Robert Vinten

https://www.anthempress.com/anthem-studies-in-wittgenstein/wittgenstein-and-the-social-sciences-hb

Review: “Robert Vinten has produced an impressively meticulous and wide-ranging discussion of how Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy can revitalize the social sciences. There is insight and scholarship on every page. This important book will open up new possibilities for both philosophers and social scientists.” —Leonidas Tsilipakos, Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK

La pregunta si Wittgenstein fue un filósofo liberal ha recibido menos atención que la de si fue un filósofo conservador, pero, como Robert Greenleaf Brice ha defendido recientemente, hay muchos indicios de liberalismo en algumas de sus observaciones, y algunos filósofos, como Richard Eldridge, han sostenido que hay un cierto tipo de liberalismo que se sigue de la filosofía de su última etapa. Richard Rorty ha sacado también conclusiones liberales a partir de la perspectiva filosófica que se basa en la obra de Wittgenstein y Alice Crary ha sugerido que las lecciones aprendidas de su propria interpretación de Wittgenstein "reflejan en formas de vida social que incorporan los ideales de la democracia liberal".
https://revistas.usantotomas.edu.co/index.php/analisis/article/view/4755

https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=28852000005

http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1666-485X2017000100005&lng=es&nrm=iso

Resumen: Tanto Perry Anderson como Alex Callinicos y Terry Eagleton han desarrollado un trabajo cultural y filosófico sobresaliente. Sin embargo, los tres han malinterpretado la obra de Ludwig Wittgenstein. La concepción de la filosofía de Wittgenstein no está en tensión con la filosofía marxista en el modo en el que ellos lo sugirieron y Wittgenstein no cometió los errores que le atribuyeron Anderson, Callinicos e Eagleton. Los marxistas se beneficiarían si consideraran más seriamente la obra de Wittgenstein porque ello los ayudaría a comprender más claramente la naturaleza de los problemas epistemológicos y metafísicos como así también los ayudaría a fortalecer y complementar sus propias concepciones de las confusiones filosóficas. En este trabajo examinaré los errores de sus interpretaciones de Wittgenstein y espero también poder proporcionar alguna indicación de las razones por las cuales Wittgenstein es considerado por muchos como el filósofo más importante del siglo XX. Abstract: Perry Anderson, Alex Callinicos, and Terry Eagleton have all produced excellent cultural and philosophical work. However, all three have misinterpreted the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy is not in tension with Marxist philosophy in the ways that they suggest and Wittgenstein did

RESUMEN
Este trabajo examina la centralidad de la acción en las disciplinas sociales y las implicaciones de este con el fin de saber si las disciplinas sociales pueden ser llamadas científicas. Se examinan y rechazan diversas razones que califican las disciplinas sociales de científicas: 1) la afirmación de que las disciplinas sociales son reducibles a las ciencias naturales; 2) la alegación, de Donald Davidson de que las razones de la acción deben interpretarse en términos causales; 3) la afirmación de que las disciplinas sociales emplean o deberían emplear las methodologías de las ciencias naturales. La cuestíon del progreso en las disciplinas sociales es examinada críticamente. ¿ Deben adoptar los métodos de las ciencias naturales los académicos que trabajan en sociología, economía, política, geografía humana y filosofía a la aparente falta de progreso en las disciplinas sociales? Mi repuesta es negativa y comparto los puntos de vista de John Dupré contra Hutchinson, Read y Sharrock al afirmar que las disciplinas sociales pueden considerarse científicas ya que existe algo como ciencia social.

PALABRAS CLAVE
Acción, ciencias sociales, reduccionismo, progreso, causalidad.

ABSTRACT
The question of whether Wittgenstein was a liberal philosopher has received less attention than the question of whether he was a conservative philosopher but, as Robert Greenleaf Brice has recently argued, there are hints of liberalism in some of his remarks, and some philosophers, like Richard Eldridge have argued that a kind of liberalism follows from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Richard Rorty has also drawn liberal conclusions from a philosophical viewpoint which draws on Wittgenstein’s work and Alice Crary has suggested that the lessons learned from her own interpretation of Wittgenstein are “reflected in forms of social life that embody the ideals of liberal democracy”. Here I will argue both that Wittgenstein was not a liberal and that his philosophy does not imply a liberal viewpoint. The authors discussed here do not demonstrate that any broad ideological conclusions follow from Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks.
THE ARTICLE CAN BE DOWNLOADED VIA THIS LINK: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5912704


KEYWORDS: Wittgenstein, Liberalism, Liberal Democracy, Brice, Eldridge, Rorty, Crary.

J.  C.  Nyiri  has  argued  in  a  series  of  papers  that  Ludwig  Wittgenstein  is  a  conservative philosopher.  In  ‘Wittgenstein  1929-31:  The  Turning  Back’  Nyiri  cites  Wittgenstein’s admiration for Grillparzer as well as overtly philosophical passages from On Certainty in  support  of  that  thesis.  I  argue,  in  opposition  to  Nyiri,  that  we  should  separate  Wittgenstein’s  political  remarks  from  his  philosophical remarks  and  that  nothing  Wittgenstein says in his philosophical work obviously implies a conservative viewpoint, or any other kind of political viewpoint. In his philosophical work Wittgenstein was concerned with  untangling  conceptual  confusions  rather  than  with  putting  forward  a  political viewpoint  and  the  two  kinds  of  activities  are  quite  different.  There  is,  however,  some evidence of elements of conservatism in the stances that Wittgenstein took on political issues  although  there  is  also  some  evidence  of sympathy  for  left-wing  views,  particularly  during  the  ‘late’  period  of  Wittgenstein’s  work  after  he  returned  to  philosophy  at the end of the 1920s. Wittgenstein’s philosophical work cannot be claimed by people of any  particular  political  persuasion  as  their  own  but  it  can  be  used  to  untangle  philosophical problems in the work of a great variety of political philosophies.

