language or by sticking to the common language we already possess? It might seem that using familiar terms would be among the nonnegotiable starting points in philosophical theorizing. After all, how else are we to ensure that our theories make and maintain contact with the subjects that prompted us to philosophize in the first place? On reflection, however, perhaps our common language is so beset with defects—imprecision, the encoding of various prejudices, an inability to express certain types of truths, and so on—that philosophers, like specialists in other fields, have no alternative but to devise their own technical language. So, even if we agree that philosophers should use “clean tools,” as J. L. Austin famously put it, that does not settle the question of whether they should adhere to a common language or whether such a language is ill-suited for philosophical purposes.In contemporary analytic circles, the debate just rehearsed is likely to prompt thoughts of the twentieth-century back-and-forth between those who thought that philosophical advancement required developing a logically ideal language (e.g. Russell and Frege) and those who were deeply suspicious of such a project (e.g. Austin and Wittgenstein). But then, contemporary analytic philosophy tends to be pretty ahistorical. And one of the main aims, and most welcome accomplishments, of Lodi Nauta’s Philosophy and the Language of the People is to demonstrate that this type of debate is not a recent phenomenon. In particular, Nauta’s stated goal is to increase awareness of the role that a critique of language—and, in particular, an insistence upon the need to respect common language—played in helping to bring about the erosion and eventual demise of Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy.Of course, Aristotle himself was hardly indifferent to the workings of ordinary language, drawing important lessons from how we use certain words. But neither was he averse to coining new terms when ordinary Greek fell short. The example of Aristotle thus makes it clear that, as Nauta notes (16), in adjudicating between common and technical language there is plenty of room for intermediate positions that do not simply champion one or the other. This general point notwithstanding, attempts to render Aristotle’s ideas in Latin and to capture the subtleties of various proposed additions to the Aristotelean framework historically led to significant increases in the stock of technical terms used to philosophize. With this came the growing sense that philosophy had lost contact with its subject matter and lost track of its proper aim of making sense of the world of everyday experience.As Nauta suggests (4), the concern that philosophy is just so much technical tire-spinning will be all too familiar to contemporary philosophers. Much less familiar, however, is that precisely this was the complaint of many Renaissance humanist and early modern philosophers. Hence the need for Nauta’s book: over eight central chapters—book-ended [End Page 506] by an introduction and conclusion—Nauta recounts the various ways in which an insistence upon the importance of “common language” played destructive and constructive theoretical roles in the writings of a selected range of thinkers.Chapter 1 considers early humanist critiques of scholastic jargon by Francesco Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni. Chapter 2 examines Lorenzo Valla (the subject of Nauta’s previous monograph) and his attempt to cast classical Latin as the natural common language in which learned scholarship should be conducted. Chapters 3–5 survey three humanists who built differently on Valla’s foundation—Giovanni Pontano, via a genealogical approach to language and an emphasis on its role in our affective, social, and cognitive lives; Juan Luis Vives, as part of his wider views on human culture... (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to a carefully planned research and mutually curated volume on the relationship between Pop art initiator Eduardo Paolozzi and celebrity philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Mantoan and Perissinotto argue that this peculiar encounter between an artist and a philosopher—both as a man and as far as his philosophy is concerned—was a “kind of happening”, which took place years before the generation of future conceptual artists had even entered art school. Not only was Paolozzi the (...) first and perhaps still is the only artist who devoted a substantial part of his oeuvre to the Austrian philosopher, but his works also impress even a philosophically qualified audience for the level of expertise and intuitiveness with which the writings of Wittgenstein are handled. Hence, Mantoan and Perissinotto pursue a twofold aim: on the one side, to present the artist Paolozzi as a precursor in reading Wittgenstein in the field of contemporary art, influencing or forestalling the then upcoming generation of conceptual artists; on the other side, to demonstrate how the reader Paolozzi may even be seen as a precursor as regards the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. (shrink)

This volume includes nearly everything contained in Cambridge Letters, supplemented by Wittgenstein’s exchanges with Sraffa, by correspondence with many of his students, and by various documents pertaining to his status in the University and to the Moral Sciences meetings. Throughout, there are notes by McGuinness that provide details about persons, places, and events mentioned in the texts. Altogether, the volume offers rich rewards for both students of Wittgenstein and those interested in the interplay of the times.Wittgenstein was (...) Austrian to the core, as is evident in his admiration for such distinctly Viennese cultural icons as Nestroy, Grillparzer, Labor, Weininger, and Kraus—none of whom was familiar in the circles within which he moved in Cambridge. In his introduction, however, McGuinness makes clear that Cambridge, not Vienna, was the place where Wittgenstein could work. There were no roots in Cambridge, compared to those in Vienna, but growth, it seems, had to take place away from the roots. During his first stay in Cambridge Wittgenstein established connections with the giants of the time: Russell, Moore, and Keynes, all of whom had been active members of the Apostles, and who. (shrink)

First published in 1927, this translation of Kulpe's 'Einleitung in die Philosophie', 1895, covered psychology, logic, ethics, esthetics and general philosophy. The author adopted a uniform approach of positivity, interest and impartiality, aiming his work at a wider public than students of philosophy. The volume was intended as an elementary but complete guide to philosophy, past and present and included facts and arguments previously confined to philosophical encyclopaedias.

For scholars working on almost any aspect of American thought, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America presents an indispensable reference work. Selecting over 700 figures from the Dictionary of Early American Philosophers and the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, this condensed edition includes key contributors to philosophical thought. From 1600 to the present day, entries cover psychology, pedagogy, sociology, anthropology, education, theology and political science, before these disciplines came to be considered distinct from philosophy. Clear and accessible, each entry (...) contains a short biography of the writer, an exposition and analysis of his or her doctrines and ideas, a bibliography of writings and suggestions for further reading. Featuring a new preface by the editor and a comprehensive introduction, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America includes 30 new entries on twenty-first century thinkers including Martha Nussbaum and Patricia Churchland. With in-depth overviews of Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Noah Porter, Frederick Rauch, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, this is an invaluable one-stop research volume to understanding leading figures in American thought and the development of American intellectual history. (shrink)

