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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Language
The Riddle Of Religious Language, Luke Hillman
The Riddle Of Religious Language, Luke Hillman
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The following project analyzes religious life through the lens of religious language. Motivated by ideas of Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians, religious language is shown to be nonsensical, and yet significant. Wittgenstein connects how we understand language with how we understand life, and this connection extends to religious life. This project offers an answer to how religious language is unique by comparing religious language to riddles and the process of answering riddles. In addition, religious language becomes understandable with imagination, a relationship with the transcendent, and an understanding of the kinds of language present in religious discourse. These ideas are solidified with …
Textures Of The Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein [Table Of Contents], Veena Das
Textures Of The Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein [Table Of Contents], Veena Das
Philosophy & Theory
Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question – how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does …
Elucidation And The Solipsism Of The Tractatus, Jacob Phillips
Elucidation And The Solipsism Of The Tractatus, Jacob Phillips
Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) of 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents his metaphysical account of the logical structure of the world and language. He aims to establish the possibility of the connection between “pictures” of the world—including linguistic constructions as sentences—and the constituent elements of the world. The account Wittgenstein promotes yields, by his own admission, a form of solipsism. Underlying the difficulties in interpreting the details of Wittgenstein’s solipsism (which he does little to explicate), there is a fundamental tension between solipsism of any sort and a metaphysical account that relies on language, something which seems essentially shared and …
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, …
“Don't Think But Look:” Using Wittgenstein's Notion Of Family Resemblances To Look At Genocide, James J. Snow
“Don't Think But Look:” Using Wittgenstein's Notion Of Family Resemblances To Look At Genocide, James J. Snow
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
This article contributes to the ongoing and growing scholarly conversation concerning how best to define the term “genocide” following Raphael Lemkin’s coining of the term in 1944. The article first shows that the Convention definition ratified in Paris in 1948 was intended solely for juridical purposes and does not reflect Lemkin’s deeper understanding of genocide. It then surveys a range of scholarship after Lemkin that argues for alternative definitions of term or even calls for jettisoning the term altogether. While it is acknowledged that a clear definition is imperative in a juridical context, it is argued that there are problems …
Wittgenstein And The Problem Of Abusive Language, Alexander S. Coppins
Wittgenstein And The Problem Of Abusive Language, Alexander S. Coppins
Philosophy Honors Projects
These days, more and more social movements are focusing on changing the ways we speak. As a result of these movements, words that were once commonplace until quite recently are being pushed out of our language because of their power to hurt people. This tells us that political groups recognize the power of words to greatly damage us. In this paper, I explore Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in order to shed light on how we can use language to insult each other. Both the early and the later Wittgenstein are able to account, in some respects, for how we understand …