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Ludwig Wittgenstein (ludwig + wittgenstein)
Selected AbstractsLanguage Games and Natural ReactionsJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2004David Rubinstein Ludwig Wittgenstein imagines a variety of eccentric social practices,like a tribe trained "to give no expression of feeling of any kind". But he also speaks of "the common behavior of mankind" that is rooted in "natural/primitive reactions". This emphasis on the uniformities of human behavior raises questions about the plausibility of some of his imagined language games. Indeed, it suggests the claim of evolutionary psychologists that there are biologically based human universals that shape social practices. But in contrast to E.O. Wilson's belief that "genes hold culture on a leash", Wittgenstein sees culture as a mediator,rather than a conduit,of "natural reactions". This suggests that social science can incorporate the claims of evolutionary psychology without scanting the centrality of culture in action and allows that nature can be overwhelmed by culture. [source] If Wittgenstein and Lyotard could talk with Jack and Jill: towards postmodern family therapyJOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY, Issue 3 2001Lois Shawver This essay uses a literary device to create a transcript of an imagined conversation between postmodern philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-François Lyotard with two family therapy trainees, Jack and Jill, in order to explain key postmodern concepts as they might relate to family therapy. These include Lyotard's concepts of a differend, paralogy, metanarrative, and Wittgenstein's concepts of a language game, language game confusions and family resemblance. Other postmodern theorists and therapists make cameo appearances in the conversation, tying their own ideas to the topics under discussion. The essay also addresses the criticism of postmodernism raised by Barbara Held. [source] Self Examination, Philosophical Education and SpiritualityJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 4 2000Alven M. Neiman As a contribution to thinking about the possibility of spiritual education, I examine Pierre Hadot's important distinction between ,philosophy as theory', a detached investigation into ,the natures of things', and ,philosophy as a way of life', practical exercises which Socrates introduced as a means of ,learning to die'. While most philosophy today amounts to ,philosophy as theory', ,philosophy as a way of life' remains a respectable and viable tradition and a most exacting education of the spirit. I illustrate it here through an examination of some of its practitioners such as St Bernard of Clairvaux, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Etty Hillesum. [source] The Relational,Linguistic Spiral: A Model of Language for TheologyTHE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 4 2002Timothy J. Crutcher This article attempts to sketch out a view of language as a relational,linguistic spiral by discussing some implications of the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein for language in general. Language is cast as a spiral which revolves around a center of ,human relationality' that anchors all our speech and concepts but which revolves in an ever,widening way into an arena of meaning we call language. Language creates linguistic space for experience and invites one into these new experiences. The borders of our language are thus not the absolute limits of our world but the admitted limits of our experience. Because the enterprise of language is inherently open, there must be a space for theological language and for the possibility at least of the kind of experiences described therein. Tracing the relational ,vectors' involved in language can also provide a platform for theological and even inter,religious dialogue. [source] Infinite Recess: perspective and play in Magritte's La Condition HumaineART HISTORY, Issue 1 2002Eric Wargo The paintings of Rene Magritte, with their unsettling of common-sense relationships among objects, images and words, have been compared by many critics to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 1933 painting La Condition Humaine, for instance, depicts a painting that exactly covers a ,real' landscape outside a window , thus raising questions about the ,location' of perception and thought. But Magritte's uncanny use of perspective, and his depictions of spaces that have ambiguous depth, suggest that an equally helpful interpretive framework to that of Wittgenstein may be that of psychoanalysis, particularly the object-relations theory of D.W. Winnicot and the latter's concept of ,transitional phenomena'. La Condition Humaine, for example, exemplifies how, by both negating and affirming the opacity of the picture plane, perspective transforms the painting into a transitional object that is both ,there' and ,not there' simultaneously. Many of the painter's works, his ,window' series in particular, suggest approaching Albertian perspective itself as a question of object-relating, the simultaneous search for autonomy and ontological security through play. An understanding of how Magritte's ambiguous spaces suggest both security as well as open-ended possibility can help to link his work not only with the traditions of Renaissance perspective and its modernist critics, but also with the aesthetic of the sublime and its iconography of colossal, indifferent nature. Sublimity may be interpreted psychoanalytically as nostalgia for the scale of childhood experience , for the world viewed as an enormous room in which small objects assume monumental physical and symbolic proportions. 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