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136Is ‘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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39The 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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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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34On 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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305Beyond 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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104On 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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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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721The 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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177Thomas 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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42Against '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
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307Engaging 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’ appr…Read more
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36Where Value Resides: Making Ecological Value PossibleEnvironmental Ethics 37 (3): 321-340. 2015.Distinguishing between the source and the locus of value enables environmental philosophers to consider not only what is of value, but also to try to develop a conception of valuation that is itself ecological. Such a conception must address difficulties caused by the original locational metaphors in which the distinction is framed. This is done by reassessing two frequently employed models of valuation, perception and desire, and going on to show that a more adequate ecological understanding of…Read more
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50Time to stop trying to provide an account of timePhilosophy 78 (3): 397-408. 2003.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…Read more
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20The enchantment of words: Wittgenstein's tractatus logico-philosophicus Denis McManus oxford: Clarendon 2006; pp. XVI + 268Philosophy 82 (4): 657-661. 2007.
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Religion as Sedition: On Liberalism’s Intolerance of Real ReligionArs Disputandi 11. 2011.‘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 r…Read more
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45The real philosophical discovery': A reply to Jolley 's 'Philosophical Investigations 133: Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy?Philosophical Investigations 18 (4): 362-369. 1995.
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |