Wittgensteins Liberatory Philosophy

In this book, Rupert Read outlines the first resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein school, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein 'school', of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.

Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations: 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130-3, 149-151, 186, 198-201, 217, and 284-6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others.

Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation.

Autorentext

Rupert Read is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. His books include: Applying Wittgenstein (2007), Wittgenstein among the sciences (2012), A Wittgensteinian way with paradoxes (2013) and A Film-philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment (2018). He was co-editor of the curriculum-changing collection The New Wittgenstein (2000), also with Routledge.

Inhalt

0 Introduction: Thinking through Wittgenstein 1

1 The Philosopher and Temptation: Wittgenstein's Augustinian Opening Move 42

2 It Is as You Please: PI 16 as an Icon oWittgenstein's Philosophy of Freedom 78

3 What Is (Wittgenstein's Own Account of) Meaning?: PI 43 and Its Critics 108

4 When Wittgenstein Speaks of 'Everyday' Language, He Means Simply Language: A Liberatory Reading of PI 95124 143

5 Objects of Comparison to the Real (Philosophical?)Discovery: PI 130133 188

6 Wittgenstein Dissolves the Know-How vs Knowledge- that Debate: PI 149151 206

7 Logical Existentialism?: An Approach to PI 186 226

8 The Faux- Freedom of Nonsense: Kripke's Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein's Wittgenstein at PI 198201 260

9 Overcoming Over- Reliance on 'The Bedrock'?: On PI 217 279

10 The Anti-'Private-Language'Considerations as a Fraternal and Freeing Ethic: Towards a Re-Reading of PI 284309 297

11 Conclusion: (A)

Liberating Philosophy 327

Bibliography 363

Index 382