Rupert Read

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined.

A key development in Wittgenstein Studies over recent years has been the advancement of a resolutely therapeutic reading of the Tractatus. Rupert Read offers the first extended application of this reading of Wittgenstein, encompassing Wittgenstein's later work too, to examine the implications of Wittgenstein's work as a whole upon the domains especially of literature, psychopathology, and time. Read begins by applying Wittgenstein's remarks on meaning to language, examining the consequences our conception of philosophy has for the ways in which we talk about meaning. He goes on to engage with literary texts as Wittgensteinian, where 'Wittgensteinian' does not mean expressive of a Wittgenstein philosophy, but involves the literature in question remaining enigmatic, and doing philosophical work of its own. He considers Faulkner's work as productive too of a broadly Wittgensteinian philosophy of psychopathology. Read then turns to philosophical accounts of time, finding a link between the division of time into discrete moments and solipsism of the present moment as depicted in philosophy on the one hand and psychopathological states on the other.

Philosophy for Life is a bold call for the practice of philosophy in our everyday lives. Philosopher and writer Rupert Read explores a series of important and often provocative contemporary political and cultural issues from a philosophical perspective, arguing that philosophy is not a body of doctrine, but a practice, a vantage point from which life should be analysed and, more importantly, acted upon. Philosophy for Life is a personal journey that explores four key areas of society today: Politics, Religion, Art, and the Environment. Taking tangible examples from modern politics, from climate change to the war on terror, and culture, from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Read shows that philosophy is already an active part of today's world. This captivating and timely book offers a philosophical response to some of the key questions facing today's society and encourages us to use philosophy as a kind of therapy. Philosophy for Life shows that we can improve our perspective on the world and our place in it by doing philosophy everyday.

A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can come together.

Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of ‘new paradigm’ and ‘scientific revolution’ make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of the history of science, which often assist the understanding of his more abstract philosophical work. These historical studies provide vital insight into what Kuhn was actually trying to achieve in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: an endeavour far less extreme than either his ‘foes’ or his ‘fans’ claim. In the book's second half, Sharrock and Read provide excellent explications, defences and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn's central concept of ‘incommensurability’, and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn's insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. This is the first comprehensive introduction to the work of Kuhn and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, theory of science, management science and anthropology.

Examining the famous section 133 of the Philosophical Investigations, I seek to elucidate Wittgenstein’s extraordinary writing-stratagem. His writing has often been criticised as ‘obscure’—this evinces a fundamental failure to understand the way Wittgenstein writes, especially in those works where he laboured for years over how to present them. In his two masterworks, Wittgenstein operates as, in broadly Modernist terms, as an unreliable narrator. Wittgenstein seems to offer a theory to end all philosophical theories, in his early work. In his later work, he seems to offer a discovery to end all philosophical discoveries. Both appearances are subtly, deliberately, seriously delusive. And necessarily so: any stratagem that does not involve such ‘indirection’ will tend to fall back into the very thing it criticises. I examine the well-known invocation of therapies and the discussion of ‘the real discovery’—the one that allegedly enables one to stop philosophising, in §133. The translation of 133 is pondered, and a reading proposed wherein this passage certainly does not amount to any crude ‘end of philosophy’ thesis, but is rather profoundly manifestative of the kind of aspect to Wittgenstein’s writing that Cavell has taught: i.e. 133 too turns out not to be a ‘statement’ of Wittgenstein’s ‘position’, but a set of temptations that need careful work by one to avoid entrapment by.

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein 'school', of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130-3, 149-151, 186, 198-201, 217, and 284-6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others. Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation.

Inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein and his idea that the purpose of real philosophical thinking is not to discover something new, but to show in a strikingly different light what is already there, this book provides philosophical readings of a number of ‘arthouse’ and Hollywood films. Each chapter contains a discussion of two films—one explored in greater detail and the other analyzed as a minor key which reveals the possibility for the book's ideas to be applied across different films, registers, and genres. The readings are not only interpretive, but they offer a way of thinking and feeling about, with, and through films which is genuinely transformative. Rupert Read’s main contention is that certain films can bring about a change in how we see the world. He advocates an ecological approach to film-philosophy analysis, arguing that film can re-shape the viewer’s relationship to the environment and other living beings. The transformative 'wake-up call' of these films is enlightenment in its true sense. The result is a book that ambitiously aims to change, though film, how we think of ourselves and our place in the world, at a time when such change is more needed than ever before.

For decades scholars thought they knew Hume's position on the existence of causes and objects he was a sceptic. However, this received view has been thrown into question by the `new readings of Hume as a sceptical realist. For philosophers, students of philosophy and others interested in theories of causation and their history, The New Hume Debate is the first book to fully document the most influential contemporary readings of Hume's work. Throughout, the volume brings the debate beyond textual issues in Hume to contemporary philosophical issues concerning causation and knowledge of the external world and issues in the history of philosophy, offering the reader a model for scholarly debate. This revised paperback edition includes three new chapters by Janet Broughton, Peter Kail and Peter Millican.  Contributors: Kenneth A. Richman, Barry Stroud, Galen Strawson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John P. Wright, Simon Blackburn, Edward Craig, Martin Bell, Daniel Flage, Anne Jaap Jacobson, Rupert Read, Janet Broughton, Peter Millican, Peter Kail

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. Nickles’ s collection by contrast is a competent, useful, and workmanlike performance, although the author argues that the editor’s focus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, in that these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), who was on balance no apostle of cognitive science either

The existence of other people addresses us; their existence is a fundamentally second-person matter. This chapter argues that staying too much in the would-be-utterly spectatorial third person, or stuck within the first person, has been philosophy’s bane. Such ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, far from being opposites, are but two sides of the same coin. The alternative is the living world of the second person: being involved with others. I connect my illustration and elicitation of this ethics to Løgstrup and to Levinas. And I triangulate my relational ethic with an apparent problem of ‘individualism’ in the second-person perspective as present in the work of Nykänen and Backström.

