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42On wanting to say: “All we need is a paradigm”The Harvard Review of Philosophy 9 (1): 88-105. 2001.
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6Book Review: How and How Not to Write on a “Legendary” Philosopher (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (3): 369-387. 2005.The author argues that Fuller’s book, with the single exception of its correct reinterpretation of Kuhn as no apostle of postmodernism—such that his “fans” and “foes” alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhn—is worse than worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, it consists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhn and recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may well mislead the unwary reader. Ni…Read more
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16David G. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 35 (1): 151-153. 1997.
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59A strengthened ethical version of Moore's Paradox? Lived paradoxes of self-loathing in psychosis and neurosisPhilosophical Psychology 25 (1). 2012.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 t…Read more
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40Wittgenstein and Marx on ordinary and philosophical languageEssays in Philosophy 1 (2): 1-41. 2000.
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1Marx and Wittgenstein on vampires and parasites: A critique of capital and metaphysicsIn Gavin Kitching & Nigel Pleasants (eds.), Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics, Routledge. pp. 35--254. 2002.
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38The Tale Parfit Tells: Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and LiteraturePhilosophy and Literature 39 (1): 128-153. 2015.[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 iden…Read more
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133Is ‘what is time?’ A good question to ask?Philosophy 77 (2): 193-210. 2002.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 s…Read more
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53The difference principle is not action-guidingCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 14 (4): 487-503. 2011.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’ w…Read more
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Practices Without Foundations? Sceptical Readings of Wittgenstein and Goodman: An Investigation Into the Description and Justification of Induction and Meaning at the Intersection of Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" and Goodman's "Fact, Fiction and Forecast"Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1995.'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 com…Read more
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33On Delusions of Sense: A Response to Coetzee and SassPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 135-141. 2003.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 135-141 [Access article in PDF] On Delusions of Sense:A Response to Coetzee and Sass Rupert Read Keywords schizophrenia, Wittgenstein, Schreber, Faulkner, Benjy, grammar, madness, Cogito The great writings on and of severe mental affliction—those for instance of Schreber, 'Renee', Donna Williams, Artaud, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Kafka's …Read more
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274Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate (edited book)Routledge. 2011.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 …Read more
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103On approaching schizophrenia through WittgensteinPhilosophical Psychology 14 (4): 449-475. 2001.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 firs…Read more
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640The New Wittgenstein (edited book)Routledge. 2000.This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's…Read more
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21Kripke’s HumeGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 24 (1): 103-121. 2003.The purpose of this paper is to consider whether or not Kripke’s ‘Wittgensteinian’ invocation of “assertibility conditions” and “the community” is a skeptical solution. In other words, this paper relates Kripke’s famous and major book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the key background text for his work—the corpus that forms the backdrop even to his most unusual reading of Wittgenstein: Hume’s works. Through questions of influence and of Kripke’s use of particular terms, the analy…Read more
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175Thomas Kuhn's misunderstood relation to Kripke-Putnam essentialismJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 33 (1): 151-158. 2002.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 relati…Read more
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Is Forgiveness Possible?: The Concrete Cases of Thoreau and Rushdie the UnforgivableReason Papers 21 15-35. 1996.
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48Throwing away 'the bedrock'Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (1). 2005.If one is impressed with Wittgenstein's philosophizing, then it is a deep mistake to think that the terms that he made famous-philosophical terms like 'form of life', 'language-game', 'everyday', 'bedrock'-are the key to his philosophy. On the contrary, they are in the end an obstacle to be overcome. The last temptation of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is to treat these terms as providing a kind of ersatz foundation. They are rather a ladder that takes one... to where one already is, only now …Read more
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44What 'there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word' could possibly meanIn Alice Crary & Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2000.
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38Against 'time–slices'Philosophical Investigations 26 (1). 2003.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, …Read more
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |