The Nordic Wittgenstein Review, published by the NWS, has published its
first ever Special Issue, edited by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Piergiorgio
Donatelli and Sandra Laugier in collaboration with the present editors
of NWR.
It's open access, as always.
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/issue/view/NWR%20Special%20Issue%202015
Best wishes,
Yrsa Neuman as the ed-in-chief
Anne-Marie Soendergaard Christensen & Martin Gustafsson, editors
PS. Submissions to NWR:
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
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PLEASE DO CIRCULATE
Note from the Editors
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock 0
Forms of Life
Peter Hacker 1-20
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3320/pdf
Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, Patterns of Life, and Ways of Living
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock 21-42
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3362/pdf
Forms of Life, Forms of Reality
Piergiorgio Donatelli 43-62
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3374/pdf
Voice as Form of Life and Life Form
Sandra Laugier 63-82
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3364/pdf
Tractarian Form as the Precursor to Forms of Life
Chon Tejedor 83-109
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3358/pdf
Mathematics and Forms of Life
Severin Schroeder 111-130
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3357/pdf
“If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats”:
Wittgenstein on Understanding Others and Forms of Life
Constantine Sandis 131-153
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3372/pdf
Elucidating Forms of Life. The Evolution of a Philosophical Tool
Anna Boncompagni 155-175
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3319/pdf
October 06, 2015
September 15, 2015
Recent doctoral dissertations at Åbo Akademi
Recent doctoral dissertations at Åbo Akademi
During the last academic year three doctoral dissertations in philosophy were defended at my old department at Åbo Akademi, Åbo/Turku, Finland:
Ylva Gustafsson, Interpersonal understanding
and theory of mind (19 September, 2014)
Summary: The claim that a “theory of mind”,
is a fundamental cognitive capacity that grounds human social life is popular
within both modern philosophical and psychological theorising on interpersonal
understanding. This claim surfaces in evolutionary psychology, in theories of
child development, in theories of autism as well as in philosophy on emotions
and in moral philosophy. The aim of this work is to scrutinise certain
psychological and philosophical theories on interpersonal understanding that
are connected with empirical research. The author argues that the theories as
well as the empirical research are often based on problematic philosophical
assumptions about interpersonal understanding. The assumptions shape the
theories and also shape the way empirical research is designed and the way results are
interpreted.
For the full text, see https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/98819
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Antony Fredriksson, Vision, Image,
Record – A Cultivation of the Visual Field (9 January, 2015)
Summary: The first part of
this thesis delivers a genealogy of the image.
It chronicles how the concepts of image, vision and the self evolved in
relation to one another in a specific scientific and philosophical context,
starting with the early Renaissance, which saw the invention of the
perspectivist painting, up to the birth of Positivism and the photographic
image. This development entailed a form of reductionism in which “the self” –
the role of human psychology, our judgement, our attention and our will – was
sidestepped. Within this intellectual tradition there is only a short step,
from the understanding of the image as a representation of three-dimensional
space on a two-dimensional surface, to the idea of the image as a transparent
picture, a window towards the world. By taking this short step one would easily
lose sight of the role of the self in the practices
of making and viewing images.
In the second part the author
offers an alternative to the intellectual tradition described in the first
part. The idea of depiction as a neutral “view from nowhere” would support a
skeptical attitude towards communication, dialogue and human testimony, and
therefore our reliance upon each other and consequently our reliance on ourselves.
What was forgotten in this understanding of the image as a view from nowhere,
was that the image is an aid in the task cultivating our visual field, an aid
in sharing our views. Due to this
function of sharing, the image becomes a guide as we find our orientation in
this world. I might stand beside another person and see what she sees, but I do
not necessarily know her reading of it. The image adds a dimension to this
relation, since it does not only show me what the other sees. When an image
works properly it also shows how that
other person sees, and thus the image becomes an agent.
While the present thesis combines
the fields of philosophical epistemology, history of science and visual
studies, its main interest is philosophical. It engages with philosophical
misconceptions of depiction as a mimetic art form, of knowledge as
domestication and of perception as reception of data.
