Category Archives: Books

Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy–New Book by Paul Horwich

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Not long ago I linked to Paul Horwich’s ”Was Wittgenstein Right?” in The Stone. His new book, out this year from Oxford UP, fully develops ideas sketched there.  (Many thanks to Ben Gibran for the heads up!) Please see below for the Publisher’s Description and Table of Contents. A portion of the text is available through Google Books here.

9780199588879

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION

Paul Horwich develops an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later writings that differs in substantial respects from what can already be found in the literature. He argues that it is Wittgenstein’s radically anti-theoretical metaphilosophy–and not (as assumed by most other commentators) his identification of the meaning of a word with its use–that lies at the foundation of his discussions of specific issues concerning language, the mind, mathematics, knowledge, art, and religion. Thus Horwich’s first aim is to give a clear account of Wittgenstein’s hyper-deflationist view of what philosophy is, how it should be conducted, and what it might achieve. His second aim is to defend this view against a variety of objections: that is, to display its virtues, not merely as an accurate reading of Wittgenstein, but as the correct conception of philosophy itself. And the third aim is to examine the application of this view to a variety of topics–but primarily to language and to experience. A further distinctive feature of this approach is its presupposition that Wittgenstein’s ideas may be formulated with precision and that solid arguments may be found on their behalf. This pair of guiding assumptions–the centrality of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and its susceptibility to rigorous articulation and rational support–are admittedly controversial but are vindicated, not just textually, but by the power and plausibility of the philosophy that results from them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
1. Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy
2. A Critique of Theoretical Philosophy
3. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
4. Meaning
5. Kripke’s Wittgenstein
6. The ‘Mystery’ of Consciousness
Bibliography
Index

Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism — New Book by Edward T. Duffy

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Edward T. Duffy, Emeritus Professor of English at Marquette University, has a new book out from Bloomsbury. Read on for a brief description and table of contents.

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About Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism

Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism serves as both introduction to Cavell for Romanticists, and to the larger question of what philosophy means for the reading of literature, as well as to the importance and relevance of Romantic literature to Cavell’s thought.

Illustrated through close readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, and extended discussions of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Cavell, Duffy proposes a Romanticism of persisting cultural relevance and truly trans-Atlantic scope. The turn to romanticism of America’s most distinguished “ordinary-language” philosopher is shown to be tied to the neo-Romantic claim that far from being merely an illustrator of the truths discovered by philosophy, poetry is its equal partner in the instituting of knowledge. This book will be vital reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, Stanley Cavell and the ever-deepening connections between literature and philosophy.

Table Of Contents

1. Stanley Cavell’s Redemptive Reading: A Philosophical Labor in Progress

2. Reading Romanticism

3. A Wordsworthian Calling of Thinking

4. Bursting from a Congregated Might of Vapors: Desire, Expression and Motive in Shelley

5. “The Breath Whose Might I Have Invoked in Song”: Epipsychidion and Adonais

6. Reviewing the Vision of The Triumph of Life / Bibliography / Index

More information can be found at the publisher’s page. The book is available online and through your local bookstore.

New Book + Review — Groundless Grounds by Lee Braver

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9780262016896Not so very long ago MIT Press published a book that should be of interest to our readership: Lee Braver’s Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Below you’ll find the publisher’s overview as well as the opening paragraph of Gary E. Aylesworth’s NDPR review.

Overview [from MIT Press]

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important–and two of the most difficult–philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In Groundless Grounds, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central topics of their thought in detail, Braver finds that Wittgenstein and Heidegger construct a philosophy based on originalfinitude–finitude without the contrast of the infinite.

In Braver’s elegant analysis, these two difficult bodies of work offer mutual illumination rather than compounded obscurity. Moreover, bringing the most influential thinkers in continental and analytic philosophy into dialogue with each other may enable broader conversations between these two divergent branches of philosophy.

Braver’s meticulously researched and strongly argued account shows that both Wittgenstein and Heidegger strive to construct a new conception of reason, free of the illusions of the past and appropriate to the kind of beings that we are. Readers interested in either philosopher, or concerned more generally with the history of twentieth-century philosophy as well as questions of the nature of reason, will findGroundless Grounds of interest.

Review [from NDPR]

Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press, 2012, 354pp., $38.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262016896.

