Rupert Read

'Practices without foundations' is, in genesis and in effect, a discussion of the following quotation , which serves therefore as an epigraph to it: ;Nelson Goodman's discussion of the 'new riddle of induction' ... deserves comparison with Wittgenstein's work. Indeed ... the basic strategy of Goodman's treatment of the 'new riddle' is strikingly close to Wittgenstein's sceptical arguments .... Although our paradigm of Wittgenstein's problem was formulated for a mathematical problem it ... is completely general and can be applied to any rule or word. In particular, if it were formulated for the language of color impressions, as Wittgenstein himself suggests, Goodman's 'grue', or something similar, would play the role of 'quus'. But the problem would not be Goodman's about induction--"Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past will be grue in the future?"--but Wittgenstein's about meaning: "Who is to say that in the past I didn't mean grue by 'green', so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, 'green'?" vskip9pt ;This fascinating remark of Kripke's suggests a project, that of charting out both the interpretive and philosophic points of connection and disconnection between Wittgenstein, Goodman and Kripke. That project is this dissertation. ;My work severely tests Kripke's remark. For I argue that Kripke not only misreads Wittgenstein, but also mistakes the extremity of the 'scepticism' of his version of Wittgenstein for the priority of the philosophical puzzle that Goodman has bequeathed to us. ;To reach this conclusion, I show that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'meaning-scepticism' is unanswerable if statable, but actually unstatable; and that, under certain interpretations, the same is true of putative scepticisms derivable from Goodman's text. The upshot is that the sceptical reading of most twentieth century philosophy must be displaced in favour of 'post-scepticism' and 'philosophical ethnography'. The latter concepts, sketched toward the end of the dissertation, are perhaps its telos

Dummett in his recent paper in Philosophy replies in the negative to the question, “Is time a continuum of instants?” But Dummett seems to think that this negative reply entails giving an alternative theoretical account; he nowhere canvasses the possibility that there is something amiss with the question. In other words, Dummett thinks that he still has to reply to the question, “What (then) is time?” I offer no answer whatsover to such ‘questions’. Rather, I ask what it could possibly mean to say that time is (e.g.) a continuum of instants (and by extension, whether it can mean anything at all to assert that it isn't). In the course of doing so, I suggest that Dummett's ‘Anti-Realism’ is invariably a form of Realism, just a subtly inconsistent form. Anti-Realism keeps the fundamental metaphysical picture of Realism intact. Anti-Realism still thinks that there is a Reality...settling whether Realism or Anti-Realism is correct! ‘Anti-Realism’ is never anti-Realist enough.

Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours the pursuit of clarity with regard to the various enterprises undertaken by human beings, with a view to dissolving the felt need for such a demarcation. In other words, Read pursues a ‘therapeutic’ approach to the issue of the status and nature of these subjects. Discussing the work of Kuhn, Winch and Wittgenstein in relation to fundamental question of methodology, Wittgenstein among the Sciences undertakes an examination of the nature of (natural) science itself, in the light of which a series of successive cases of putatively scientific disciplines are analysed. A novel and significant contribution to social science methodology and the philosophy of science and ‘the human sciences’, this book will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers, as well as to psychiatrists, economists and cognitive scientists.

[B]ecause I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow but that you will acquiesce in it.Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.“Are you watching closely?”The last line of Parfit’s description of the “branch-line case” of tele-transportation, the very epicenter of his hugely influential thought experiment that famously proposes a radically new view on “personal identity,” runs as follows: “[W]hile I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.”1 Parfit, notoriously, goes on to argue that the “branch-line” version of me, the “I” in the..

Wittgenstein once remarked: ?nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.? This has an immediate corollary, previously unnoted: that it may be true that someone is simply filth?a rotten person through and through?and also true that they don?t believe that they are filth (or, in a certain sense, that they do), but that it is absurd or means nothing to say ?I?m filth.? Even considering the possibility seriously already prevents it from being true of one that one is (simply) filth. You just can't say ?I'm filth? and mean it. In the act of saying it, it is already untrue. Nor can you even say and mean it: ?it may be true that I?m filth,? and it still be true that you are filth. This paper considers cases of delusional belief and of depressive self-loathing in which people may find themselves believing things along the lines of ?I?m filth.?

Gillett argues that there are unexpected confluences between the tradition of Frege and Wittgenstein and that of Freud and Lacan. I counter that that the substance of the exegeses of Frege and Wittgenstein in Gillett's paper are flawed, and that these mistakes in turn tellingly point to unclarities in the Lacanian picture of language, unclarities left unresolved by Gillett. Lacan on language is simply a kind of enlarged/distorted mirror image of the Anglo-American psychosemanticists: where they emphasize information and representation, he emphasizes evocation and connotation. Neither contrasting emphasis is remotely adequate to linguistic action-in-the-world. Is "the unconscious", as Lacan claims, a "network of signifiers"? Arguably, yes; but most ordinary / actual language does not involve such "signification". Words primarily "signify" concepts or things only in exceptional circumstances; normally, words are transparent, and nothing at all is meant by them except in an actual situation of use of a sentence. Second, is "the unconscious" structured like a language? Again, yes-- if we understand by "language" what Lacan asks us to. "The unconscious" arguably is structured like a language--as Lacan (inadequately) understands language.