For the full text, see http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/103039
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Mari Lindman, Work
and Non-Work : On Work and Meaning (8 May, 2015)
Summary: It may seem self-evident that
employment is crucial to a happy life and that job creation is a central
societal concern. However, this dissertation suggests that work is neutralized
when it is understood simply as a valuable societal asset or as an individual
life project, while its existential, ethical and political significance in a
specific life situation is ignored. One example of such neutralization is when
the importance of work is reduced to the importance of “having a job”, whatever
its practical content or purposes. To challenge such neutralizations, the
author looks at the tension within the conceptions of work (necessity, hard
work and self-realization are three examples) which underlie them. The danger
of such neutralization is that political and existential worries about work and
the working life are swept under the rug. The book aims to repoliticize work by
looking at it as an essentially contested concept. The author suggests that
important aspects of work are revealed within such contestations of the role of
work in our lives and that tensions can be a fruitful point of departure for
resisting neutralizations of work. All chapters are structured around dialogues
with critical accounts of work, including those of Hannah Arendt, André Gorz,
Kathi Weeks, Simone Weil, Raimond Gaita, Karl Marx and Richard Sennett. What
does it mean to say that society has been invaded by necessity? What does it
mean to imagine a society beyond wage labor? Is it a utopia or a dystopia to
think about work as a limitless activity? What is at stake when work becomes a
commodity on the market? What are the hazards of fragmentation of work?
For the full text, see http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/104317
September 14, 2015
Standing Before a Sentence
Yrsa Neuman is defending her doctoral thesis in philosophy at Åbo Akademi on Friday, 18 September (in Auditorium Arken, Fabriksgatan 2, Åbo/Turku), at 12 noon. The opponent (external examiner) is Dr Kevin Cahill, Bergen.
Short summary:
The contribution of this work is
meta-philosophical in being
concerned with philosophical method. Its point of departure is in
the
therapeutic strand of the tradition after the later Wittgenstein.
The full text of the thesis is found here:
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/113681/neuman_yrsa.pdf?sequence=2
Short summary:
Standing Before a Sentence
Moore’s paradox and a perspective from within
language
Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote to G.E. Moore
that he had
stirred up a philosophical wasps’ nest with his paradox,
associated with the
sentence “I believe it’s raining and it’s not raining”. The
problem is that it
would be odd for a speaker to assert this thought about herself,
although it
could be true about her, and although the sentence is well-formed
and not
contradictory.
Making use of the notion of a sentence having
sense in a
context of significant use (inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein), the
author
explores the responses of some of the “wasps” who responded to the
paradox, and
the background of their reactions.
By
using the metaphor of philosophizing from within language rather
than outside
of language the author explores what she calls “the user
perspective” on
philosophical problems. In this investigation, Moore’s paradox
functions as a
test case, by which the author elucidates differences in view of
the role and
powers of philosophical terminology.
The full text of the thesis is found here:
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/113681/neuman_yrsa.pdf?sequence=2
July 25, 2015
June 19, 2015
“An attitude towards a machine”
Ex Machina might be suitable for a
film and philosophy course. It gives plenty of food for thought. There is ingenious
play with various degrees of embodiedness - to travesty Wittgenstein, Ava’s body
is the worst picture of her soul (Philosophical
Investigations¸ Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, § 25).The erotic
tension gives a wholly different twist to the intellectualist preconception of
the original Turing setup.
Standing before a Jackson Pollock
painting, Nathan explains that the greatest difficulty is how to recapture a similar
effect of controlled spontaneity in the robot.
There are, by the way, some
intriguing allusions to Wittgenstein – maybe as a gesture to his grappling with
the problems of souls and automata (e.g. Philosophical
Investigations § 420). Apart from the search engine Bluebook which is explicitly
said to be named after the Wittgenstein text, a copy of Gustav Klimt’s portrait
of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Ludwig’s sister), posing erect, cool, composed,
is prominently displayed – in the room in which the female dresses and faces of
robots are stored. (Gender roles is also a theme of the film that might be explored.)
And on one occasion, Ava shows Caleb a doodle she has made and asks “What is
this?” (an allusion to Culture and Value,
p. 24). Caleb then teaches her to draw.