Reviewed by Gary E. Aylesworth, Eastern Illinois University

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though they were aware of one another, each made only one recorded mention of the other, and these were made in passing. These remarks open a narrow pathway into a large field of investigation. However, perhaps because they came to represent opposing camps of professional philosophers, few have attempted to read them so as to bring them into productive dialogue. Lee Braver’s publication is the latest of these relatively rare efforts. His general thesis is that, despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both insist upon our radical finitude as human beings, and that there is an unsurpassable limit to the reasons we give as to why things are the way they are. In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot ground itself, but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already “there” before the question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place. In developing this thesis, Braver hopes to begin a dialogue between so-called analytic and continental philosophers and to inaugurate a re-appropriation of the philosophical tradition on the basis of mutual understanding. That is to say, he believes his study can lead “analysts” and “continentalists” to agree on what philosophy is, on what it has been, and on what it ought to become. Given the institutional divisions within professional philosophy, in place for two or more generations, this is no small ambition, and it is unlikely to meet with a friendly reception from all quarters (see Richard Rorty) . . .

To continue click here.

Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity — New Book by Colin Koopman

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Some of you will remember Colin Koopman’s 2009 Pragmatism as Transition, which treats the usual pragmatist suspects old and new (Dewey and James, Rorty and Putnam), but with the help of some perhaps-unlikely figures (Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell). The text labors to reconcile select conflicts within the tradition, as well as to rescue certain pragmatist insights for the sake of a forward-looking critical-philosophical project.  His second book, just out from Indiana University Press, takes that forward-looking critical-philosophical project as both its object of inquiry and aim. More information about the text can be found here, and below.

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Description
Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Genealogy Does
1. Critical Historiography: Politics, Philosophy & Problematization
2. Three Uses of Genealogy: Subversion, Vindication & Problematization
3. What Problematization Is: Contingency, Complexity & Critique
4. What Problematization Does: Aims, Sources & Implications
5. Foucault’s Problematization of Modernity: The Reciprocal Incompatibility of Discipline and Liberation
6. Foucault’s Reconstruction of Modern Moralities: An Ethics of Self-Transformation
7. Problematization plus Reconstruction: Genealogy, Pragmatism & Critical Theory

Colin Koopman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and author of Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty.

For those of you interested in Foucault studies, Clare O’Farrell does an exemplary job administering Foucault News.  I’ve also heard rumor of a conference in Paris this June on Foucault and Wittgenstein, but can’t seem to find an announcement online.  I hope you’ll contact me with any leads!

CL

 

Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond — New Book (Forsberg, Burley & Hämäläinen, Eds.)

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9781441140555

This seems an appropriate time to announce the recent publication of Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond, edited by Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley, and Nora Hämäläinen from Bloomsbury.  (Congratulations, all!)  Please see the blurb below, as well as a Table of Contents. The text is available for purchase here.

About Language, Ethics and Animal Life

New research into human and animal consciousness, a heightened awareness of the methods and consequences of intensive farming, and modern concerns about animal welfare and ecology are among the factors that have made our relationship to animals an area of burning interest in contemporary philosophy. Utilizing methods inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the contributors to this volume explore this area in a variety of ways. Topics discussed include: scientific vs. non-scientific ways of describing human and animal behaviour; the ethics of eating particular animal species; human nature, emotions, and instinctive reactions; responses of wonder towards the natural world; the moral relevance of literature; the concept of dignity; and the question whether non-human animals can use language. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in philosophical and interdisciplinary issues concerning language, ethics and humanity’s relation to animals and the natural world.

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction Niklas Forsberg

1. Humanizing Nonhumans: Ape Language Research as Critique of Metaphysics Pär Segerdahl

2. Ethics and Language: What We Owe to Speakers David Cockburn

3. The Difficulty of Language: Wittgenstein on Animals and Humans Nancy E. Baker

4. Rape among the Panorpidae, Spouse Abuse among the Mantis Religiosa, and Other ‘Reproductive Strategies’ in the Animal and Human World Olli Lagerspetz