This chapter contains an introduction by the editors of the volume P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy. First, the chapter describes Strawson’s life and gives a summary of his most important works, ranging from his early ‘On Referring’ to his latest book Analysis and Metaphysics. Secondly, it gives an overview of the contributions that appear in P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy. Lastly, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources is given. The aim of the chapter is to (...) introduce the reader to Strawson’s work and to facilitate the learning process of becoming acquainted with Strawson’s philosophical project. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret (...) Macdonald, from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:542 BOOK REVIEWS sires. Rather, the Subjects need to want to do those things that bring about the Bosses' satisfaction. And this raises the question of the control of the imagination. explores the subtle power relations between controllers and the controlled, to the end of exploring ways that imagination offers control over power relationships. Yet Rorty ends with a bleak vision: we are a basically conservative species, whose capacities (...) for imagining new forms of power relationships tend to be dominated by the archetypes gleaned from our collective and individual experience, often reflecting malign structures. Even benign experiences, Rorty argues, tend to reinforce our inclination to seek refuge in submission to authority. What are we to make of this collection which stretches from philosophy of mind through Freudian analyses to a chastened Hobbesian vision of our social and moral order? There is much here to interest philosophers of mind and those who are concerned with the frontier between that field and empirical psychology. While she does not supply a theory of mind, Rorty shows clearly how much heterogeneous material such a theory must encompass. JOHN CHURCHILL Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas Faith and Reason From Plato to Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology. DEWEY J. HOITENGA, JR. S.U.N.Y. Press, 1991. Pp. 263. $18.95. This is an excellent and important book. Most of those who have written about the ' Reformed ' epistemology of religious belief have done so with either polemical or systematic interests in mind. That is not inappropriate, since the interests of those who have propounded Reformed epistemology have also been mainly polemical and systematic. Though here and there they have pointed to historical antecedents, they have not traced those antecedents in any detail. Hoitenga's contribution is to do exactly that. For the most part, his understanding of Reformed epistemology is accurate. He himself crisply summarizes his understanding in these words: "Its central claim is the immediacy of our knowledge of God. We do not, in the first instance, know God by inference or testimony but by direct acquaintance with him. A closely related claim fa that we cannot easily remain indifferent to the God whom we know by such direct acquaintance. Thus our knowledge of God is like our knowl- BOOK REVIEWS 543 edge of every other fundamental kind of reality-physical objects, their properties and relationships, others persons, right and wrong, good and evil, and the elementary objects of logic and mathematics. Furthermore, the claim is that everyone knows God in this way, not just the Christian believer. If someone does not believe in God, that is, does not trust in God as Christians do, this is not because one does not know God. All human beings by nature have what Calvin calls an awareness of divinity.... Although the fall has clouded over this natural awareness of God and led to the loss of faith in him, it has not eradicated this awareness. Christian faith does not alter this direct awareness of God but rather presupposes it, rejuvenates it, and enlarges it " {235). Hoitenga discusses in detail three precursors of this view: Plato, Augustine, and Calvin, thus showing that the contemporary Reformed epistemology of religious belief stands in a long intellectual tradition. Though shortly I will offer a few critical comments about his interpretations, his discussion of the three thinkers is, in each case, extremely helpful. The full view of each of these thinkers, on the matters under consideration, must be constructed from passages scattered around in a large number of different texts. Hoitenga conducts this recovery of the relevant sources and the construction of his interpretation with wide knowledge of the primary texts, with apt use of the secondary literature, and with the judiciousness and balance which such interpretation requires. Though I shall now make critical comments on three points, I view these criticisms as entirely compatible with my judgment that Hoitenga has made a very important contribution with this historical introduction to Reformed epistemology. I begin with one point in his exposition of contemporary Reformed epistemology. Plantinga observes that there are perhaps some cases in which, though a person has a prima facie right to believe some theistic proposition immediately, that right is... (shrink)

Józef Bremer's book, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Religion, is the first extensive Polish commentary on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion and is worth reading even if for no other reason. As author suggests in the subtitle, the book is not intended for specialists. However, it is difficult to understand the arguments without a general knowledge of Wittgenstein's philosophy. It has a loose structure and can be regarded as a collection of essays preceded by a chapter introducing the problems (...) of Wittgenstein's philosophy. The task which the author has undertaken is very ambitious, because even a sketchy presentation and interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on religion is difficult - precisely because it is sketchy. There are several reasons for this. First, understanding Wittgenstein's views concerning religion requires a perfect understanding of all aspects of his philosophy, since it is impossible to separate his considerations on religion from the rest of his investigations. Secondly, Wittgenstein's writings are full of ambiguous aphorisms and not always conclusive mini-dialogues, which is why there exist many alternative interpretations of his texts. Thirdly, only a few of his notes about religion have been published. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual StudyDavid SternRobert J. Fogelin. Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual Study. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2009. Pp. xviii + 181. Cloth, $35.00.This is an excellent book, which should be read widely. It is a short, lucid, and accessible introduction to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, written by a leading expert. It is the ideal sequel to Saul Kripke’s (...) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language on a short list of required readings for a course on Wittgenstein. Part 1 concerns rule following and the conceivability of a private language, while part 2 discusses three topics in his philosophy of mathematics: the status of mathematical expressions, Wittgenstein’s treatment of Cantor on transfinite cardinals, and his approach to logical consistency. There is very little discussion of the secondary literature on any of these topics. Instead, apart from a few prefatory methodological [End Page 147] passages, almost all of the book is devoted to extensive quotations from Wittgenstein’s writing and to close reading of what he says there.Fogelin’s chief aim, to take Wittgenstein at his word, is in a sense a very modest one. Wittgenstein insisted throughout his career that he was not presenting philosophical theses, and that philosophy should not be a matter of defending theses. Indeed, Fogelin explicitly acknowledges that in taking Wittgenstein at his word, he is not presenting “a novel—hitherto unrecognized—way of understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” (xii–xiii). Nevertheless, most interpreters have read Wittgenstein as failing to follow his own methodological precepts, and their interpretations have focused on the theses that they attribute to him. Instead, Fogelin lets “Wittgenstein speak for himself” (xi), not only quoting at length from his writings, but also from Wittgenstein’s “self-commentaries” (xi), passages where Wittgenstein helps us appreciate the philosophical significance he assigns to his words. Crucially, these quotations are held together by a close reading that provides a lucid and perceptive statement of what Wittgenstein is saying there and why, highlighting the intimate connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and his treatment of key topics in the philosophy of language and mathematics.A leading theme in Fogelin’s book is what he calls Wittgenstein’s “defactoist” approach to rule following. While he does not define this neologism, he does say that it involves “the rejection of appeals to rational processes where philosophers typically have attempted to find or supply them” (41). Furthermore, Fogelin connects it with the central role Wittgenstein gives to natural responses and training, the fact that the kind of training a creature can undergo depends on its natural or instinctive responses and Wittgenstein’s “rejection of the idea that training is merely an external device intended to induce in the trainee a grasp of the correctness, the legitimacy, of what he has been trained to do” (35–36).Although Fogelin never explicitly addresses the crucial question of which texts to draw on in taking Wittgenstein “at his word,” in practice he makes use of a wide range of publications from every stage of Wittgenstein’s career. The Tractatus, written during the First World War, is treated as belonging to an earlier stage of his thought, and some similarities to and differences from his later work are discussed. No such distinctions are drawn between material written in the early 1930s, editors’ reconstruction of lecture notes from the early 1930s and late 1930s, passages from the Philosophical Investigations, assembled in the mid-1940s, the different parts of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, and selections from On Certainty, dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s. While Fogelin acknowledges that there was some development in Wittgenstein’s views during these years, he puts great weight on passages taken from manuscripts and student lecture notes from the 1930s. For instance, in his crucial opening chapter on rule following, he relies heavily on the words with which Wittgenstein first formulated his paradox of interpretation in the early 1930s (20–21) and on his statement of the connection between meaning and rules in his 1932 lectures (17). While these passages are attractive precisely because they... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram EilenbergerDavid HermanTime of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside; 432 pp. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.Is it possible to write a deeply researched and technically precise contribution to the history of philosophy that reads like a gripping novel? (...) Time of the Magicians, originally published in German in 2018 as Zeit der Zauberer, convincingly demonstrates that this feat can indeed be accomplished. However, it may be achievable only by the rare expert who, like Wolfram Eilenberger, combines a thoroughgoing knowledge of the field, an unstinting commitment to recreating a public forum for philosophy, and a gift for the exposition—and dramatization—of philosophical debates, the broader circumstances in which they took place, and the motivations and aims of those who participated in them.The book, stylishly translated by Shaun Whiteside, begins by plunging us into the middle of things. Eilenberger provides snapshots of what his four focal thinkers were up to in 1929, before backtracking, in subsequent chapters, to cover key events in the decade that brought them to this point. Then, in the epilogue, he briefly sketches their post-1929 lives and careers. The book's readability is further enhanced by the way the text is broken up into short sections with eye-catching titles ("A Hut of One's Own," "Existential Health Check," "Self-Fashioning through Openness").The opening pages center on June 1929, when Ludwig Wittgenstein, having previously renounced his portion of his family's fortune and taught for several years at primary schools in rural Austria, undertook an oral defense of his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge at age forty. Wittgenstein's "thesis" just so happened to be Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the influential, sometimes gnomic book he had published in 1921; and at the conclusion of the defense, the candidate is rumored to have said to his examiners, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."In fact, as Eilenberger discusses in a later chapter, by 1929 Wittgenstein's own thinking was no longer where it had been when he wrote the Tractatus. The [End Page 492] philosopher's primary concern had shifted away from identifying the logical structure of meaningful propositions; instead, he had become interested in how meaning emerges from the way language is used in particular, concrete contexts. Apropos the evolving nature of Wittgenstein's ideas, one of the funniest parts of the book describes the philosopher's meetings with members of the Vienna Circle, a group that, in seeking to reorient philosophy around the natural sciences, had come to see the Tractatus as a touchstone for their work. During his first meeting with the group, in 1927, Wittgenstein, instead of talking shop, recited poems by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, standing with his back turned to the audience. Later discussions did involve philosophy, but eventually, as Eilenberger puts it, although the "Vienna Circle had hoped for something that coincided with their ideal of objective research," they "were instead left to grapple with an extremely idiosyncratic style of thinking that, in both execution and results, seemed directly contrary to it" (p. 274).Meanwhile, a few months prior to Wittgenstein's defense of a thesis that no longer reflected his real tendencies of mind, two of Eilenberger's other focal thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, engaged in a much-anticipated public debate at the Grand Hôtel Belvédère in Davos, Switzerland. When he first mentions it, Eilenberger furnishes just enough detail to whet readers' curiosity about this epochal contest between the eminent neo-Kantian Cassirer, whose reputation for encyclopedic erudition had just been sealed by the publication of the final volume of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and the considerably younger Heidegger, a one-time student of Edmund Husserl who had made a radical departure from Husserlian phenomenology in Being and Time.By the time readers return to the debate, some three hundred pages later, Eilenberger has provided a decade's worth of historical context, which casts a... (shrink)

