Nordic Wittgenstein Review (NWR)
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Philosophy of everyday life: Rethinking the role of philosophy in our lives with the Oxford women philosopher quartet (Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch)
No full textAt Oxford University, in the context of WW2, when men were largely obliged to abandon the university benches to take part in the war effort, four women philosophers, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Mary Midgley (1919-2018), Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and Philippa Foot (1920-2010), formed a group of philosophical reflections that would become a competitor, after the war, to John L. Austin’s famous ‘Saturday Mornings’. At the heart of the concerns of this ‘wartime quartet’: putting the importance of being human back at the centre of ethics. They opposed “modern moral philosophy” and its many presuppositions, including the claim that ethical questions are independent of the facts of human life or concern a purely rational subject abstracted from everyday issues and from its belonging to the human species. By putting the importance of being human back at the heart of their ethical reflections, these philosophers came to reflect on issues that directly concern human life, far from the philosophical abstractions that interested their men homologues. In this paper, I explore the extent to which this re-inscription of philosophy into everyday life and into ordinary human concerns, opens the way to a feminist philosophy and ethics
Book Review: James C. Klagge, Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry.: Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2021
No full textBook revie
Wittgenstein and Critical Theory: Mickaëlle Provost in Conversation with Alice Crary
No full textThis is the second of two parts of an interview with Alice Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The first part on “Wittgenstein and Feminism” is published in the NWR Special Issue “Wittgenstein and Feminism”, forthcoming later this year
Book Review: "Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch", eds. Michael Campbell and Lynette Reid
No full textSpeaking Silences: A Wittgensteinian Inquiry into Hermeneutical Injustice
Get PDFMiranda Fricker’s account of what is involved in cases of hermeneutical injustice has been criticised for neglecting the existence of alternative hermeneutical resources developed by non-dominant groups and consequently overlooking its members’ cognitive agency. I argue that this critical strand might be extended to consider what I call “uncontroversial cases of hermeneutical injustice”, i.e. cases in which no alternative resources are available, but marginalized subjects can still be said to resist dominant interpretations of their experiences. Following Alice Crary, I trace the limitations of Fricker’s original account of hermeneutical injustice back to her reliance on a neutral conception of reason and argue that widening the realm of rationality to accommodate affective responses authorizes a revaluation of marginalized subjects’ agency under ideological systems. To illustrate this point, I indicate that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on hinges present a notion of objectivity that serves liberatory projects and might guide a more adequate response to cases of hermeneutical injustice
Embracing the In-Betweenness of Aspect-Perception\u27s Normative and Evaluative Dimensions
Get PDFAbstract: This paper examines the following two ideas and their relations: (i) aspect-perception is a perceptual experience; (ii) veridicality is the primary standard for evaluating the success of a perceptual experience. I argue that a valuable lesson to glean from Wittgenstein’s investigations of aspect-perception is that aspect-perception is “in-between” when it comes to whether and how veridicality is at issue in it. Yet it does not follow from this in-betweenness that there is no standard by which we evaluate aspect-perception, no notion of success at perceiving an aspect. Aspect-perception has normative and evaluative dimensions that are not a matter of veridicality, or at least not in any straightforward way, some of which I explore here. These dimensions are brought to light, in part, by shifting evaluative focus to what the perceiver “brings” to aspect-perception experiences and attending to the ways aspect-perception requires and involves mastery of a technique. The shift in focus also helps illuminate different ways of understanding aspect-blindness and the kinds of failure at play in different kinds of aspect-blindness. All in all, embracing aspect-perception’s in-betweenness regarding whether or not veridicality is at issue in it illumines aspect-perception’s distinctive character and richness
Essay Review: Dinda L. Gorlée, "Wittgenstein\u27s Secret Diaries: Semiotic Writing in Cryptography"
No full textTransfeminism and Political Forms of Life
Get PDFIt is sometimes argued that there are pre-political, ‘natural’ characteristics that have a significant role in rendering political subjects, for instance that women are the subjects of feminism. These same arguments criticise transfeminism as a usurper of feminist priorities because it changes focus to the rights of groups whose members are not exclusively women. This essay challenges such criticism. It begins by defining transfeminism as a form of activism and an epistemological tool, in order to cogently address some of the views that oppose it. I then propose a way out of the conflict by showing how we can make better sense of transfeminism aided by Wittgenstein’s concept of forms of life, since both views contend that there are biological and environmental features that constitute the uniqueness as well as the diversity of the given human form of life, without implying that said diversity leads to relativism. The paper concludes that transfeminism, when conceptualised correctly, can indeed work with other feminisms and political movements in order to counter institutionalised and market-driven gender politics that only simulate to address feminist concerns.
Key words: transfeminism, Wittgenstein, forms of life, Judith Butler, feminist subjec
