Aug 2026· Philosophies· Vol 11, pp. 148· 0 citations· 54 references
Abstract
The contribution of this essay to two rather distinct academic literatures is two-fold. First, it reconceives the significance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect–seeing, which are generally taken to be revelatory of language narrowly conceived, and instead explores the connection between aspect–seeing—what Wittgenstein identifies as one “among the concepts of experience”—and the nature of experience itself. It does so by noting the importance to Wittgenstein of inventing “fictitious natural history” to reveal the connection between what we say and the kind of creature we are. It then examines other fictitious natural histories involving aspect–seeing (or its absence) that illustrate some “very general facts of nature”—facts that, the essay contends, help form the fundamental conditions for our finding one another intelligible. Second, the essay reconceives what constitutes the significance of jazz improvisation (and possibly other forms of spontaneous activity, though those are not explored here) by grounding this significance in these same very general facts of nature. It develops this thought by considering the implications of a different fictitious natural history involving musical performance, and through a remarkable if complex instance of an exemplary improvised jazz solo by Charlie Parker.
There are many ways to write oneself. Most popular is the story—a life lived, experiences accumulated, lessons learned, wisdom acquired, triumph or tragedy—a coherent and linear self. I do not want to do that. That is a fiction. Rather, I offer some fragments, some discontinuities, and some tensions and paradoxes that make up what might be called my biography. I want to think about “what it is I have become.” And I will do that against the backdrop of the epistemic shift that has framed and forged my intellectual career—the shift from a welfare state to a neoliberal state, from one form of domination to another, an intensification. I will try to make sense of myself as a social subject, as produced contingently and historically across that shift, and allude to some struggles and resistance to not being governed thus—another kind of fiction perhaps. This will encompass both my experience of education, very briefly at school and at university and the evolution and reorientations of my intellectual preoccupations as a researcher and “scholar.” There is a class, social class, sub-text to some of this; but I will not dwell on that. I have written about it before.
Let us try this. As I say, I want to write myself as a social subject, or rather two contrasting and incoherent subjects, two historically contingent, unstable subjects, and the foreshadow of a third. One was an Enlightenment subject, produced in a world defined epistemologically by rationality and progress; the other is a Neoliberal subject produced by self-interest, competition, and profit as individual dispositions and as the solution to social problems of any kind. The latter did not erase the former but overlaid, colonised, and distorted. The third is ill-defined, a struggle in process and it will continue so.
So, this is an account of discomforts, misalignments, and a long circular journey from school and back again; from loving and then hating school; from wanting to “save” it, to wanting to erase it. It is also an account in which my singularity is exaggerated far too much. The opportunities I have had, the things I have thought and written, and the wisdom I have acquired, such as it is, have been a collective effort. I have been supported, encouraged, facilitated, stimulated, criticised, informed by, and learned from a long list of teachers, colleagues, and collaborators, and my life-partner, Trinidad.
I would have been able to think much less well without them. It is difficult to find the right words to express how grateful I am.
Summary: This paper explores Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, advancing the working hypothesis that these reflections emerge at the intersection of three key ideas that Wittgenstein decisively resists. First, Wittgenstein challenges the assumption that language games can be analyzed independently of the “vital” or “cultural” practices in which they are embedded. Second, he rejects the positivist notion that the progress of natural science will eventually render religion obsolete. Third, and most pointedly, he disputes the idea of a “universal grammar” underlying religious practices — a supposed structure hidden beneath the surface diversity of religious expressions. Through his remarks, Wittgenstein not only offers a powerful critique of the search for hidden essences — emphasizing the irreducibly plural and context-dependent nature of religious language — but also lays the groundwork for the methodological orientation that will characterize his later philosophical investigations.
ABSTRACT The invitation to reflect on the ‘books that made me’ indulges in a necessary albeit seductive fiction, namely, that reading unfolds causally, that intellectual life can be traced through a stable sequence of influences, and that books play into the creation of coherent subjects. This essay proceeds from a somewhat different proposition. Working through and alighting from four texts, namely, Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I consider reading as a practice of interruption and of undoing. Rather than recounting a genealogy of intellectual formation, the essay explores how books participate in a processual deterritorialisation of thought and in a concomitant unsettling of geographical sensibilities. What emerges is less a narrative of influence than an indeterminate cartography of encounters, misreadings, and affects through which theory becomes immanent to life.
Joe Gerlach· Social & Cultural Geogra...· 0 citations
“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare tells us, “and all the men and women merely players.” But what does this mean, philosophically? Are all actors “merely” players, or do the best of them undergo a transformation in becoming something other than who they are? Are our own identities similarly slippery? Who is the real author of the play in which we find ourselves? To what degree does the very language we use control our thoughts and speech?
This book addresses these questions across strikingly different scenarios: ancient Greece, sixteenth-century Italy, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Germany. In each case the contrast between linear and non-linear styles of reasoning is seen to be a major source of conflict, from the contentious exchanges in sixteenth-century Europe between the Church and the supporters of modern science, to the nineteenth-century shift in scholarship from straightforward analysis to hermeneutical interpretation, and to the crisis in twentieth-century thought forced by the need to think and feel as an embodied self beyond language. This work should find its target audience in advanced undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, and in an educated audience outside of academia.
The aim of this commentary is to make “Being and Time” accessible in terms of its fundamental conceptual structure and its extraordinary wealth of ideas, and to reveal the book’s guiding themes in their systematic interconnection. To this end, references to both Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology are indispensable. An interpretative approach that does justice to the systematic significance of such a reference to transcendental philosophy remains a desideratum of research, despite the now almost unmanageable volume of secondary literature. The present interpretation analyses Heidegger’s magnum opus within the framework of a close reading of the text. The occasionally ‘jargon-like’ nature of his language cannot be avoided throughout; however, the commentary attempts to reduce it as far as possible. At the same time, the exposition goes beyond the letter of the text where the argumentation requires further explanation or interpretative clarification. The commentary is framed by a contextualising introduction and a concluding section which recapitulates the train of thought in “Being and Time” once again in concise form, addresses Heidegger’s transcendentalism, and summarises the analysis of time central to the work. A final section is devoted to the connection between “Being and Time” and Heidegger’s ‘error’.
Abstract Realism about metaphysics states that metaphysics seeks, and can sometimes succeed in discovering, valuable truths. One version of realism about metaphysics, which I call Structural Realism, holds that although many ordinary truths about the world seem to require the existence of certain things with particular properties, we cannot actually draw metaphysical conclusions from these truths because they are not stated in a way that “matches” or represents the intrinsic structure of reality (they do not “carve at the joints” of nature). In this paper, I clarify this view and distinguish two forms of it. I show that the more extreme version cannot be correct because a constitutive aim of language use is communication; I argue for this using a novel, teleological account of constitutive aims. I then critique the more moderate version of the theory on the grounds that it would render metaphysics irrelevant to other areas of philosophy.