Long recognized as an important and abiding influence in the European artistic and intellectual circles of the last century, the work of Pierre Klossowski is slowly gaining recognition in the Anglo-American scholarly community. The older brother of the painter Balthus, a friend of Rilke and Gide among others, and a celebrated artist in his own right, Klossowski is a difficult if not impossible thinker to categorize. From quite early in his career, Nietzsche was an important influence on Klossowski’s work. In (...) addition to translating two volumes for Nietzsche’s Oeuvres Complètes (1967, 1976), as well as Heidegger’s four-volume work on Nietzsche (1976), Klossowski also wrote a number of essays on Nietzsche as well as a book, Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux (1969). In a note to Différence et Répétition, Gilles Deleuze, citing “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” as well as “Forgetting and Anamnesis in the Lived Experience of the Eternal Return of the Same,” writes that Klossowski’s work has “renewed the interpretation of Nietzsche.” “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” appeared as the final essay of Klossowski’s book, Un si funeste désir (Such a Deathly Desire), first published in 1963. It is one of two essays in the book that are devoted explicitly to Nietzsche; the second, “On Some Fundamental Themes of Nietzsche’s Gaya Scienza,” is the opening essay of the volume and had previously appeared as an introduction to Klossowski’s translation of The Gay Science. “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” had not previously appeared in print, although Klossowski had presented it as a lecture at the Collège de Philosophie in Paris in 1957. Together, the two essays bound a series of reflections on Gide, Blanchot, Bataille, and others, all of which appeared previously – sometimes in a different form – and that taken together explicate Klossowski’s conception of “the demon.” The conception of the demon, drawn from The Gay Science, is for Klossowski a figuration of the double life of the existing human being: both conscious, rational, goal-directed, and vital, passionate, a victim of intensities. (shrink)

