Lawrence Marcelle

ABSTRACT The fact of pluralism has set a number of practical and theoretical problems for political theorists. One of the most serious difficulties is the question of the criteria for judgment. What critical standards are available when encountering a society's practices that are different from one's own? One strategy for dealing with this is to separate out questions of ethics from questions of morality. We argue that this is a particularly unfruitful conceptual strategy. Rather our position is that the concept of real interests is already operant within the practices of judgment that constitute a community, or a form of life. Our strategy is to first explore the possibility of immanent normative critique of interests expressed in forms of life using Wittgenstein and Dewey in light of Rahel Jaeggi's Critique of Forms of Life. Properly understanding how these standards of immanent critique work dissolves the problem of how to apply these to external contexts. While Jaeggi's is an excellent contribution to the discourse on critique and justification, we find that there are commitments in her idea of “immanent critique” that require reformulation with respect to the question of real interests.

John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein offer devastating critiques of the dominant model of human action that each inherited in their own time. Dewey, very early in his philosophical career, ostensibly put the stimulus–response mechanical understanding of action to rest with his “reflex-arc” concept article. Wittgenstein famously redescribed action as moves within language games that interconnect to constitute an interpretively open-ended form of life. In each case, these fundamental insights serve as heuristics, guiding our intellectual activity with regard to understanding our practices, and as reminders in approaching problems. Several scholars have interpreted Dewey and Wittgenstein as allies in a grand project of...

This dissertation offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. My interpretation follows from that proposed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. They read the Tractatus in light of Wittgenstein's claim at 6.54, that his propositions are mere nonsense. I take their central claim to be that what appears to be the doctrines of the Tractatus are to be eventually recognized as logically indistinguishable from mere gibberish. Since the value of the work cannot consist in the doctrine taught to its readers , the value of the work requires an alternative account. The value of the Tractatus is that it elicits the reader's desire for philosophical doctrines, and then exposes those desires as incoherent, by drawing attention to moments within the text when they can recognize, and so acknowledge, that they have taken in nonsense for sense. ;I claim that this reading lets us interpret the Tractatus as a book which seeks to teach its readers, not philosophical knowledge, but about their desire for such knowledge. Specifically, it aims to teach them that they are not clear about what, if anything, they want when they profess to want philosophical knowledge. ;I explain that the picture of philosophical knowledge offered in the Tractatus demonstrates how its readers are unclear about their relation to knowledge they can and do have ---they both value this knowledge and are also profoundly dissatisfied with the inability of scientific knowledge to answer their philosophical questions. Insofar as the dissatisfaction with knowledge is misunderstood, and hence, not properly acknowledged, it generates the expectation that there must be a deeper, more profound type of knowledge. Relying on Diamond/Conant, I show how the Tractatus brings its readers to an understanding, not only that, but why it is that, they are unclear about their relationship to knowledge. This kind of understanding is called self-knowledge. ;The Tractatus can then be read as a book which disguises what it thinks its readers need, but don't want , as what it thinks its readers imagine they need