Over fifteen years have passed since Cora Diamond and James Conant turned Wittgenstein scholarship upside down with the program of “resolute” reading, and ten years since this reading was crystallized in the major collection _The New Wittgenstein_. This approach remains at the center of the debate about Wittgenstein and his philosophy, and this book draws together the latest thinking of the world’s leading Tractatarian scholars and promising newcomers. Showcasing one piece alternately from each “camp”, _Beyond the Tractatus Wars_ pairs newly commissioned pieces addressing differing views on how to understand early Wittgenstein, providing for the first time an arena in which the debate between “strong” resolutists, “mild” resolutists and “elucidatory” readers of the book can really take place. The collection includes famous “samizdat” essays by Warren Goldfarb and Roger White that are finally seeing the light of day.

Kuhn's ‘taxonomic conception’ of natural kinds enables him to defend and re-specify the notion of incommensurability against the idea that it is reference, not meaning/use, that is overwhelmingly important. Kuhn's ghost still lacks any reason to believe that referentialist essentialism undercuts his central arguments in SSR – and indeed, any reason to believe that such essentialism is even coherent, considered as a doctrine about anything remotely resembling our actual science. The actual relation of Kuhn to Kripke-Putnam essentialism, is as follows: Kuhn decisively undermines it – drawing upon the inadequacies of such essentialism when faced with the failure of attempts to instantiate in history or contemporaneously its ‘thought-experiment’ – and leaves the field open instead for his own more ‘realistic’, deflationary way of thinking about the operation of ‘natural kinds’ in science.

‘Political liberalism’ claims to manifest the real meaning of democracy, including crucially the toleration of religion – it is through the history of this toleration that it acquired its current form and power. Political liberalism is however, I argue, more hostile to religion than was ever dreamt possible in the philosophy of avowedly anti-clerical Enlightenment Liberalism. For it refuses point-blank ever to engage in serious debate with religion. It considers it of no consequence. It allows religion only to be ‘outward forms’, meaningless ceremony. Political liberalism annihilates religion. The time has come for Western intellectuals to re-assess their allegiance to a tacit secularism, and to overturn the annihilation of religion. Religion or spirituality that brings forth the best of humanity may well in fact be essential to addressing the cultural crisis of our times. Political liberalism is the most extreme fundamentalism of them all, in its insistence upon every political claim being purely political, and not at all religious. Political liberalism considers genuine religion seditious. The way beyond the clash of fundamentalisms must be genuinely open to religion. Such openness to religion requires openness to the possibility that – far from reducing religion to a ‘lowest common denominator’ if it is to enter into public affairs at all , and neutering it otherwise to being an entirely private and inconsequential merely ritualistic matter – we might seek a ‘highest common factor’ approach to affirmative religions that escape the narrow constraints laid down by liberalism. Such a ‘common faith’ may even be vital to human survival.

Extending work of Wittgenstein, Lakoff and Johnson I suggest that it is the metaphors we rely on in order to conceptualise time that provide an illusory space for time-travel-talk. For example, in the “Moving Time” spatialisation of time, “objects” move past the agent from the future to the past. The objects all move in the same direction – this is mapped to time always moving in the same direction. But then it is easy to imagine suspending this rule, and asking why the objects should not start moving in the opposite direction. This is one way of generating the idea of time-travel “back” into the past. Time-travel-talk essentially involves the unaware projection of fragments of our time-talk – taken from powerful conceptual metaphors – onto the nature of reality itself. Understanding this dissolves away the charm and attractions of such talk

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models--for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as "cognitivists" claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted--if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter first that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans in general and Sass's hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian considerations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn't take sufficiently seriously Wittgenstein's use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic's "world"--for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing--there is no "world" there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their "alienness" is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of "logically alien thought".

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’

Dummett argues that there are difficulties with existing accounts of time, and urges us to consider the merits of his alternative ‘constructionist’ account. He derides my opting out of the debate between him and his Realist opponents as “quietist”. But the epithet “quietist” only works if there actually is some genuine topic on which I am staying quiet (or silencing others). Whereas I simply urge that, while Dummett has correctly identified difficulties with Realist accounts of time, he does not have any valid reason for opposing those accounts—and such valid reason can only come from a radically different approach which questions whether those accounts or any alternatives to them can satisfy those who wish to put them forward. I argue that at best such accounts present fragments of ‘the grammar’ of time, in a rather misleading form.

The concept of ‘time–slice’ turns out to be at best philosophically inconsequential, I argue. Influential philosophies of time as apparently diverse as those of Dummett, Lewis and Bergson, thus must come to grief. The very idea of ‘time–slice’ upon which they rest – the very idea of spatialising time, and of rendering the resulting ‘slices’ of potentially infinitely small measure – turns out on closer acquaintance not to amount to anything consequential that has yet been made sense of. Time is, rather, a ubiquitous lived ‘tool’ for the organisation and co–ordination of human activities, a tool so completely involved in those activities that Anti–Realism about it is as unstateable as Realism about it is unnecessary.

Utilitarianism would allow any degree of inequality whatsoever productive of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But it does not guide political action, because determining what level of inequality would produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number is opaque due to well-known psychological coordination problems. Does Rawlsian liberalism, as is generally assumed, have some superiority to Utilitarianism in this regard? This paper argues not; for Rawls’s ‘difference principle’ would allow any degree of inequality whatsoever that best raises up the worst off, and similar psychological coordination problems apply. It concludes that Rawlsian liberalism, designed to solve the problem that Utilitarianism will not give us stable rules and will counsel their violation, and giving us in the process a contract and rights within a semi-consequentialist framework, repeats (in the difference principle) that very problem of Utilitarianism. It fails substantively to guide the level of inequalities permitted in such a framework.