TheTractatusfirst appeared in 1921, the same year that Post's “Introduction to a General Theory of Elementary Propositions” appeared in theAmerican Journal of Mathematics. As the latter is the first piece clearly to present and exploit the distinction between a deductive system and a truth-functional interpretation of such a system, we may conclude that Wittgenstein's views had been arrived at somewhat before a variety of logical concepts had received the clarification and refinement incipient on the now taken-for-granted distinction (...) between proof and model theory. One such concept, of considerable interest to Wittgenstein, was that of inference. The following constitutes an attempt to explicate his notion. In particular, I shall attempt to show that his repudiation of “laws of inference” is closely tied to his rejection of logical constants; and that both can be seen as the product of what might be termed a “metaphysics of completeness”—before, of course, any notion of completeness had achieved a measure of precision or currency. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay examines two anonymous pamphlets that have sometimes been attributed to John Millar: the ‘Letters of Sidney’, and the ‘Letters of Crito’, both published in 1796 by the Scots Chronicle. It outlines the political context for the pamphlets’ publication and the evidence for and against Millar's authorship, and reassesses their contents' significance for our interpretation of Millar's other writings. While the ‘Letters of Crito’ present a classically Foxite critique of Pitt's ministry and Britain's war against revolutionary France, the ‘Letters (...) of Sidney’ put forth a more theoretical defence of property reform based upon a Smithian theory of justice. Yet taken together, the essay demonstrates the pamphlets offer new insights into the political discussions that were taking place in Scottish Foxite Whig circles in the 1790s. They also provide a snapshot of the various ways in which the theories of the Scottish Enlightenment could be used by Millar and his circle of friends and students to interpret the political context of the mid-1790s, as the French Revolution was transforming the political language of its English and Scottish contemporaries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. By HANS Kii'NG. Translated by J. R. Stephenson. New York: Crossroad, 1987. Pp. 601. $37.50 (cloth bound). This is an imposing book (first German edition, 1970), not only in length, but in breadth of presentation. Kiing, in the introduction, outlines the philosophical, theological and cultural milieus out of (...) which Hegel's theology and philosophy emerged. In the next 400 pages (seven chapters), Kiing thoroughly articulates the historical development of Hegel's theological and philosophical thought as expressed in his successive writings, specifically examining and evaluating the christological elements. Kiing's final chapter interprets Hegel's Christology in light of recent biblical historical/critical methodology, by way of a prolegomenon to a future Christology. The book concludes with five integral historical/theological excursus which take up specific questions that arise out of this Hegelian enterprise, for example: "Does God suffer?," "The Dialectic of the Attributes of God," "Immutability of God?". In the preface to this English edition, Kiing states that the purpose of this work is to "provide theologians with an introduction to Hegel's theological and christological thought.... [It will be] a many-leveled 'invitation' into Hegel's life and 'thought, with particular reference to his religious world, and then into his theology and Christology " (p. ix). "Moreover,.this book is an introduction to Hegel's thought by way of 'prolegomena to a future Christology '. In ·these pages we endeavour to return... a provisional reply that will take us some way in the right direction" (p. x). Why did Kiing look to Hegel for the clue to a future Christology? His thesis is that "the biblical message concerning a God who is by no means separated from the world but rather operates within it, and who is by no means stuck immovable and immutable in an unhistorical and suprahistorical realm but rather performs living acts in hi&tory can be better understood [along the lines of Hegelian thought] than in terms of the metaphysics of either classical Greece or the middle ages" (p. xii). Any student of historical or philosophical theology/christology will be captivated by Kiing's treatment of.the development of Hegel's ilhought. Undoubtedly he has mastered Hegel's life, writings and 698 694 BOOK REVIEWS thought, and presents these in a clear, complete and engaging manner. Kiing notes that Hegel, beginning with his student days at Tiihingen, was influenced by three strong cultural and intellectual currents: the Enlightenment as it specifically culminated in the thought of Kant, the French Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic movement. Kiing shows that, while the young Hegel was acquainted with the Bible, and even,though he already displayed an interest in the role of religion (folk religion) as formative of society, nowhere was he "seized in a lively and inward fashion by the Christian faith, by the figure of Christ himself" (p. 54). To rthe contrary, Hegel's early experience of Christianity was lifeless and joyless. During his subsequent time in Bern, Hegel's evaluation of Jesus un· derwent a transformation. Hegel became fascinated with Greek religion, not because it was true, but because it embodied the culture and spirit of the people. Developing this train of thought, he stated that "The supreme end of man is morality, and his religious bent is pre· eminent among his aptitudes for promoting that end" (p. 69). In light of this, Hegel considered Jesus,to lack the humane and universal scope of Socrates, who was " the paradigm of a free, good and humane Hellenism and of harmony with nature, world and state " (p. 63). Jesus' teaching was too much an authoritarian imposition upon people rarther than, like Socrates', a nurturing of their inner spirit and life. Shordy, as reflected in his Life of Jesus, Hegel's view of Jesus was to change. Now he was placed above Socrates, not because he was acknowledged to be the eternal Son of God, nor because he reconciled mankind to God by his death on the cross, but rather because he per· sonified the divine ideal of virtue that is so necessary for social order. " Whart is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

This abridged and revised edition of the original book (Springer-Wien-New York: 2001) offers the only comprehensive history and documentation of the Vienna Circle based on new sources with an innovative historiographical approach to the study of science. With reference to previously unpublished archival material and more recent literature, it refutes a number of widespread clichés about "neo-positivism" or "logical positivism". Following some insights on the relation between the history of science and the philosophy of science, the book offers an (...) accessible introduction to the complex subject of "the rise of scientific philosophy” in its socio-cultural background and European philosophical networks till the forced migration in the Anglo-Saxon world. The first part of the book focuses on the origins of Logical Empiricism before World War I and the development of the Vienna Circle in "Red Vienna" (with the "Verein Ernst Mach"), its fate during Austro-Fascism (Schlick's murder 1936) and its final expulsion by National-Socialism beginning with the "Anschluß" in 1938. It analyses the dynamics of the Schlick-Circle in the intellectual context of "late enlightenment" including the minutes of the meetings from 1930 on for the first time published and presents an extensive description of the meetings and international Unity of Science conferences between 1929 and 1941. The chapters introduce the leading philosophers of the Schlick Circle (e.g., Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Felix Kaufmann, Edgar Zilsel) and describe the conflicting interaction between Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath, the long term communication between Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as between the Vienna Circle with Heinrich Gomperz and Karl Popper. In addition, Karl Menger's "Mathematical Colloquium" with Kurt Gödel is presented as a parallel movement. The final chapter of this section describes the demise of the Vienna Circle and the forced exodus of scientists and intellectuals from Austria. The second part of the book includes a bio-bibliographical documentation of the Vienna Circle members and for the first time of the assassination of Moritz Schlick in 1936, followed by an appendix comprising an extensive list of sources and literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nature as Guide: Wittgenstein and the Renewal of Moral Theology by David Goodill, O.PCajetan Cuddy and O.P.Nature as Guide: Wittgenstein and the Renewal of Moral Theology. By David Goodill, O.P. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. Pp. xiii-319. $75.00. (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3445-8.Nature as Guide is an intriguing reevaluation of the philosophical legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the light of Thomistic moral theology (...) after the Second Vatican Council. Goodill helpfully lays out his fundamental argument in the book’s introduction: Wittgenstein can help the philosopher to reconcile the “modern dichotomy between nature and reason,” and the theologian to reevaluate “the associated oppositions typical of modern thought, such as that between moral agency and natural agency or between grace and nature” (2). The author is overt in his appreciation for Fergus Kerr’s 1997 monograph Theology after Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, Nature as Guide is unique insofar as it focuses on specifically moral theological issues in a moment of theological “renewal”—one in which we can recognize “the restoration of metaphysics to the center of theological debate” (12).The first four chapters of Nature as Guide consider Wittgenstein in relation to themes associated with classical philosophy. Goodill’s “objective in the first part of the book is to construct a dialogue between Wittgenstein and the metaphysical tradition which illuminates both conversation partners” (38). This initial part of the book culminates in an account of human nature that serves as the foundation for the moral theological inquiry that follows in the second part (the fifth through the eighth chapters).In the first chapter (“What Lies Hidden: Wittgenstein, Metaphysics, and Moral Theology”), Goodill introduces Wittgenstein’s “philosophical practice”—specifically his “insistence on grounding philosophical enquiry in everyday thinking” that effectively “connects him to the [metaphysical] tradition that begins with Plato and Aristotle” (16). Goodill is perceptive and nuanced in his analysis of Wittgenstein’s texts. He recognizes that “it would be wrong to treat [Wittgenstein] as an unproblematic inheritor of this tradition” (37). Nonetheless, he wants his readers to appreciate the careful balance between theory and praxis maintained in Wittgenstein’s thought vis-à-vis the priorities of classical philosophy. To this end, he examines G. E. M. Anscombe’s account of how Wittgenstein helped her to overcome the “trap” of phenomenalism.In the second chapter (“Nature, Logic, and Grammar”), Goodill attends to the progress of key tenets in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He identifies as “the guiding theme” of this narrative “the development of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the relationship between the meaning and the application of linguistic expressions” (40–41). Specifically, he suggests that Wittgenstein’s “mistake” in the Tractatus (51) can be reduced a fundamental point: the erroneous presupposition that there is “one general notion of clarity which is required in all contexts. It was precisely this requirement which Wittgenstein came later to reject in the Investigations” (52). Indeed, between the Tractatus [End Page 703] and the Investigations Wittgenstein abandoned his efforts to establish a “forced unity” of language through “the general form of the proposition”—turning, instead, to “our actual linguistic practices” (85). The whole of human life, thus, “provides the unity of our grammar” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Goodill also points out that Wittgenstein does not reject “the central insight” of the Tractatus, namely, “that meaning is internal to our forms of representation” (59). This immanence remains throughout the Tractatus and the Investigations.The third chapter (“Grammar, Teleology, and Understanding”), summarizes objections to Goodill’s proposal that Wittgenstein can be read in continuity with the metaphysical tradition. William Charlton “argues that in the absence of a teleological conception of nature Wittgenstein’s account of language collapses into pragmatism” (88-89). Rush Rhee “accuses Wittgenstein of being misled by his analogy between language and games to neglect the basis of our linguistic practices in the human search for universal understanding” (89). In brief, both “Charlton and Rhee argue that a much richer conception of our natural human capacities and reactions is required than that provided by Wittgenstein”—and they do so in a complementary way (103). Although Goodill does not believe that their objections stand above... (shrink)

