Wittgenstein Essays

The British Avant-Garde: A Philosophical Analysis ABSTRACT: British Avant-Garde art, poses a challenge to traditional aesthetic analysis. This paper will argue that such art is best understood in terms of Wittgenstein¡¦s concept of "seeing-as," and will point out that the artists often use this concept in describing their work. This is significant in that if we are to understand art in terms of cultural practice, then we must actually look at the practice. We will discuss initiatives such as the

then know if the writer is using an ordinary term or their newly defined meaning of that same term? In order to make this distinction and to understand of the redefined and coined terms, one must read with an intentional awareness of the terms. Wittgenstein understands this difficulty and aids his readers

is there any problem in attributing to these sentences a belief as their base, or a utilitarian action as their purpose. In other words, these are the cases that support the identification of the linguistic subject with the cognitive self. But Wittgenstein shows us that to a large extent in our ordinary use of language, and especially in our psychological language, it is many levels of consciousness and diverse modes of knowing that are active beyond the rational. In these cases, language functions

PHIL20033: Philosophy of Mind - First assignment A. Short answers: 1. Explain Descartes’ argument for substance dualism and why it seems plausible. Substance dualism is the argument that there are two distinct kinds of objects that exist, one being mental substances and the other being physical substances. In René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, this refers to the mind being the mental substance and the body as the physical substance. In Meditation II, he defines what a body is: “face

The Elimination of Natural Theology ABSTRACT: The dispute between fideists and rationalists seems intractable since those who argue for faith alone claim that they are offended by the use of reason in religion. The advocates of reason claim that they are equally offended by the appeal to faith. This dispute may be resolved by showing that those who rely on faith may be seen as engaging in an experiment of living, so they can become part of a rational experiment without having to alter their

Cratylus to develop a similar theory. Using propositions and names, respectively, the two philosophers develop arguments showing that there is an extreme parallel between language and pictures. After Plato discloses the origination of names and Wittgenstein looks at the composition of propositions, the two philosophers are able to assess the relation between names, propositions and reality. The relation of names and propositions to reality leads

“Critically assess the claim that religious language is meaningless” Religious language has been argued about by many philosophers to whether or not the ways in which we speak about religion are relevant or meaningful. This issue of religious language looks at the way we talk about God, debate ideas and communicate our theist or atheist ideologies. For some, religious language is meaningful and full of purpose while others see it to being incomprehensible and pointless. The Vienna Circle was

intellectual link between Wittgenstein and Gramsci (who placed great emphasis of the sociopolitical aspects of language at its everyday pervasiveness): “The role of conventions and rules, including what Wittgenstein came to call “language games,” and the relevance of what has been called “the anthropological way” which Sraffa championed to Wittgenstein, all seem to figure quite prominently in the ‘Prison Notebooks’” (Sen 2003, 1245). As Bakhtin noted around the same time as Wittgenstein (1910s), the Russian

Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2002. This book explains the major theories of Wittgenstein, a well-known linguistic philosopher in the 20th century. Wittgenstein argued that ethics and religions are beyond the boundaries of language and therefore cannot be communicated. Ethics and religions are mysterious truths

In The Rhetorical Situation, Lloyd F. Bitzer argues that what makes a situation rhetorical is similar to that which constitutes a moral action as he writes that, “an act is moral because it is an act performed in a situation of a certain kind; similarly, a work is rhetorical because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind”.(3) By defining the rhetorical situation in this way, Bitzer further contends that rhetoric is a means to altering reality. (4) It is through the use of discourse that