Victor J. Krebs

McLuhan’s _The Medium Is the Message_ announced a new task for philosophers: gauging the manner and extent to which technological changes transform our basic _faculties of (collective) experience_ (rational thinking, feeling, intuiting, empathizing, imagining). The more traditionally repressed of these basic capacities in philosophical discourse are nevertheless the ones most directly affected by newly emerging media. After 2500 years of exploring reason in the West, it may be time for a deeper exploration into the spontaneous _vitality_,“the submerged iceberg beyond the mere tip that is reason,” as Ortega y Gasset argues. Ethical questions are not anymore about what is right or good but about the need to transform and overcome our resistance to finitude and mortality by learning to see the concrete circumstances of our words, actions, and feelings as conditions for things’ standing in the world.

We present here excerpts from seminars, interviews, and conversations with Stanley Cavell during the time of his visit to Caracas in 1998, collectively known as the ‘Caracas Seminar’. This material comprises Cavell’s responses to questions raised at the seminar, extracts from an interview with Maria Elena Ramos and Victor Krebs, and a subsequent letter they received from Cavell in response to further questions. Krebs’ introduction to the collection sets the scene for Cavell’s visit and sketches some reasons for the relevance of Cavell’s philosophy to Latin America and the nature of its reception there.

This article examines Armando Robles Godoy’s 1969 Peruvian film La muralla verde (The Green Wall) through the philosophical lens of Stanley Cavell, particularly his concepts of scepticism, acknowledgement, and moral perfectionism. The film’s depiction of a family seeking renewal in the jungle, only to be devastated by tragedy, stages an encounter with the limits of human mastery over nature, the fragility of social bonds, and the inevitability of grief. Rather than offering nostalgia for a lost harmony or a straightforward political denunciation, The Green Wall invites a sustained engagement with the ethical demands of acknowledgement—of others, of the environment, and of the limits of one’s own knowledge. Read against the background of Latin America’s colonial legacy, Cavell’s Emersonian call to the ordinary provides a counterpoint to the region’s inherited scepticism and its persistent ‘cultural melancholy’, marked by the tension between cosmopolitan ideals and autochthonous realities. In this light, Robles Godoy’s film can be seen not only as a reflection of Perú’s fractured history but also as an instance of cinema’s philosophical power: its capacity to reawaken democratic hope and ecological awareness, and to enact what Cavell describes as an ‘education for grown-ups’—a conversion grounded in mourning, finitude, and the possibilities of moral responsiveness.

Our understanding of the face is deeply entrenched in ocular-centrism and anthropocentric narcissism, limiting the recognition of faceness to humans alone. This restricted perspective undermines our ethical engagement with the non-human world and sustains an illusion of stability and control, blinding us to our existential fragility and diminishing our ability to address the profound challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on speculative realism, this essay seeks to transcend these limitations by reimagining the concept of the face as a dynamic, relational phenomenon. By broadening our discernment of faceness beyond the human, we aim to foster a more attuned and ethically responsive orientation toward the interconnected realities of our era.

This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon --at the same time both a remedy and a poison-- and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book's postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic. Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.

This article explores the fate in Wittgenstein's mature work, of the issue of the unsayable, heart of the Tractatus project. According to the traditional interpretation of his work, he left behind that concern as a product of his early mistakes, later refuted in the Investigations. This article attempts to show that, in a certain sense, it is obvious that the problem of ineffability is still behind all his efforts. That it is constitutive not only of Wittgenstein's conception of language, but is also the point of what he calls the vision of aspects, on which his latest writings focus.

I show that the latter Wittgenstein's treatment of language and the mind results in a conception of the human subject that goes against the exclusive emphasis on the cognitive that characterizes our modern conception of knowledge and the self. For Wittgenstein, our identification with the cognitive ego is tantamount to a blindness to our own nature — blindness that is entrenched in our present culture. The task of philosophy is thus transformed into a form of cultural therapy that seeks to awaken in us a sensitivity to different modes of awareness than the merely intellectual. Its substance of reflection becomes not only the field of conscious rational thought, but the tension in our nature between reason and vital feeling, that is, between culture and life.

