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107Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philos…Read more
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10Wittgenstein on Knowledge and CertaintyIn Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.Wittgenstein takes Moore to task for confusing knowledge with the non‐epistemic brand of conviction that logically underlies it, and he drives a categorial wedge between them: 'knowledge and certainty belong to different categories'. However basic knowledge is understood, it must be capable of standing in logical relations to whatever judgements rest on it. For example, it must be capable of being consistent or inconsistent with them. But this means that even basic knowledge must involve proposi…Read more
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5Coming to Language: Wittgenstein’s Social ‘Theory’ of Language AcquisitionIn Volker Munz (ed.), Essays on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, De Gruyter. pp. 291-314. 2010.
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16Wittgenstein 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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63Beyond H acker's W ittgenstein: Discussion of HACKER, P eter (2012) “ W ittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism” Philosophical Investigations 35:1, J anuary 2012, 1–17 (review)Philosophical Investigations 36 (4): 355-380. 2013.In “Wittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism,” Peter Hacker addresses what he takes to be misconceptions of Wittgenstein's philosophy with respect to (1) the periodisation of his thought and to what should properly be counted as part of his work; (2) his conception of grammar since the Big Typescript (1929–33); and (3) his conception of philosophy as grammatical investigation. I argue that Hacker's restrictive conception of what ought to be considered part of Wittgenstein's philosophy and h…Read more
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10Certainty in action: Wittgenstein on language, mind and epistemologyBloomsbury Academic. 2021.Meaning, believing, thinking, understanding, reasoning, calculating, learning, remembering, intending, expecting, loving, longing: these experiences are, according to Wittgenstein, embodied actions. In Certainty in Action, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock argues that there is hardly anything traditionally thought to be a mental process or state, that, in fact, Ludwig Wittgenstein has not shown to be primarily embodied or enacted. The book traces the radical, diverse and recurrent importance of action and…Read more
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44Extending Hinge Epistemology (edited book)Anthem Press. 2022.Hinge Epistemology is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting areas of epistemology and Wittgenstein studies. In connecting these two fields it brings a revived energy to both, opening them up to fresh developments. The essays in this volume extend the subject in terms of both depth and breadth. They present new voices and challenges within hinge epistemology. They explore new applications and directions of hinge epistemology, particularly as it relates to the philosophy of mind, society, ethi…Read more
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8From deed to word: gapless and kink-free enactivism: In memoriam John V. Canfield (1934–2017)Synthese 198 (Suppl 1): 405-425. 2019.In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT 2017), Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are them…Read more
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38Restoring CertaintyInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-16. forthcoming.This paper addresses the objections that Genia Schönbaumsfeld makes in The Illusion of Doubt to my view of hinge certainty as a ‘certainty’, and as nonepistemic, nonpropositional and animal. It also addresses her dissatisfaction with Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘the groundlessness of our believing’.
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15Wittgenstein’s Grammar: Through Thick and ThinIn A. C. Grayling, Shyam Wuppuluri, Christopher Norris, Nikolay Milkov, Oskari Kuusela, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Beth Savickey, Jonathan Beale, Duncan Pritchard, Annalisa Coliva, Jakub Mácha, David R. Cerbone, Paul Horwich, Michael Nedo, Gregory Landini, Pascal Zambito, Yoshihiro Maruyama, Chon Tejedor, Susan G. Sterrett, Carlo Penco, Susan Edwards-Mckie, Lars Hertzberg, Edward Witherspoon, Michel ter Hark, Paul F. Snowdon, Rupert Read, Nana Last, Ilse Somavilla & Freeman Dyson (eds.), Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 39-54. 2019.It may be said that the single track of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar—its nature and its limits. This paper will trace Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. It will distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge’ certainties of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of Last Writings attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work o…Read more
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12Wittgenstein’s Grammar: Through Thick and ThinIn Shyam Wuppuluri & Newton da Costa (eds.), Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 39-54. 2019.It may be said that the single track of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar—its nature and its limits. This paper will trace Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. It will distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge’ certainties of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of Last Writings attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work o…Read more
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24Wittgenstein: No Linguistic IdealistIn Sebastian Sunday Grève & Jakub Mácha (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 117-138. 2016.Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein’s leitmotif was action. Wittgenstein saw action (or behaviour) as the root, manifestation and transmitter of meaning. He repeatedly demonstrated the regress manifest in seeing the proposition, or any kind of representation, as a necessary precursor to thought and action, or at least he pointed out the superfluity of such shadowy inner precursors when instinct and practices can easily be seen to be at the base of all our thought: ‘In philosophy one is in constant dang…Read more
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25D. H. Lawrence and the Truth of LiteraturePhilosophy and Literature 43 (2): 271-286. 2019.D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that “art-speech is the only truth.” If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by “truth.” Here is the passage in which this expression occurs:Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.... Two blankly o…Read more
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10A certeza fulcral de WittgensteinDissertatio 41 (S1): 3-30. 2015.O desenvolvimento do presente texto parte do pressuposto inicial segundo o qual grande parte do Da Certeza é dedicada a expor a distinção entre ‘certeza’ e ‘conhecimento’. Nossas certezas básicas – ou ‘fulcrais’ ou, ainda, ‘dobradiças’ [hinges] – formam a nossa imagem de mundo e sustentam o nosso conhecimento, não sendo elas mesmas, porém, de natureza epistêmica. As deliberações de Wittgenstein levamno a compreender que as nossas certezas básicas compartilham as seguintes características conceit…Read more
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41From deed to word: gapless and kink-free enactivism: In memoriam John V. Canfield (1934–2017)Synthese 198 (Suppl 1): 405-425. 2019.In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT 2017), Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are them…Read more
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40Fighting Relativism: Wittgenstein and KuhnIn Katharina Neges, Josef Mitterer, Sebastian Kletzl & Christian Kanzian (eds.), Realism - Relativism - Constructivism: Proceedings of the 38th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, De Gruyter. pp. 215-232. 2017.
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39Review 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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106Cora 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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115Words 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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63Perspicuous 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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5PrefaceIn 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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