Manuela Teles

Supported by John McDowell’s conceptualism, Sonia Sedivy develops her conceptual realism as a response to a perplexity she identifies in Arthur C. Danto’s views on the theoretical and historical nature of artworks and their aesthetic properties. Namely, that at least some of these objects and properties are not visible. Considering the connection between the ques- tion on the visibility of artworks and their aesthetic properties and the broader issue of aesthetic realism, this paper challenges the assumption that representationalism is the only possible application of the apparatus from philosophy of perception to philosophical aesthetics. Drawing on Charles Travis’s anti-representationalism and Michael Martin’s non- representationalist account of looks, the paper proposes an alternative account of the historical and visible character of at least some aesthetic properties of artworks, one that does not rely on the assumption that they involve representational content.

Tracing what I call the atmospheric metaphor in Wittgenstein’s Investigations and the Blue Book, this paper argues that, despite apparent convergence on the power of language over thought as a source of misunderstandings and illusions, Frege and Wittgenstein diverge on the nature of this relation, its implications for philosophy, and what it entails for realism. The paper shows that the atmospheric metaphor brings out assumptions of a familiar picture of language—and of logic—Wittgenstein rejects and associates with Frege and the “logicians,” among whom he includes himself as “the author of the Tractatus.” After emphasising that, whereas for Frege the task of philosophy is to free thoughts from ordinary language through crystalline logical notation, for the later Wittgenstein it is to make thoughts intelligible through grammatical clarification, the paper indicates how this shift dissolves the apparent philosophical need to choose between “pure” realism and solipsism.

This paper examines a widely held assumption in contemporary discussions of hermeneutical injustice: that such injustices harm people as knowers by depriving them of the conceptual and linguistic resources needed to render their social experiences intelligible. On what I call the conceptual-deficit model, hermeneutical injustice is typically understood to involve a lack of intelligibility that can be addressed through conceptual or linguistic supplementation or amelioration. I challenge the conceptual-deficit model by identifying two tensions within it. The first is an internal tension arising from the paradigmatic case of Carmita Wood in the literature on hermeneutical injustice. The second tension is external and emerges from Cora Diamond’s Wittgensteinian account of difficulties of reality. Taken together, these two tensions call into question the idea that the distinctive wrong of hermeneutical injustice lies in a lack of intelligibility that can be repaired through conceptual and linguistic work.

To begin, the points of departure. First, the theoretical. As a motivation for her inquiry, Sally Haslanger (2000b) uses an epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir to ask: what is a woman? According to this epigraph, this is a question that we have to face if we admit that there are women. Beauvoir (1987 [1949]) begins the original text by noting how irritating the theme of “the woman” is, especially if we take into account the confusions and disagreements about what it means to be a woman. In this initial part of her text, Beauvoir emphasizes how complicated the question of what it means to be a woman is. Implicitly appealing to common sense and everyday language, Beauvoir notes how problematic it is, on the one hand, to suggest that (in the mid-twentieth century) there are no longer women and, on the other, to demand of women (also in the mid-twentieth century) that they “be women, remain women, become women” (

I address some issues on the concept woman that might illuminate both feminist thought and practice, and the interpretation of Wittgenstein. Using Sonia Sedivy’s New Wittgensteinian approach to accuse Neo-Wittgensteinians and their critics of still being essentialists about the concept art, I point out that Cressida Heyes’ Wittgensteinian anti-anti-essentialism concerning the concept woman is subject to the same accusation. Heyes suggests that, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein provides feminist philosophers with a kind of anti-anti-essentialism based on which a dilemma concerning the concept woman can be dismissed. She grounds her anti-anti-essentialism in her reading of Philosophical Investigations as offering feminist philosophers the idea that we can draw the boundaries of the concept woman according to our moral and political purposes. My goal is to call this grounding into question considering the New Wittgensteinian reading, such as Sedivy’s. I suggest that Heyes’ proposal falls prey of the essentialist illusion it tries to escape. I end by enquiring whether this same criticism can be applied to current ameliorative projects concerning the concept woman within so-called conceptual ethics or engineering.

Em 1882, Frege escreveu a Anton Marty que o seu projeto era provar que as leis fundamentais da aritmética são analíticas no sentido de Kant. A resposta a esta carta foi assinada por Carl Stumpf, que aconselhou Frege a escrever sobre as suas motivações para a criação da linguagem formal que apresentou na sua Begriffsschrift, escrita três anos antes. Os Grundlagen der Arithmetik, que Frege publicou dois anos depois, podem ser vistos como o seu resultado por seguir o conselho de Stumpf. Aí, Frege menciona Kant novamente, tanto enquanto motivação para o seu programa logicista como enquanto um seu opositor. Neste artigo, pretendo compreender esta influência de dois lados de Kant nos propósitos de Frege. Para isso, apresento e discuto excertos dos Grundlagen onde Frege fala sobre Kant. Mostro que, depois de rejeitar a proposta de Kant de que juízos numéricos são sintéticos a priori, Frege tem uma visão da definição de Kant de analítico de acordo com a qual é possível conhecer objetos que não são percetíveis pelos sentidos ou pela intuição apenas pela razão. É esta visão que está na base da motivação de Frege para o seu programa logicista. De acordo com o programa logicista de Frege, os números são objetos conhecidos exclusivamente pelas suas propriedades, sem ligação com qualquer representação. A visão de Frege permite-nos pensar que Kant poderia ter chegado a este resultado com a sua noção de analítico não fosse o seu compromisso com a noção de conceitos enquanto representações que são os blocos de construção dos pensamentos. Em vez disso, Frege propõe que novos conceitos podem ser descobertos na decomposição de pensamentos e que esta descoberta é uma tarefa para a lógica em exclusivo. Sendo uma tarefa da lógica em exclusivo é precisamente o sentido de analítico de Kant. O que a visão de Frege acrescenta ao analítico de Kant é, então, que pode ser uma fonte de conhecimento.