Adolf Reinach was one of the leading figures of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, and Husserl's first real co-worker. Although his writings are highly original and remarkably clear, Reinach's tragic death in the First World War prevented him from formulating a definitive statement of his phenomenology, leaving his name virtually unknown to all but a small circle. In his ground-breaking study, Judgment and Sachverhalt, DuBois shows how Reinach succeeds in developing a realist ontology and epistemology (...) based on rigorous argumentation and phenomenological elucidation. Drawing from numerous texts and the developments of Reinach's students and colleagues - Roman Ingarden, Alexander Pfänder and Dietrich von Hildebrand above all - DuBois presents, refines and defends Reinach's `phenomenological realism'. Confrontations of Reinach's theories of states of affairs, concepts and speech acts with the work of contemporary authors like Chisholm and Searle allow readers to evaluate Reinach's philosophy, not only in the light of the later developments of Husserl, but also in the light of certain Anglo-American developments. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the (...) stores seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captivated the imagination of all. Its chief influence, at first, was on the Logical Positivists of the 1920s and 30s, but many other philosophers were stimulated (...) by its philosophy of language, finding attractive, if ultimately unsatisfactory, its view that propositions were pictures of reality. Perhaps most of all, Wittgenstein himself, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920s, was fascinated by its vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships. The posthumous publication of other writings has, therefore, only served to reawaken interest in the Tractatus and to illuminate its more neglected aspects. David Pears and Brian McGuinness revised their translation in the light of Wittgenstein's own suggestions and comments in his correspondence with C.K. Ogden about the first translation. In addition, this edition contains the introduction by Bertrand Russell which appeared in the original English translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Project of Knowing:Lorenzo Valla and Salvatore Camporeale’s Contributions to the Querelle Between Rhetoric and PhilosophyMelissa Meriam BullardThe Journal of the History of Ideas has published two symposia devoted to examinations of Lorenzo Valla's place in Renaissance intellectual history, both of which sought to situate Valla in his appropriate contemporary context and to assess his contributions to developing tools of rhetorical analysis and textual criticism in the fifteenth (...) century. In the first JHI debate published in 1989, Salvatore Camporeale's foundational reexamination of Valla's views on language, rhetoric, and theology was frequently cited; and his assessment served as a fulcrum in the disparate interpretations offered by John Monfasani and by Richard Waswo and Sarah Gravelle.1 In the second forum published in 1996, Camporeale was invited to contribute an essay on Valla's famous critique of the false Donation of Constantine; therein the Roman humanist had appealed for Christian renewal inspired by an early Christianity, unburdened by medieval ontological discourse, and seeking to subvert the imperial (Constantinian) model of the church that had dominated since the fourth century.2More than half a century later in the early sixteenth century, reform-minded intellectuals such as Erasmus, More, Luther, and Melanchthon picked up Valla's pleas and used his insights and textual criticism to buttress their own calls for ecclesiastical reform, challenging the claims to authority of the [End Page 477] Roman church. But despite the popularity among the reformers of Valla's two most noted and provocative texts, his rhetorical and philological refutation of the Donation of Constantine and his annotations for a new translation of the New Testament from Greek, his legacy gradually faded from prominence after the sixteenth century. By then when the Protestants' split from Rome had become an accepted reality, and their battle to achieve a place in a divided Christian world won, the reformers' use of Valla's arguments no longer seemed so controversial. For its part, Catholic discourse in the Tridentine era had reverted to reassertions of papal hierarchy along the Constantinian model. Valla's other contributions to understanding rhetorical hermeneutics and philosophy gradually receded, especially from Anglophone intellectual consciousness and in some quarters even from the metanarratives of intellectual history.3 His legacy frequently goes unacknowledged in reconstructions of antecedents to modern intellectual history and philosophy despite the late twentieth century's lingering love affair with philosophies of language and the stress on contextualization pioneered by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which share many of the same concerns Valla had plumbed for his day.4 The present group of essays attempts to address that lacuna in various ways, by revisiting Valla's contributions to the philosophy of language, by casting his story forward to understand the nature of his legacy beyond the Renaissance and Reformation, and by exploring why his and other Renaissance humanists' contributions to the project of human knowledge have been minimized or overlooked in more recent times. It is the contention of all the contributors that Valla, and to wit Camporeale's Valla, richly deserves our attention and that his overlooked legacy endures.Beginning in the 1970s Salvatore Camporeale, the leading modern Valla specialist, wrote and lectured widely to highlight the Roman humanist's place in the history of thought and to discuss him in an idiom reflective of modern sensitivities to issues of rhetoric, philosophy, language, and historical context.5 Camporeale's massive tome, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972) has only slowly made its fortune beyond Italy and Europe. The book, densely written and daunting for its close philological examination of variant texts and datings, has been more often consulted than read outside [End Page 478] the select circle of Valla devotees, this despite Eugenio Garin's clearly stated appreciation in his presentation of the volume. Garin lauded the depth and precision of Camporeale's scholarship and the lucidity with which he brought into focus the rich fabric of fifteenth-century theological disputes that engaged Valla and that invested his understanding of language and philology.6 Through careful and insightful analysis, Camporeale not only established Quintilian as the major inspiration behind Valla's rhetorical theory, but, logical step by logical step, he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism by Jon StewartMichael RohlfAn Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. By Jon Stewart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 304. $100.