Like virtually all stories involving
artificial intelligence, this film remains a fairy tale along the lines of Frankenstein
or Pygmalion – not a prediction of a possible development. The missing link in all
stories about artificially created consciousness is the question how a human creation
is supposed to be endowed with a life. The
real deus ex machina here is Ava’s supposed
desire to survive. But where does her desire come from? Or rather: where does the
machine’s disposition to secure its
own continued functioning come from?
April 12, 2015
What is understanding a sentence?
Michael
Johnson gives the following argument for compositionality in his article on the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
We are capable of understanding a
very large number—perhaps an infinite number—of sentences that we have never
heard before. …
If we
understand the meaning of a new sentence whose meaning we haven’t been
specifically taught before, it must be that we can work out its meaning from
information available to us when we hear that sentence and other things that we
have already learned.
Suppose for a
moment that English is a compositional language, in the sense that the meaning
of a sentence of English can be computed (worked out) from its syntactic
structure and the meanings of its morphemes. This would explain how one could
understand a novel utterance [shouldn’t this be “sentence”?] such as There is a cauliflower-shaped
spacecraft from Saturn on television. English speakers who have
never learned the meaning of this sentence specifically have nevertheless
learned the meanings of each of the words in it: cauliflower, shape, the past tense morpheme -ed, spacecraft, and so forth.
Furthermore, part of mastering a language involves acquiring the ability to
parse sentences of that language, that is, to figure out their syntactic
structure—for example, figuring out that cauliflower-shaped
modifies spacecraft,
but on television
doesn’t modify Saturn.
Thus if English is compositional, English speakers have all they need to
understand novel English sentences they have never encountered before—provided
those sentences don’t contain unfamiliar words. (Michael Johnson,
“Compositionality”
, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy¸ accessed
11 April, 2015)
This is one version of a familiar line of argument. However,
it doesn’t seem clear to me what precisely it is supposed to prove. I had never
heard the sentence, “There is a cauliflower-shaped
spacecraft from Saturn on television” until I read this article. I immediately recognized
it as an English sentence, and I suppose I can say I understood it: it didn’t
bewilder me, I understood how it was meant to be taken. (This was partly due,
no doubt, to the context in which I encountered the sentence, as an instance of
“sentences-understood-though-never-before-heard”.)
I could,
as it were, identify the place of the sentence in the language calculus. Or we
might say, I can state its truth-conditions (“the sentence p is true if and
only if p”). But considered as an achievement, it seems to me, this is tautologous.
Mastery of the system gives me mastery of the system; the question, however, is
what enables us to reach beyond the language cage. After all, compositionality I
take it is supposed to explain how we are able to communicate by
means of combinations of words we have never encountered before, and all its seems
to explain is how we are able to recognize combinations of words as the combinations
of words they are. Suggesting that understanding a sentence takes us beyond
mere recognition because it enables us to tell what the truth-conditions of the
sentence are is no help: for one thing, this is true only if truth-conditions are
understood as tautologically conveyed by the sentence itself. (“’Snow is white’
is true if and only if snow is white.” ) Second, if I don’t understand
what the speaker is up to I don’t know how
he means for his words to be related to the question of truth: is he trying to
tell me something, musing on a formulation, telling a joke, composing a line
for a science fiction story, planning the interior design of a room (“On top of
the television set there will be this funny-shaped spacecraft-looking thing.”)?
In fact, the condition that I must know
the words in the sentence in order to understand it – in this sense – seems gratuitous,
as long as I know what grammatical categories they
belong to. Thus, to cite a famous example, while I have no idea what a runcible
is, I have no difficulty understanding that the sentence “Smith kept a runcible
at Abbotsford” is true if and only if Smith did indeed keep a runcible at
Abbotsford. Why should my familiarity with the words have a bearing on my ability
to extract the truth-conditions from the sentence?
The idea seems to be that compositionality can explain the
mysterious leap from simply hearing a sequence of words to
a state called “understanding the sentence …”, a state which, although it does
not yet tell me what I am to do with the words spoken, yet puts me in a
position to deal with them wherever I might encounter them. And I doubt whether
any such state needs to be postulated.
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