In the main bulk of this chapter, I offer a Wittgensteinian take on infinity and deduce from this some Wittgensteinian criticisms of Chomsky on ‘creativity’, treating this as one among many examples of how metaphors, following the understanding of Lakoff and Johnson, following Wittgenstein, can delude one into metaphysics. As per my title, ‘metaphysics’ turns out to be, really, nothing other than metaphorics in disguise. Our aim in philosophy, then, is to turn latent metaphors into patent metaphors. When we do this, the charm of metaphysics evaporates. Or again, its charm, if still felt, is properly contextualised: ‘metaphysics’ becomes at best a kind of accidental or un-self-aware poetry, rather than something like a super- or supra-science.

Finlayson argues that ‘post-truth’ is nothing new. In this response, I motivate a more modest position: that it is something new, to some extent, albeit neither radically new nor brand new. I motivate this position by examining the case of climate-change-denial, called by some post-truth before 'post-truth'. I examine here the (over-determined) nature of climate-denial. What precisely are its attractions?; How do they manage to outweigh its glaring, potentially-catastrophic downsides? I argue that the most crucial of all attractions of climate-denial is that it involves the denier in a kind of fantasised power over reality itself: namely, over the nature of our planetary system, and thus of life itself. Climate-denial pretends to give the denier a power greater than that of nature, including in nature's 'rebellion' against humanity, what James Lovelock calls Gaia's incipient and coming 'fever'. Climate-denial seems to give the denier freedom from truth itself, in the case of the most consequential truth at present bearing down upon humanity. The most crucial of all the attractions of climate-denial is then that it provides would-be libertarians an ultimate freedom. They reject the reality of human-triggered climate-change, in the end, because they are unwilling to be ‘bound’ by anything, not even truth itself. Climate-denial has been around for a while, but not for more than 30-35 years or so. I thus suggest that Finlayson is right to be sceptical of the claim that post-truth is radically new and extremely recent, but I suggest that it is relativelynew and has been with us for only about a generation or at most two. Keywords: climate-change, climate-denial, libertarianism, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.

In this article, we analyse one of the most famous recent thought‐experiments in philosophy, namely Donald Davidson's Swampman. Engaging recent commentators on Davidson's Swampman as well as analysing the spatio‐temporal conditions of the thought‐experiment, we will show how the ‘experiment’ inevitably fails. For it doesn't take seriously some of its own defining characteristics: crucially, Swampman's creation of a sudden in a place distinct from Davidson's. Instead of denigrating philosophical thought‐experiments per se, our analysis points towards considering thought‐experiments in a different sense: imaginary scenarios helpfully self‐deconstructing rather than constituting substantive philosophical resources.

Gordon Baker in his last decade published a series of papers (now collected inBaker 2004), which are revolutionary in their proposals for understanding of later Wittgenstein. Taking our lead from the first of those papers, on “perspicuous presentations,” we offer new criticisms of ‘elucidatory’ readers of later Wittgenstein, such as Peter Hacker: we argue that their readings fail to connect with the radically therapeutic intent of the ‘perspicuous presentation’ concept, as an achievement‐term, rather than a kind of ‘objective’ mapping of a ‘conceptual landscape.’Baker's Wittgenstein, far from being a ‘language policeman’ of the kind that often fails to influence mainstream philosophy, offers an alternative to the latent scientism of Wittgenstein's influential ‘elucidatory’ readers.

Distributive justice relies on metaphors about spatial distribution. Modelling cross-temporal relations on cross-spatial relations in this way obscures how earlier groups become the later ones. Procedural justice metaphors rely on metaphors of contract and thereby on impartial reasoning. Their dominance is already problematic in the case of contemporary relations, but is even more so in the case of relations across time, where the conditions for later parties are controlled and created by earlier ones. Future generations should not be thought of as a distinct group living at a different temporal “location,” but as who we will become. Thus, the frame of “justice” is much less appropriate for our relations to them than the frame of “care”.

This provocative, engaging and important book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Peter Winch's seminal The Idea of a Social Science. The authors – the first two philosophers, the third a sociologist – have worked together in various permutations before. No-one familiar with their previous publications will be surprised that the dominant voice throughout is Wittgenstein's – that is, Wittgenstein as read ‘resolutely’ by ‘new Wittgensteinians’. They have three principal aims: first, to read Winch's own work in an equally ‘resolute’ way; hence to read ISS as prophylactic and therapeutic in intention, and not as heralding a wonderful or not-so-wonderful new social theory; secondly, to defend Winch against certain persistent charges; and thirdly, to persuade social theorists and philosophers of ‘social science’ that Winch's therapeutic lessons have not yet been assimilated, with the possible exception of a handful of ethnographers and ethnomethodologists.Following a substantial introductory section, Chapters 1 and 2 – respectively, entitled ‘Beyond pluralism, monism, relativism, realism etc.: reassessing Peter Winch’ and ‘Winch and linguistic idealism’ – argue that Winch cannot be seen as an advocate of linguistic idealism or “any of the other ‘isms’ that have been reactively bandied about …