Suchergebnisse

pt. I. Westermarck and the emergence of twentieth-century social anthropology / sub-editor, Olli Lagerspetz -- pt. II. Westermarck as a precursor of evolutionary psychology / sub-editor, Jan Antfolk -- pt. III. The emotional origins of morality / sub-editor, Camilla Kronqvist -- pt. IV. Evolutionary psychology and morality : critical perspectives / sub-editor, Ylva Gustafsson.

Even though several branches of philosophy meet in the notion of trust, it has nevertheless been largely neglected by mainstream philosophy. Arguably, most existing analyses fail to give a just account of the reality of human experience. The author believes that this is not a coincidence but symptomatic of the irrelevance of received ideas of rationality for crucial areas of human agency. `Individualist' approaches, he argues, can be accused precisely of ignoring fundamental questions about the nature of the individual. Expanding on the works of Wittgenstein, Winch, and others, in Trust: The Tacit Demand the author demonstrates the conceptual significance of our dependence on others. The discussion stretches over philosophical psychology, epistemology, political philosophy and moral philosophy. The book may be of interest to anyone in philosophy, psychology or the social sciences

Abstract
After the publication of Wittgenstein's posthumous work the question was raised whether that work involved idealist tendencies. The debate also engaged Wittgenstein's immediate students. Resistance to presumed idealist positions had been ideologically central to G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and other representatives of realism and early analytic philosophy. While Wittgenstein disagreed with them in key respects, he accepted their tendentious definition of 'idealism' at face value and bequeathed it to his students. The greatest flaw in the Realists' view on idealism was their assumption of symmetry between realist and idealist approaches. For Realists, the chief task of philosophy was to establish what kinds of thing exist, and they took Idealists to offer an alternative account of that. However, the Idealists' guiding concern was rather to investigate the subjective conditions of knowledge. In this respect, Wittgenstein's conception of philosophical method was closer to theirs than to that of the Realists. This is especially obvious in his rejection of Moore's idea of immediate knowledge. Ultimately, the trouble with Wittgenstein was not that he endorsed any kind of idealist ontology. It was his refusal to deliver the expected realist ontological messages on the supposed question of whether reality is independent of language or otherwise.

The focus is on two texts by Wittgenstein where 'forms of life' constitute the pivot of an extended argument: 'Cause and Effect' and the discussion of colour concepts in 'Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology'. The author argues that forms of life are above all Wittgenstein's response to the question what it is to analyse a concept. The remark that forms of life are 'given' and must be 'accepted' is a natural corollary of Wittgenstein's antireductionism and his idea of philosophy as a descriptive enterprise. Wittgenstein is, however, not offering forms of life as the ultimate foundation of our statements about causation or colour. He shifts the focus to the questioning activity itself. Our inquiries and descriptions imply conceptions of how to look and what to accept as verification. Forms of life are given, not because they cannot be analysed further, but because the investigation will take them as given. Comparisons are made, on the one hand, with G.H. von Wright's interventionist account of the concept of causation and, on the other hand, with the two currently dominant interpretations of 'forms of life': the 'linguistic community' view and the 'naturalist' view.

Review of Wittgenstein and Modernism edited by Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé.

Review of Chantal Bax. Subjectivity after Wittgenstein. The Post-Cartesian Subject and the 'Death of Man'. London: Bloomsbury 2011 (hb), 2012 (pb).