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-284293-0.The interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is (...) notoriously controversial for several reasons. One such reason, indicated by Jon Stewart at the outset of his new introduction to the subject, is that while Hegel’s views on religion are intricately interwoven with the rest of his philosophical system, the political climate in Prussia at the time was such that “Hegel was guarded with respect to issues of religion and took some care to dissemble his true views” (2). A second reason is that although the texts Hegel published during his lifetime contain scattered discussions of religion, his only systematic treatment of religion occurs in his Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR), which were published after his death in several editions, each of which drew upon different selections from student lecture notes and [End Page 688] Hegel’s own notes (he lectured on the philosophy of religion or proofs of God’s existence in five different semesters between 1821 and 1831), and each of which has been criticized for presenting only a partial picture of Hegel’s views on the subject. Stewart explains that the first edition of these lectures in particular, published in 1832 as part of the first complete edition of Hegel’s works, “was in many ways the key text that caused the split among... the schools of right and left Hegelianism” (15). Critics complained that this edition made Hegel look more orthodox than he actually was (16), but so-called right Hegelians defended Hegel’s philosophy as in fact consistent with orthodox Christian doctrines, while left Hegelians argued that Hegel’s philosophy “undermined or demystified Christianity” (202).Stewart’s book is an accessible and admirably neutral introduction to the philosophical context, content, and reception of Hegel’s LPR. Its scope and Stewart’s pellucid prose make it an excellent overview for readers coming to this material for the first time, while its detailed discussions of the publication history and reception of Hegel’s LPR and its thorough references make the book a valuable resource for more advanced students and scholars as well. Stewart’s approach is to frame Hegel’s philosophy of religion as a response to criticisms of religion in the Enlightenment and to Romanticism in Hegel’s own day. Accordingly, the book’s first two chapters provide context by discussing Enlightenment debates about religion in Voltaire, Reimarus, Lessing, Hume, and Kant, along with Hegel’s critical response to the Enlightenment. Chapter 3 then presents Rousseau as a forerunner, and Jacobi and Schleiermacher as representatives, of the Romantic approach to religion in Hegel’s own day. After discussing Hegel’s general method in LPR and the relation between philosophy and religion in chapter 4, Stewart turns to Hegel’s philosophical accounts of pre-Christian religions in chapter 5, of Christianity in chapter 6, and of Islam in chapter 7. Since Hegel’s account in LPR ends before the rise of Islam, Stewart draws primarily on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History in chapter 7. Chapter 8 is, in this reviewer’s opinion, the most valuable part of the book, where Stewart summarizes and weighs in on debates in the 1830s and 1840s about the consistency or inconsistency of Hegel’s views with Christian doctrines of immortality, the personhood of God, and the divinity of Christ. The book then closes with a final chapter about the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy of religion today.Stewart indicates two distinctive features of his interpretation in the book’s introduction, where he references the tendency of scholars to assume that Hegel “kept secret his true views about religion” (13). On Stewart’s reading, there are really two related secrets concealed within Hegel’s texts about religion. First, while Hegel is quite explicit that “his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought by Habib C. MalikJ. KellenbergerHabib C. Malik. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 437. Cloth, $59.95.At the end of the twentieth century no one who has any acquaintance with Western philosophical or religious thought would fail to recognize Kierkegaard’s name. (...) This was not always so. Kierkegaard wrote in his native Danish in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for decades his thinking and his name were virtually unknown outside Scandanavia. Habib C. Malik’s book contains the richly detailed story of how Kierkegaard’s thought became known in Europe and in the English-speaking world. Malik breaks down the reception of Kierkegaardian ideas into several phases: “non-reception,” the beginnings of reception, “misreception,” suppression, and serious reception. In the first phase Kierkegaard was read in Denmark, but not understood. In [End Page 637] the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s while Kierkegaard was still alive, his writings started to become known outside Denmark in Scandanavia (and even reached North America via Scandanavian-American immigrants). In the period of “misreception,” as Malik calls it, Kierkegaard’s ideas or catch-words are appropriated but not fully understood—as with Ibsen, Malik argues. After Kierkegaard’s journals and papers began to be published in the 1870’s, there developed a new kind of interest in Kierkegaard, the “biographical-psychological approach,” initiated by Georg Brandes, in which Kierkegaard’s ideas and themes were interpreted in terms of the crucial events in Kierkegaard’s life. This approach led to the substance of Kierkegaard’s thinking being suppressed by what became a morbid interest in Kierkegaard’s personal life, such as a preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen and then reading “The Diary of a Seducer” or key parts of Fear and Trembling as an expression of this event. The period of suppression reaches into the 1880s and 1890s as scholars and translators, like Christoph Schrempf, use Kierkegaard for their own ends. Schrempf, a Lutheran minister who renounces his belief, looks to Kierkegaard for support for his new stance and translates Kierkegaard into German, omitting passages that do not foster his end. Finally there is the period of serious reception, or its beginning, especially in the German-speaking world. Malik ends the story of Kierkegaard’s reception with the period following the First World War, before the development of twentieth century Existentialism.In the book’s eight chapters a vast number of minor and major cultural figures are dealt with. Some, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted (the rector of Kierkegaard’s university and the discoverer of electromagnetism, whose approach to religion was cosmological) Kierkegaard knew and interacted with. Most, like Ibsen, Brandes, Schrempf, and Hans Peter Barford (the first editor of Kierkegaard’s extensive papers) and Albert Bärthold (who learned Danish to translate Kierkegaard into German and during the 1870’s regularly produced translations and commentaries) enter the story after Kierkegarrd’s death. Malik recounts Kierkegaard’s Kirkekampen (church-struggle) with the Lutheran Danish state-Church, and he brings out how Kierkegaard’s writing in this period of his “Attack on Christendom” greatly influenced the way he was initially received. He discusses the reaction to Kierkegaard by the early Swedish writer and feminist Fredrika Bremer, and he discusses Kierkegaard’s later influence on such various thinkers and writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (to name some of the more familiar).There are many nuggets of detail in the book. For instance, those who have read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist would know that in 1888 Brandes called Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s attention, but too close to the onset of Nietzsche’s madness for him to read Kierkegaard. However we learn from Malik that Brandes in a letter had characterized Kierkegaard as “one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed” and that Nietzsche in his reply in February of 1888 actually expressed the intention to “take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard” when... (shrink)

