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42Review of David Pears, Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein's Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (1). 2008.
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205Logic in Action: Wittgenstein's Logical Pragmatism and the Impotence of ScepticismPhilosophical Investigations 26 (2): 125-148. 2003.So-called 'hinge propositions', Wittgenstein's version of our basic beliefs, are not propositions at all, but heuristic expressions of our bounds of sense which, as such, cannot meaningfully be said but only show themselves in what we say and do. Yet if our foundational certainty is necessarily an ineffable, enacted certainty, any challenge of it must also be enacted. Philosophical scepticism – being a mere mouthing of doubt – is impotent to unsettle a certainty whose salient conceptual feature …Read more
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79Wittgenstein TodayWittgenstein-Studien 7 (1): 1-14. 2016.In this paper,¹ I briefly take stock of Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy and some other disciplines. Surveying some of the ways in which he emphasizes the primacy of action, together with the superfluity - in basic cases - of propositions and cognition, in his account of mind, language and action, I suggest that, far from being a maverick philosopher, Wittgenstein’s pioneering ’enactivism’ puts him in the mainstream of philosophy today. I mention the importance of his thought for the ph…Read more
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123The good sense of nonsense: A reading of Wittgenstein's tractatus as nonself-repudiatingPhilosophy 82 (1): 147-177. 2007.This paper aims to return Wittgenstein's Tractatus to its original stature by showing that it is not the self-repudiating work commentators take it to be, but the consistent masterpiece its author believed it was at the time he wrote it. The Tractatus has been considered self-repudiating for two reasons: it refers to its own propositions as ‘nonsensical’, and it makes what Peter Hacker calls ‘paradoxical ineffability claims’ – that is, its remarks are themselves instances of what it says cannot …Read more
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18IntroductionPhilosophy and Literature 40 (1): 124-126. 2016.Leavis would not have approved of the third epithet in our title. He saw himself as an “anti-philosopher”—philosophers being thinkers who reduce thought to “isms.” Leavis was clear that he was neither a theorist nor a philosopher, but as a literary critic he could not avoid thinking about the kind of existence works of literature have, and how they can be forms of thought. In “Leavisian Thinking,” Ian Robinson shows how this led him to develop the idea of the “third realm,” which is often misint…Read more
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127Introduction: Hinge EpistemologyInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (2-3): 73-78. 2016._ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 73 - 78 This introduction gives a summary of the content of the special issue _Hinge Epistemology_, grouping the papers in three sections: more exegetical accounts of Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge certainties and their bearing on a theory of justification and knowledge as well as on the topic of external world scepticism; papers critical of the very notion of hinge certainty; and papers that apply the notion to various areas of epistemology and compare Wittgen…Read more
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147Wittgenstein and the Memory DebateNew Ideas in Psychology Special Issue: Mind, Meaning and Language: Wittgenstein’s Relevance for Psychology 27 213-27. 2009.This paper surveys the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notio…Read more
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154Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, Patterns of Life, and Ways of LivingNordic Wittgenstein Review 4 21-42. 2015.This paper aims to distinguish Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘form of life’ from other concepts or expressions that have been confused or conflated with it, such as ‘language-game’, ‘certainty’, ‘patterns of life’, ‘ways of living’ and ‘facts of living’. Competing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ are reviewed, and it is concluded that Wittgenstein intended both a singular and a plural use of the concept; with, where the human is concerned, a single human form of life characterized by…Read more
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41Review of Fergus Kerr, "Work on Oneself": Wittgenstein (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
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2Mind, Language and Action: Contributions to the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium (edited book)Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. 2013.
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108Cora Diamond and the Ethical ImaginationBritish Journal of Aesthetics 52 (3): 223-240. 2012.In much of her writing, Cora Diamond stresses the role of the imagination in awakening the sense of our humanity. She subtly unthreads the operations of the ethical imagination in literature, but deplores its absence in philosophy. Borrowing the notion of ‘deflection’ from Cavell, Diamond sees ethical understanding ‘present only in a diminished and distorted way in philosophical argumentation’. She does, however, herself make a philosophical, if idiosyncratic, use of the imagination in her appea…Read more
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117Words as deeds: Wittgenstein's ''spontaneous utterances'' and the dissolution of the explanatory gapPhilosophical Psychology 13 (3). 2000.Wittgenstein demystified the notion of 'observational self-knowledge'. He dislodged the long-standing conception that we have privileged access to our impressions, sensations and feelings through introspection, and more precisely eliminated knowing as the kind of awareness that normally characterizes our first-person present-tense psychological statements. He was not thereby questioning our awareness of our emotions or sensations, but debunking the notion that we come to that awareness via any e…Read more
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277Understanding Wittgenstein's On certaintyPalgrave-Macmillan. 2004.This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, On Certainty, has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of scepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-in, a primitive confidence or ur-trust whose pra…Read more
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64Perspicuous presentations: essays on Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2007.This anthology focuses on the extraordinary contributions Wittgenstein made to several areas in the philosophy of psychology - contributions that extend to psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology. To bring them a richly-deserved attention from across the language barrier, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock has translated papers by eminent French Wittgensteinians. They here join ranks with more familiar renowned specialists on Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology. While revealing differences in…Read more
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6PrefaceIn Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Volker Munz & Annalisa Coliva (eds.), Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. 2015.
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100Wittgenstein on psychological certaintyIn Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology, Palgrave-macmillan. 2007.As is well known, Wittgenstein pointed out an asymmetry between first- and third-person psychological statements: the first, unlike the latter, involve observation or a claim to knowledge and are constitutionally open to uncertainty. In this paper, I challenge this asymmetry and Wittgenstein's own affirmation of the constitutional uncertainty of third-person psychological statements, and argue that Wittgenstein ultimately did too. I first show that, on his view, most of our third-person psycholo…Read more
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115The Animal in EpistemologyInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (2-3): 97-119. 2016._ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 97 - 119 In this paper, I briefly summarize the nature of Wittgenstein’s ‘hinge certainties,’ showing how they radically differ from traditional basic beliefs in their being nonepistemic, grammatical, nonpropositional, and enacted. I claim that it is these very features that enable hinge certainties to put a logical stop to justification, and thereby solve the regress problem of basic beliefs. This is a ground-breaking achievement—worthy of calling _On Certaint…Read more
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64Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium (edited book)De Gruyter. 2015.
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26Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness, by Garry L. HagbergMind 120 (479): 870-875. 2011.
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23Hinge Epistemology (edited book)Brill. 2016.In _Hinge Epistemology_, eminent epistemologists investigate Wittgenstein's concept of basic or 'hinge' certainty as deployed in _On Certainty_ and show its importance for mainstream epistemology.
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107Readings on Wittgenstein's On Certainty (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2007.This anthology is the first devoted exclusively to On Certainty. The essays are grouped under four headings: the Framework, Transcendental, Epistemic and Therapeutic readings, and an introduction helps explain why these readings need not be seen as antagonistic. Contributions from W.H. Brenner, Alice Crary, Michael Kober, Edward Minar, Howard Mounce, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Thomas Morawetz, D.Z. Phillips, Duncan Pritchard, Rupert Read, Anthony Rudd, Joachim Schulte, Avrum Stroll, Michael William…Read more
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25Wittgenstein and Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the EthicalPhilosophy and Literature 40 (1): 240-264. 2016.Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. … But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics could not be made manifest; and indeed I will suggest that Wittgenstein took the best manifestation of ethics to be in aesthetics, and more specifically literature. Literature uses words in such a way as to allow ethics to show itself. It does this, I suggest, thr…Read more
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |