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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Wittgenstein And Embodied Cognition: A Critique Of The Language Of Thought, Amber Sheldon
Wittgenstein And Embodied Cognition: A Critique Of The Language Of Thought, Amber Sheldon
Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows
The assertions of this paper will be concerned with language acquisition as it is presented in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in contrast with Jerry Fodor’s theory of tacit language described in The Language of Thought. This symbolic mental language is often analogized with the symbolic “language” of a computer. Fodor theorizes that the mind has an innate symbolic (and physically real) system of representation that comes prior to any natural language. Famously, with the private language argument, Wittgenstein contends that language is performed and produced by activity. One learns a language through practice and participation. In this paper, …
Kant, Neo-Kantianism, And Phenomenology, Sebastian Luft
Kant, Neo-Kantianism, And Phenomenology, Sebastian Luft
Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications
This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Kant, the Kantian tradition, and phenomenology, here focusing mainly on Husserl and Heidegger. Part of this reassessment concerns those philosophers who, during the lives of Husserl and Heidegger, sought to defend an updated version of Kant’s philosophy, the neo-Kantians. The chapter shows where the phenomenologists were able to benefit from some of the insights on the part of Kant and the neo-Kantians, but also clearly points to the differences. The aim of this chapter is to offer a fair evaluation of the relation of the main phenomenologists to Kant and to …
Past Desires And The Dead, Steven Luper
Past Desires And The Dead, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
I examine an argument that appears to take us from Parfit’s [Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1984)] thesis that we have no reason to fulfill desires we no longer care about to the conclusion that the effect of posthumous events on our desires is a matter of indifference (the post-mortem thesis). I suspect that many of Parfit’s readers, including Vorobej [Philosophical Studies 90 (1998) 305], think that he is committed to (something like) this reasoning, and that Parfit must therefore give up the post-mortem thesis. However, as it turns out, the argument is subtly equivocal and …
Paradox And Metaphor: An Integrity Of The Arts, Lawrence Kimmel
Paradox And Metaphor: An Integrity Of The Arts, Lawrence Kimmel
Philosophy Faculty Research
Art is movement, movement is life. Surprisingly, the spareness of paradox in art promotes a fullness of life. We must first speak as simply as possible about art as a fundamental human activity. Only then can we hope to say something of consequence about the so-called “fine arts” — which may be misleading as a description. In substance, the reference “fine art” simply means useless art: “fine” as being free from utility. Art is imaginatively productive, it makes something, whether painting, poem, or partita. But this making has no independent utility, and its character as a work of art …