Jan Srzednicki’s metaphysical conception of epistemology lies in radical opposition to the whole epistemological tradition. The main problem of his new epistemology is to find a non-linguistic (non-cognitive) idea of reference to an ontological presence.Srzednicki finds the prototype of such a completely new, non-linguistic perspective in Brentano’s Doppelurteile. Brentano’s idea cannot be mechanically adopted, however, because on the whole it still remains within the traditional theory. To avoid the problemsrevealed by Wittgenstein we need a more sophisticated strategy. Srzednicki achieves (...) this goal by scripting the epistemological scenario for two dimensions: theoretical and pre-theoretical. The first one represents the logical space of observer, the second one, the theoretically discernible logical requirements of cognition (called cognitive potential, pre-Ego or arche of the possibility of cognition).Srzednicki’s idea was born in the space of three theoretical challenges: Brentano’s, Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s. He begins where each of these three theorists broke off, which is to say, entangling his endeavors at he end in dilemmas which cannot be resolved by means available from his perspectives. (shrink)

In this 1970 introduction to philosophy Mr Taylor concentrates on two central topics - explanation and meaning. He takes the argument far enough to acquaint the reader first-hand with the methods and approach of analytical philosophy, and yet because of the scope of these two topics he is able to introduce many of the traditional philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and logic. By this approach he avoids the dangers both of superficiality and of undue technicality. Philosophers (...) are concerned to analyse and describe certain concepts and modes of argument, not to establish facts or conclusions of any sort that can be tested by formal demonstration or controlled observation; their findings cannot be conveniently categorized or graded into a comprehensive and progressive course of studies. Mr Taylor meets this difficulty with his extended discussions of specific topics and questions which have implications over the whole subject. (shrink)

This work brings in both the original German and English translation of over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind of historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932-35, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann, but also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann closely based on the dictations. Many of these texts become the (...) ultimate sources of material on philosophy of language that constitutes the bulk of Waismann's book Logic, Sprache, Philosophy. The transcriptions throw light on the development of Wittgenstein's thought in this period and some of the topics are not covered in any of the existing publications of his writings, in particular his detailed attention to causal theories of meaning. They also contain texts covering psychological concepts such as expecting, intending and experience; these have no counterparts in Waismann's publications. (shrink)

_Introduction to German Philosophy_ is the only book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present. the first book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present. offers an accessible introduction to the work, among others, of Kant, Fichte, the Romantics, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Husserl, (...) Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Gadamer, and Habermas. considers how German philosophy reacts to revolutionary changes in modern science, society, and culture; ideal for anyone wanting to know more about the role of the German tradition within philosophy and literature as a whole. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. (...) In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

This introduction briefly places Karl Mannheim’s 1918 lecture on the crisis in relations between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ culture in the context of Mannheim’s negotiations with Georg Simmel’s sociology of culture, as mediated by the young Mannheim’s intimate ties to Georg Lukács and his circle.

Must We Mean What We Say? is Stanley Cavell's first book, and, in a sense, it is his most important. It contains all the themes that Cavell continues to develop masterfully throughout his philosophy. There is a renewed usage of J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, and, in the classic essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” he establishes the foundations of a radical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein , the connections among skepticism, acknowledgement, and Shakespearean tragedy (...) ; there is the reflection on the ordinary that runs throughout his later works ; and, finally, there is the original aesthetic approach that defines Cavell's work, through his objects—which range from William Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and pass through Hollywood comedies and melodrama, and opera—and, above all, through his style and method. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

Comprising specially commissioned essays from some of the most significant contributors to the field, this volume provides a uniquely authoritative and thorough survey of the main lines of Wittgenstein scholarship over the past 50 years, tracing the history and current trends as well as anticipating the future shape of work on Wittgenstein. The first collection of its kind, this volume presents a range of perspectives on the different approaches to the philosophy of Wittgenstein Written by leading (...) experts from America, Britain, and Europe Provides a much needed overview of the complex landscape of Wittgenstein exegesis and Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophy Assesses the current state, aims, and future of Wittgenstein scholarship An essential guide for both students and scholars. (shrink)

Subtitled "Ideas and Arguments from Plato to Sartre," this volume is intended, as are many others, to serve both as a textbook for introductory courses in philosophy and as an introduction to philosophic thinking. One of its goals, and one admirably achieved, is to provide some hearing both to all the very greatest figures in the history of western philosophy and to some major opposing traditions. No one can read the volume and fail to grasp something of the content (...) and spirit in the work of such men as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and others. What makes Flew's work creative and original is a combination of factors. First of all, he combines in a very stimulating and integral way two methods commonly adopted in works of this kind, namely representative selections from original sources and expository and critical commentary. Almost one half of the work consists of material taken from the primary sources, but these selections are not set off in large chunks interspersed with commentary. Rather they are worked into the text to illustrate the thrust of the arguments and ideas involved, and thus we find Hobbes' militant manifesto of metaphysical materialism confronting the Eleatic Stranger's argument for the existence of "certain incorporeal Forms which are objects of the mind" in The Sophist, Hume's views on finality contrasted with the argument developed by Aquinas in his fifth way, and Frege's polemic against confusing the logical with the psychological set opposite the arguments of Locke concerning the meaning of human understanding. In addition, in offering his own critical comment Flew deliberately seeks to set forth his own conclusions even in areas that have been and are controversial. Thus the work is by no means an impersonal account but conveys something of the enthusiasm and excitement that the author experiences in trying to forge sound arguments and assess the soundness of arguments advanced by others--and this, for Flew, is the principal work of the philosopher. One could argue over many of the nuances that Flew's way of proceeding gives to the meaning of the philosophies discussed, but this in no way detracts from the value of this stimulating and exceptionally informative introduction.--W. E. M. (shrink)

The new critical edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham is being prepared and published under the supervision of the Bentham Committee of University College London. In spite of his importance as jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, and leader of the Utilitarian reformers, the only previous edition of his works was a poorly edited and incomplete one brought out within a decade or so of his death. Eight volumes of the new Collected Works, five of correspondence, and three (...) of writings on jurisprudence, appeared between 1968 and 1981, published by the Athlone Press. Further volumes in the series since then are published by Oxford University Press. The overall plan and principles of the edition are set out in the General Preface to The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, which was the first volume of the Collected Works to be published.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work, is a classic text in modern philosophy and jurisprudence. First published in 1789, it contains the important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and a pioneering study of crime and punishment, both of which remain at the heart of contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory. Printed here in full is the definitive edition, edited by the distinguished scholars J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. An introductory essay by Hart, first published in 1982 and a widely acknowledged classic in its own right, is reprinted here. It contains an important analysis of Bentham's principle of utility, theory of action, and an account of the relationship between law and morality.A new introduction by the leading Bentham scholar F. Rosen, specially written for this Clarendon Paperback edition, provides students with a helpful survey of Bentham's main ideas and an extensive bibliographical study of recent critical work on Bentham. Professor Rosen's essay also contains a new analysis of the principle of utility in Bentham's philosophy which is compared with its use in Hume and J. S. Mill. (shrink)

Brian R. Clack’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion is intended not only as a contribution to its thorny subject but also as an introductory text that is accessible to undergraduate philosophy students. To his credit, Clack negotiates the difficulties inherent in his task with considerable care and skill. He makes good decisions about what to discuss. He reaches careful conclusions that are defensible and, given the book’s brevity, reasonably well defended. Although I have found much to (...) disagree with in this book, I would commend it as a worthy addition to the literature. (shrink)