The prominent literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, is one of a limited number of Marxist theorists to have taken Wittgenstein’s ideas seriously. He wrote the script for Derek Jarman’s film about Wittgenstein and his work in cultural theory is clearly indebted, to some extent, to Wittgenstein. His Ideology: an Introduction employs the Wittgensteinian notions of ‘family resemblance’ and ‘forms of life’ and he also leans on Wittgenstein’s remarks about epistemological matters in it. Among the novels inspired by Wittgenstein there is one by Eagleton—Saints and Scholars—that has a semi-fictionalised version of Wittgenstein meeting in Dublin with James Connolly, Nikolai Bakhtin and Leopold Bloom. Eagleton has clearly both endeavoured to understand Wittgenstein as a person and engaged with Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. In this paper I will argue that Eagleton’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, in his paper ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’, is defective in various respects, but I will conclude that the project of uniting the insights of Wittgenstein and Marx is nonetheless a sound one.

I  start  by  arguing  that  Mackie’s  claim  that  there  are  no  objective  values  is  a nonsensical one. I do this by ‘assembling reminders’ of the correct use of the term ‘values’ and by  examining  the  grammar  of  moral  propositions  à  la  Wittgenstein.  I  also  examine Hare’s thought experiment which is used to demonstrate “that no real issue can be built around the objectivity or otherwise of moral values” before briefly looking at Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’.  In  the  final  section  I  propose  that  Robert  Arrington’s  ‘conceptual  relativism’, inspired by Wittgenstein, helps to make our use of moral language more perspicuous and avoids the problems faced by Mackie.

The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. (Karl Marx, The German Ideology)


It is often supposed that Marxist philosophy and Wittgensteinian philosophy are not just very different but that they are opposed to each other. Wittgenstein was notoriously against theorizing in philosophy whereas Marx tried to give a scientific account of human society and culture. Marx famously said that ‘[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, while Wittgenstein was concerned with conceptual considerations and had very little to say about workers' struggles. My aim in this paper is to show that these apparent differences dissolve once one realizes that Marx and Wittgenstein thought differently about the nature of philosophy. In the course of coming to this conclusion I will look at misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy from Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos as well as at Wittgensteinian criticisms of Marxist philosophers such as Leon Trotsky, John Rees and Slavoj Žižek. I will conclude that Marxist philosophers stand to gain from a clearer understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy and that Wittgensteinians can similarly gain from an appreciation of the kind of analysis of economics, society and politics offered by Marxists.

Guy Axtell's new book, as the title suggests, is an attempt to assess the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. In attempting to delineate those limits Axtell thinks that it is useful to employ the notions of luck and risk in examining how reasonable a particular religious (or atheistic) stance is. A central concern of the book is with religious groups which exclude others in some way and which ascribe traits to those other groups that are very unlike the traits the group ascribes to themselves.
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/witt.2020.11.issue-1/witt-2020-0020/witt-2020-0020.xml?format=INT

Tsilipakos is not the first to have applied  Wittgensteinian  methods to social theory. Perhaps most famously Peter  Winch  published The  Idea  of  a Social  Science (1958)  a  few years after Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) appeared and many other philosophers have taken inspiration from Wittgenstein in their work on social theory since that time. Nonetheless, Tsilipakos’s book is certainly a fresh take on the relevance of Wittgensteinian methods to the social sciences and the ‘theoretical’ work that he examines in the book mostly dates from after the turn  of the  millennium. It is a book that many of those currently working in the social sciences would greatly benefit from reading.

If you would like to attend the 'Wittgenstein, Religion, and Cognitive Science' workshop on December 15th 2020 (via Zoom) please contact me. Speakers at the workshop include Roger Trigg, Olympia Panagiotidou, Hans Van Eyghen, Gorazd Andrejc, and Rita McNamara (schedule and abstracts in the document attached).

On 25th September 2020 I was the respondent to Juliet Floyd's paper 'Wittgenstein on Ethics: Working through Lebensformen' as part of the Zoom seminar series Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Times of Crisis:
https://online-witt-events.weebly.com/schedule.html

If you are interested in attending a Zoom workshop on Wittgenstein, Nature, and Religion on 29th July 2020 please send me an email and I can send you the Zoom link. The schedule for the workshop is in the attached Word document. Speakers at the workshop include myself (Robert Vinten), Alexandra Dias Fortes, Modesto Gomez Alonso, Thomas D. Carroll, Gorazd Andrejc, Guy Axtell, and Duncan Pritchard

On 3rd March 2020 I gave a response to Etienne Balibar’s paper ‘Ontological difference, anthropological difference, and equal liberty’ at the Translation, Hospitality, and Equal Liberty workshop at the Law School, Universidade Nova, Lisbon.
The webpage for the workshop can be found here: https://cosmopolites.wixsite.com/balibar
Etienne Balibar’s paper can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejop.12512
My response to Etienne Balibar’s paper was recorded and the video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb3vT6kD7BA&t=619s

Paterson is a wonderfully gentle and gently amusing film. It is almost entirely without plot but that is no complaint. It has a rhythm to it, revolving around the daily routines of the protagonists — Paterson (Adam Driver), a poet and bus driver, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), his wife, and their dog, Marvin — and it has a lovely, deliberate, serene tone...

In the spring of 2020 I delivered three seminars on hinge epistemology and religious belief for the University of Porto. The document here contains descriptions of the content of those seminars and suggested reading material. The three seminars were on (1) Wittgenstein, hinge epistemology and religious belief (2) Duncan Pritchard's Quasi-Fideism and (3) Gorazd Andrejc's take on the role of hinges in understanding religious belief.