I intend to motivate discussion on the ways of thought in art and philosophy in terms of a problem characteristic of contemporary culture diagnosed by Plato as the "loss of memory." He referred to the impoverishment of knowledge caused by an exclusive and excessive interest in information as well as by the loss of value in reflection. I examine the problem more closely by referring to a passage in the Phaedrus that shows what Plato meant by "a forgetfulness of the soul" is tantamount to the disconnection of intellectual knowledge from emotion and the body. I reflect on the relation between art and philosophy as well as on the character of philosophical thought as regards the need to "cultivate memory" in our time.

“Wittgenstein’s Ghosts. Between Deleuze and Derrida”. Both Derrida and Deleuze agree that with the advent of the moving image and the art of film, we need to articulate a new ontology or –in Wittgenstein’s terms–, a new grammar. Derrida suggests this much when he reflects on what he calls the return of ghosts, which he attributes to the advent of film and the communications media; Deleuze does the same in his studies of film, and in particular in what he calls the time-image. They both carve a grammatical space where room is opened for us to talk about an experience that fuses, paradoxically, problematically, the real and the virtual. Wittgenstein is tracing this grammar in his discussions on inner experience and in his observations about the phenomenon of aspect-seeing. Articulating a new grammar requires also a new way of seeing and this new seeing is the purpose of his methods; “clairvoyant” methods we can call them, following Deleuze’s term for what the time image propitiates in the viewer, in that they allow us to see beyond things to their aspects, beyond substances to processes; in other words, they train us to think in moving time. Philosophy is thus always a work of mourning and a commerce with ghosts. What this means is that Wittgenstein is –as Derrida and Deleuze are too–, what we might call a philosopher of becoming.

El Naturalismo Trascendental del Ultimo Wittgenstein The present article considers an internal tension in Wittgenstein's late philosophy. In what I call his 'naturalism', Wittgenstein circumscribes philosophical reflection to natural objects, to «making natural history». In his 'transcendentalism' he focuses on the «possibility of phenomena» and distinguishes philosophical method from the method of the natural sciences. I show that his 'transcendentalism' is present in his discussion of rules and prívate language, arguing for an interpretation in terms of a kantian type of transcendental synthesis. But far from contradicting his 'naturalism', both tendencies are inseparable and essential to the main purpose of his Philosophical Investigations.

Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. These essays show that aspect-seeing was not simply one more topic of investigation in Wittgenstein’s later writings, but, rather, that it was a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy’s attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. Arranged in sections that highlight the pertinence of the aspect-seeing remarks to aesthetic and moral perception, self-knowledge, mind and consciousness, linguistic agreement, philosophical therapy, and “seeing connections,” the sixteen essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, demonstrate the unity of not only Philosophical Investigations but also Wittgenstein’s later thought as a whole. They open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human consciousness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena and concepts surrounding aspect-seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy. The volume includes a concordance for the unnumbered remarks in the various editions of Philosophical Investigations, including the latest (4th) edition. (The front matter is posted here. The introduction - "Seeing Aspects in Wittgenstein" - appears below under "Published articles.")

Presentación del dossier, titulado “Kierkegaard”, que recoge los trabajos, simposios e intervenciones que formaron parte del homenaje organizado por el Centro de Estudios Filosóficos de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú titulado “200 años después: Søren Kierkegaard, un romántico imposible”. Con esta iniciativa, el Centro se unió a las múltiples celebraciones realizadas en Hispanoamérica en torno a la figura del pensador danés, resaltando su vigencia, influencia y la riqueza de su pensamiento en el contexto contemporáneo.

The article critically examines the interplay between political theory and multiculturalism, questioning liberal assumptions about cultural neutrality. It argues that liberal democracies often fail to accommodate cultural diversity adequately and that political philosophy must address structural inequalities embedded within cultural recognition. Drawing on case studies and normative analysis, the author proposes a framework that better aligns liberal principles with the demands of justice in multicultural societies.

