Lectures On A Philosophy Less Ordinary

This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work. Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

This volume showcases contemporary, ground-up ethical essays in the tradition of Wittgenstein’s broader philosophy and Wittgenstein-inspired ethical reflection. It takes the ethical relevance of Wittgenstein as a substantial and solid starting point for a broad range of ongoing thinking about contemporary ethical issues. The texts are organised in two sections. The first consists of chapters exploring questions around what could be called the “grammar” of our moral forms of life, and thus represents a more traditional approach in ethics after Wittgenstein. The second part represents a recent turn in the tradition towards investigating moral conceptions, perspectives and concepts that are undergoing change, either because the world itself is changing (for instance with new technologies) or because human agency, such as social movements, has brought us to reconsider previously unquestioned ideas and structures. Within the book, the authors’ contributions are inspired, in their ways of working with ethical questions, by Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language, understanding and the nature of philosophical inquiry. This book is of interest to philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, as well as to all ethicists seeking ideas for how to do philosophy in a manner close to lived experience and practice.

This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress, and profundity. Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they work to shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conducive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat different argumentative strategies. Part 1 consists of an overview and reassessment of popular self-help literature and its sociological and journalistic critics, written from a moral philosophical perspective. Part 2 opens with discussion of the current attraction, among a range of philosophers, to self-transformative themes. The chapters assess the strand of self-transformative philosophy found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell, and Iris Murdoch. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the theme of social change and moral renegotiation in contemporary societies, which is a central but underestimated undercurrent in discussions on contemporary self-transformative practices. The book’s dual perspective—on both popular self-help and self-transformative currents in philosophy—enables a cultural and moral philosophical analysis of contemporary ethical ideals of personhood, as well as reflection on the literatures available for its development. The Making of the Good Person will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral philosophy, history of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literary studies.

Austinian Themes offers a reconstruction of philosophical views on several themes developed by J. L. Austin. Exploring Austin's work in detail through a series of thematically organized chapters, Marina Sbis? draws on both published work as well as unpublished manuscript notes to offer a defence of Austin's speech act theory, characterized by a specific notion of illocution, against some important criticisms. Sbis? offers a reconstruction of Austin's responsibility-based conception of action drawing on his remarks on acts and actions in How to Do Things with Words and in later papers. Exploring Austin's contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of perception (including his realist stance, anti-scepticism, and presentational view of perception), Sbis? analyses the roles that he assigns to knowledge in the dynamics of assertion. On the theme of truth, Austin's claims are expounded and explained as worthy of reassessment. Other chapters explore the ways in which Austin deals with sense, reference, 'family resemblances', truth-falsity assessments, and context-dependence. Austin's most famous statement of method, as outlining a 'linguistic phenomenology', is cast as analogous to Husserl's phenomenology in adopting an epoch? which isolates language (rather than consciousness), a reading which helps to clarify several characteristic positions adopted by Austin. On metaphilosophical themes, Sbis? analyses the notion of ordinariness, distinguishing it from common sense and the endorsement of the 'Linguistic Turn', approaching it instead in terms of the by-default nature of the social bond and conversational cooperation. Various recurrent aspects of Austin's philosophy are illuminated: the opposition to dichotomies, the attention paid to intersubjectivity, the commitment to a 'sober' philosophy, and a strong sense of human situatedness.

The book explores the impact of manuscript remarks during the year 1929 on the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. Although its intention is to put the focus specifically on the manuscripts, the book is not purely exegetical. The contributors generate important new insights for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his place in the history of analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s writings from the years 1929-1930 are valuable, not simply because they marked Wittgenstein’s return to academic philosophy after a seven-year absence, but because these works indicate several changes in his philosophical thinking. The chapters in this volume clarify the significance of Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy in 1929. In Part 1, the contributors address different issues in the philosophy of mathematics, e.g. Wittgenstein's understanding of certain aspects of intuitionism and his commitment to verificationism, as well as his idea of "a new system". Part 2 examines Wittgenstein's philosophical development and his understanding of philosophical method. Here the contributors examine particular problems Wittgenstein dealt with in 1929, e.g. the colour-exclusion problem, and the use of thought experiments as well as his relationship to Frank Ramsey and philosophical pragmatism. Part 3 features essays on phenomenological language. These chapters address the role of spatial analogies and the structure of visual space. Finally, Part 4 includes one chapter on Wittgenstein’s few manuscript remarks about ethics and religion and relates it to his Lecture on Ethics. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in 1929 will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein and the history of analytic philosophy.

This book connects the philosophy of Henri Bergson to contemporary debates in metaphysics and analytic philosophy of religion. More specifically, the book demonstrates how Bergson’s philosophy of time can respond to the problem of foreknowledge and free will. The question of how humans can be free if God knows everything has been a perennial issue of debate in analytic philosophy of religion. The solution to this problem relies heavily on what one thinks about time. The problem of time is central to Bergson’s philosophical system. In this book, the author offers a systematic application of Bergson’s thought to the freedom and foreknowledge problem. The first chapter presents a discussion of Bergson’s central concept of la durée (duration). The subsequent two chapters link la durée to the relation of time and space. Here the author provides a Bergsonian response to McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time and develops a novel theory of time connected to Bergson’s analysis of temporal experience. The last three chapters explore the relation between free will, determinism, and divine foreknowledge. The author reconstructs Bergson’s theory of freedom and shows how it undermines the underlying dogmas of contemporary free-will theories. The author then argues that Bergson’s philosophy can be used to resolve the free will and foreknowledge problem in the philosophy of religion. The monograph concludes by opening avenues for new research into Bergson and analytic philosophy of religion, such as the philosophy of religious language, the relation between God and modality, religious experience, and religious pluralism. Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Bergson, 20th-century continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of time.

The clean separation between manifold phenomena and a systematic order that prevails in them is a basic feature of the rational-scientific orientation system. The first authoritative formulation of this premise is found in Plato. His discussion of constitutive forms of world events has initiated a broad development in the history of philosophy, which is also effective today in the preference for reason-guided analyses of often confusing circumstances. The authors of this volume address the lasting relevance of this idea within two interrelated areas of research, namely Plato scholarship and contemporary Platonism. Of particular interest is the relationship between Plato and Wittgenstein. Following this overall idea, this volume is divided into three sections: Plato scholarship, Platonism, and Plato and Wittgenstein. As the contributions show, Platonism proves to be not only a purely historical-exegetical field of research but rather a fruitful stimulus for contemporary discussions on logical, linguistic, and social topics.