5. Three Perspectives on Altruism Ylva Gustafsson

6. Talking about Emotion Camilla Kronqvist 

7. Man as a Moral Animal: Moral Language-Games, Certainty, and the Emotions Julia Hermann

8. Living with Animals, Living as an Animal Anne Le Goff

9. What’s Wrong with a Bite of Dog? Rami Gudovitch

10. Second Nature and Animal Life Stefano Di Brisco

11. Wittgenstein, Wonder and Attention to Animals Mikel Burley

12. Honour, Dignity and the Realm of Meaning Nora Hämäläinen 

13. W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative Alice Crary

Bibliography

Index

New book: “Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell” (ed. David LaRocca)

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A new anthology of writings on Emerson, edited by David LaRocca, has just been published by Bloomsbury, and we wanted to be sure our readers knew of it. Below is some information about the book. For much more, visit the editor’s webpage for the collection by clicking on the cover image to the left.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is internationally renowned as helping to define American identity as we know it. What is less known is the degree to which he has inspired and influenced generations of other internationally celebrated writers and thinkers.

Estimating Emerson is the most comprehensive collection yet assembled of the finest minds writing on one of America’s finest minds. It serves as both a resource for easily accessing the abundant and profound commentary on Emerson’s work and as a compendium of exceptional prose to inspire further thought about his contribution to our thinking.

As ‘America’s Plato,’ it is perhaps not surprising that Emerson has drawn a great deal of critical (in both senses of the word) attention. What is surprising, however, is the fact that so much of the attention was given by writers and thinkers as varied as Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, the James brothers, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, George Santayana, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John Updike, and William Gass. Estimating Emerson collects for the first time the writing of these and many other notable writers as they consider the impact of Emerson on their life and work.

Other Contributors include:

  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Charles Dickens
  • Margaret Fuller
  • Herman Melville
  • Walter Savage Landor
  • Herman Grimm
  • Charles Baudelaire
  • John Greenleaf Whittier
  • James Russell Lowell
  • Horace Greeley
  • John Ruskin
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • Matthew Arnold
  • John Jay Chapman
  • Charles Sanders Peirce
  • Josiah Royce
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • John Dewey
  • Hugo Münsterberg
  • Robert Musil
  • Maurice Maeterlinck
  • H. L. Mencken
  • Charles Ives
  • Lewis Mumford
  • F. O. Matthiessen
  • Perry Miller
  • Robert Frost
  • Lionel Trilling
  • Robert Penn Warren
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Harold Bloom
  • Richard Rorty
  • Richard Poirier
  • Alfred Kazin
  • Cornel West
  • Charles Bernstein
  • Leslie Fiedler
  • P. Adams Sitney
  • … and Stanley Cavell

NDPR Review: “Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups” (Saito and Standish, eds.)

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NDPR has just published a review — written by Stanley Bates (Middlebury College) — of the recently published essay collection Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (Fordham University Press), edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish.

To access the whole review online, please click here.

Here is how it begins:

Stanley Cavell’s influence on a variety of contemporary fields continues to grow. It has been marked, in the past decade or so, by a number of distinguished anthologies in a wide range of disciplines including politics and literature. It is heartening for those of us who think that this influence is overwhelmingly (though, perhaps, not universally) positive to have witnessed the continuing (re)discovery of his work, and its significance for American Studies, Film Studies, Shakespeare studies and, of course, for what should be its home country, philosophy. (Whether academic philosophy as presently constituted in American and British universities is home country for Cavell is a continuing topic in much of this literature and in much of Cavell’s own writing.)

The relevance of Cavell’s thought to reflection on education should be obvious, since it is implicit in all of his writing including his interpretations of the opening of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and his discussion of, e.g., the “scene of instruction.” Moreover the title of the work under review is drawn from Cavell’s explicit characterization of philosophy as the education of grownups in the concluding paragraphs of Part I of The Claim of Reason. Perhaps the lack of interest in thinking of Cavell on this topic is related to the negligible place of philosophy of education in most departments of philosophy. Philosophy of education has been primarily pursued in departments, programs, and schools of education, and in those places it also has a somewhat tenuous position. Academic programs in education tend to be primarily concerned with issues about schooling, and the preparation of teachers who will operate in schools. Though schooling is almost always an important part of someone’s education (sometimes negatively) Cavell’s characterization of philosophy as the education of grownups is mostly about what happens out of school. Nonetheless reflections on his line of thought might have implications for how we think about the characterizations of education in some contemporary discussions.