The Digital Revolution is transforming the way in which we interact with one another and relate to experience. The superabundance and superfluity of the virtual world, the fleeting moment and instantaneous pleasure it provides, begin to prevail as a cultural value and determine an attitude of detachment and indifference that extends to all aspects of our life. For Søren Kierkegaard this is a “demoniacal temptation” that leads to a life devoid of spiritual depth. In the midst of the undeniable bounties of technology, reflection on this paradoxical nature of the technological in our lives becomes an urgent task.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy is usually characterized as pragmatist, his account of linguistic meaning as conventionalist, and his methodology as naturalistic. Wittgenstein is said to have renounced in the later work his early concern with the Unsayable, and to have relocated philosophy within the realm of discourse. I argue against that picture of Wittgenstein's later philosophy in this dissertation. ;The central insight of Wittgenstein's discussion of rules and language in the Investigations is that meaning is not the result of a cognitive achievement, but that it is grounded in precognitive natural reactions common to all human beings. I show that the appeal to the precognitive is transcendental, for it involves reference to a synthesis that is prior to discursive articulation and presupposed as a necessary condition of meaning. ;I argue against the conventionalist reading of Wittgenstein that the transcendental appeal to precognitive reactions in the discussion of rules is distinct from the appeal to a social context in the Private Language Argument, and that the relation between those two discussions is analogous to that between Kant's Transcendental Deduction and the Refutation of Idealism. ;The parallel with Kant helps to show how the failure to distinguish the empirical and transcendental levels in Wittgenstein's discussion leads to the conventionalist readings of his account of language . . It also shows that Wittgenstein is not subject to the charge of relativism commonly levelled against him . ;The distinction between empirical and transcendental levels, as it appears in the pivotal notion of Form of Life, reveals that Wittgenstein's methodology is not naturalistic but instead depends on a non-discursive mode of awareness. . I argue on this basis that Wittgenstein is closer to intuitive-realists than to pragmatists . ;Wittgenstein's Transcendentalism thus shows a deep continuity between the motivations behind his early and his later thought. In fact, the Unsayable plays a central role in the later work, for it is through non-discursive insight into the Unsayable that philosophy fulfills the therapeutic task that Wittgenstein assigns to it in the Investigations

Este artículo desarrolla la idea que subyace a la obra filosófica de Wittgenstein, por lo menos desde las Investigaciones, del lenguaje como “algo animal” y de nuestras palabras como principalmente expresivas. A partir de esta idea, se propone empezar a mostrar cómo los problemas filosóficos son para él, en última instancia, producto de una desconexión de la dimensión sensible de la cual derivan su sentido nuestras palabras. Se sugiere que el propósito de Wittgenstein es, por lo tanto, propiciar una reconexión del lenguaje con el deseo, lo cual lleva a cabo ejemplificando en sus textos –y así obligándonos como lectores a asumir– una relación distinta con las palabras de aquella que define el pensamiento filosófico convencional. De esta manera, reivindica para la reflexión filosófica modos de saber y de conciencia radicalmente opuestos al tipo de conocimiento científico con el que aún se identifica la disciplina.

“¿Principio de caridad o hybris?” La intuición de Wittgenstein, de que el significado lingüístico se constituye dentro de la trama de vida pareciera hacer posible un acercamiento entre la tradición hermenéutica continental y la filosofía analítica del lenguaje. En el presente artículo se sostiene que esta intuición debe ir acompañada de una revisión de la concepción del sujeto implícita en el “principio de caridad” de Donald Davidson. Sin esa reconcepción, el principio de caridad se convierte en una forma encubierta de imperialismo conceptual incompatible con el espíritu de la hermenéutica continental. Se concluye el artículo con algunas observaciones sobre el relativismo a la luz de las consideraciones anteriores.

Prestándole especial atención a sus reflexiones en tomo a la estética, en este artículo se sostiene que Wittgenstein, en su última obra, lejos de rechazar la cuestión de lo trascendente de su discurso filosólico como usualmente se lo lee, intenta más bien recuperar y darle un nuevo sentido a esa problemática, respondiendo así a una necesidad real de la filosofía que se sigue definiendo, aún en nuestro siglo, por criterios de conocimiento que no le pertenecen. En particular, se arguye que el recurso wittgensteiniano a la invención de "casos intermedios" e "historias naturales" ficticias logra este objetivo al activar mediante su introducción de la imaginación modos diferentes de conciencia, que permiten reubicar lo trascendente en el pensar filosófico sin necesidad de recurrir a un ámbito sobrenatural ni a un conocimiento místico.