The present article-based dissertation is a contribution to a historical and systematic recon- struction of Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy. Building on previous work on the same subject, this thesis continues a research effort exploring Feyerabend’s early ties to scientific philoso- phy, in particular Logical Empiricism and the Vienna Circle, as well as its continued effects on Feyerabend’s later philosophy. The main claim is that Feyerabend’s formative years in Vienna (1946-1955) happened in the context of scientific philosophy and that his early (...) philosophi- cal proposals should be interpreted as a critical contribution within this tradition. Secondly, it proposes a framework to connect Feyerabend’s early and later philosophy and explain the theoretical change involved. -/- The first article gives the reader an overview of Feyerabend’s philosophy, introducing key themes of Feyerabend’s writings. -/- The second article deals with the context and interpretation of Feyerabend’s earliest extant essay (1948) and identifies an early stage of Feyerabend’s philosophical formation, possibly preceding his acquaintance with Logical Empiricism, in which positivism as a concept of ”philosophy of physicists” is his primary interest. This helps to build a very fine-grained time sequence of his early philosophical interests and helps to disentangle the notion of scientific philosophy. -/- The third article deals with an objection by Thomas Oberdan to the claim that Feyerabend’s pragmatic theory of observation is a development of earlier proposals by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Karl Popper in the early 1930s. In particular, Oberdan denies that Carnap ever proposed such a theory about protocol sentences. The article argues that Oberdan’s objection fails by reconstructing how such a theory can be found in Carnap’s 1932 writings. Feyerabend’s pragmatic theory of observation is indeed one major point of contact between Logical Empiricism, Feyerabend’s early philosophy and his later ’post-positivist’ philosophy. This completes one main interpretative claim in previous work, namely, that Feyerabend’s pragmatic theory of observation should be seen as a contribution to the project of a ”behavioristics of scholars”. -/- The fourth and last article is dedicated to Feyerabend’s role as a protagonist in the so-called historical turn in the philosophy of science in the 1960s. His early strong opposition and his later adherence to the turn is discussed and an explanation of the change involved is given. To this end I introduce a reconstruction of Feyerabend’s metaphilosophy, a framework called Decision-based Epistemology, and claim that specific changes on the metaphilosophical level can account for prominent changes on the level of Feyerabend’s philosophical contributions. -/- An introduction at the beginning of the collection of articles gives a rationale of the outline, the overall research project and provides more informations on how these articles fit in the overall research project. (shrink)

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a (...) fragment, without either title, motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

Research and publications on Wittgenstein and on the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism have been steadily increasing in recent decades. Nevertheless, detailed comparisons between the single famous philosopher and the influential circle around Moritz Schlick are less often undertaken. To be sure, the reception and impact of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (TLP) on the Vienna Circle is a familiar topic as are the conversations Wittgenstein had with Schlick and Waismann. This introductory essay suggests that a broader (...) focus be adopted. The first part provides an overview of the multi-faceted Vienna Circle based on recent historiography and primary sources; the second part offers a new perspective on the complex relations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. To this end, a case study of a central relevant document is provided, namely of Rose Rand’s “Development of the Theses of the ‘Vienna Circle’” (1932/33). A close reading of this unique source sheds new light on the central philosophical triangle of Wittgenstein-Schlick-Waismann and opens up new avenues for future analyses. These considerations are offered to provide a thematic frame for the papers contained in this volume documenting the international conference on “Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle”, held in Vienna, June 2021 to mark the centenary of the publication of Wittgenstein’s Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921) / Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). (shrink)

This book explores the influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889-1957). Ogden was connected to several of the most significant figures of the modernist period, including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victoria Lady Welby, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In investigating these connections, this book reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of (...) their respective histories and in turn sheds light on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century. Readers are introduced to the important interaction between Ogden's thought and Victoria Lady Welby's 'significs', Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'logical atomism' in its various forms, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. McElvenny also examines the background to the ideas espoused in Ogden's book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I. A. Richards, along with the application of these ideas in Ogden's international language project Basic English. Provides a detailed study of the historical origin of key concepts in semantics and semiotics Reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories Makes extensive use of previously unexplored sources, including Ogden's articles in the journal Psyche and unpublished correspondence Includes a detailed examination of The Meaning of Meaning, 1923 and Basic English, 1930. (shrink)

The Vienna Circle was, as the research of recent decades made abundantly clear, far from a homogeneous group of philosophers (nor an always harmonious one). This can be shown with regard to the way different general philosophical and cultural influences affected the views of different members, but also with regard to the way in which the doctrines of specific philosophers closely associated with the origin of logical empiricism were received. Wittgenstein is a case in point. This paper sets (...) out, with the help of a few indicative examples, how the critical reception of the Tractatus by Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath—former members of an informal pre-World War 1 discussion group, the so-called first Vienna Circle—and by Rudolf Carnap reflected their pre-existent theoretical interests. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contributed to their developing philosophy but was far from its foundation, contrary to what has often been presumed about the relation of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captivated the imagination of all. Its chief influence, at first, was on the Logical Positivists of the 1920s and 30s, but many other philosophers were stimulated (...) by its philosophy of language, finding attractive, if ultimately unsatisfactory, its view that propositions were pictures of reality. Perhaps most of all, Wittgenstein himself, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920s, was fascinated by its vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships. The posthumous publication of other writings has, therefore, only served to reawaken interest in the Tractatus and to illuminate its more neglected aspects. David Pears and Brian McGuinness revised their translation in the light of Wittgenstein's own suggestions and comments in his correspondence with C.K. Ogden about the first translation. In addition, this edition contains the introduction by Bertrand Russell which appeared in the original English translation. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It influenced philosophers and artists alike and it continues to fascinate readers today. It offers rigorous arguments but clothes them in enigmatic pronouncements. Wittgenstein himself said that his book is 'strictly philosophical and simultaneously literary, and yet there is no blathering in it'. This introduction, first published in 2005, considers both the philosophical and the literary aspects of the 'Tractatus' and shows (...) how they are related. It also shows how the work fits into Wittgenstein's philosophical development and the tradition of analytic philosophy, arguing strongly for the vigour and significance of that tradition. (shrink)

The appearance of this translation is a major event in English-language Hegel studies, for it is more than simply a replacement for Wallace's translation cum paraphrase. Hegel's Prefaces to each of the three editions of the Enzyklopädie are translated for the first time into English. There is a very detailed Introduction translating Hegel's German, which serves not only as a guide to the translator's usage but also to Hegel's. Also included are a detailed bilingual annotated glossary, very extensive (...) bibliographic and interpretive notes to Hegel's text, an Index of References for works cited in the notes, a select Bibliography of recent works on Hegel's logic, and a detailed Index. The translation is guided by the principle that rendering Hegel’s logical thought clearly and consistently requires rendering his technical terms logically.... This ought immediately to become the standard translation of this important work. --Kenneth R. Westphal, in _Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

Ever since the first meeting of the proponents of the emerging Logical Empiricism in 1923, there existed philosophical differences as well as personal rivalries between the groups in Berlin and Vienna, headed by Hans Reichenbach and Moritz Schlick, respectively. Early theoretical tensions between Schlick and Reichenbach were caused by Reichenbach’s Kantian roots, who himself regarded the Vienna Circle as a sort of anti-realist “positivist school”—as he described it in his Experience and Prediction. One result of this divergence was (...) Schlick’s preference of Carnap over Reichenbach for a position at the University of Vienna, and his decision not to serve as a co-editor with Reichenbach for the journal Erkenntnis that they jointly established in 1930. A second split rooted in different views on induction and probability, which culminated in the Hans Reichenbach’s refusal to serve as an invited author on probability within the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science series ed. by Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris and Otto Neurath from 1938 onwards. In this regard it is remarkable that also Richard von Mises, who was the second leading figure of Logical Empiricism in Turkish exile, criticized the theory of probability put forward by his former Berlin colleague. In this paper I analyse this controversial exchange, drawing on the relevant correspondence and asking whether these philosophical differences were a typical feature of the pluralism inherent in Logical Empiricism in general. (shrink)