New Books in Critical Theory (website): Audio interview with Avner Baz

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Brandon Fiedor — host of the website New Books in Critical Theory (which features “discussions with critical theorists about their new books”) — has just posted an audio recording of an interview he recently conducted with Avner Baz (Philosophy, Tufts University), about Prof. Baz’s book When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2012). To listen to this interview online, please click here (and look for the audio player near the bottom of the page). Our thanks go to Brandon for letting us know of this!

Charles Bernstein: “Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature” (on Stein and Wittgenstein)

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Charles Bernstein (English, University of Pennsylvania) recently wrote to let us know that a digital version of his undergraduate thesis — on Stein and Wittgenstein, and directed by Cavell — is now available for purchase (for $5). We thought it would be of interest to some readers of this blog, in particular those working on poetry and poetics. To purchase a digital copy online, please visit this page.

Here is Bernstein’s description of the thesis:

Forty years ago, during my last semesters of college, I wrote a senior thesis on Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans, which I read in the context of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I had concentrated in philosophy at Harvard even though my interests were primarily literature and art (poetics and aesthetics). I didn’t know anyone who had read Stein but was surrounded by philosophers deeply engaged with Wittgenstein. Still, I saw two key issues that Stein addressed in her early work that related to the philosophical problems that echoed through Emerson Hall, where Stein herself had studied with William James.

Throughout The Making of Americans, Stein confronts the problem of what she calls “the real thing of disillusionment”: a sense of being a stranger, queer, to those around her; the sinking feeling that one is not, and perhaps cannot be, understood, that drives you to cry out in pain that you write for “yourself and strangers,” in Stein’s famous phrase. Stein’s formulations struck me as being connected to the problem of other minds, or skepticism, a virtual obsession of Stanley Cavell in those years. It seemed to me that Stein and Wittgenstein had crafted a related response to skepticism.

The related philosophical issue that Stein’s work addresses is the nature of meaning and reference in verbal language: how words refer to objects in the external world. Both Wittgenstein and Stein dramatize the breakdown of a one-to-one correspondence between word and object. They are both averse to the conception that words are akin to names or labels and that meaning is grounded in a verbal mapping of a fully constituted external world. What do words or phrases designate? This goes beyond the issue of private language, which has dogged the interpretation of Stein’s work. The problem of where the pain is when pain is expressed opens up for Wittgenstein and his interpreters (for me primarily Rogers Albritton and Cavell) a more general problem of the nature of reference, designation, and naming for such intangibles as (in Stein’s words) “thinking, believing, seeing, understanding.” I felt, still do, that this philosophical conundrum directly bears on the meaning and reference of not just words or phrases in poems but of poems themselves, which certainly mean, designate, and express, but do not necessarily refer to “things,” if things are assumed to be already existing and named objects. I am not satisfied with the argument I make about the nature of reference in the final sections of The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons, where Stein invented a compositional method that I call “wordness.” Still, despite the manifest shortcomings of this work, it locates some ongoing problems that remain to be addressed, both in terms of a full-scale reading of The Making of Americans and a more technically robust account of reference in works such as Tender Buttons.

Two new books on Thoreau, Emerson, and Philosophy

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David Robinson (Oregon State University) has kindly sent us the following news about two recently published books, which he thought would be of interest to reader of this blog:

Dieter Schulz (University of Heidelberg, Germany) has published a collection of essays on Emerson and Thoreau which includes studies of Thoreau, Emerson and Gadamer, and of Thoreau and Berkeley, among several other philosophical readings of Emerson and Thoreau. Schulz is one of the leading European scholars of Emerson and Thoreau, and author of the 1997 study Amerikanischer Transzendentalismus. His book (in English) is entitled Emerson and Thoreau, Or Steps Beyond Ourselves (Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg ISBN 978-3-86809-057-4).

The Fordham University Press Series in American Philosophy (distributed by Oxford University Press) has published the collection Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy, edited by Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid (ISBN 978-0-8232-3930-6). The volume contains a variety of essays on Thoreau’s epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and politics, and concludes with an interview with Stanley Cavell, conducted by Rick Anthony Furtak.