Wittgenstein on the Place of the Concept “Noticing an Aspect”

Seeing aspects is a dominant theme in Wittgenstein's 1940s writings on philosophy of psychology. Interpreters disagree about what Wittgenstein was trying to do in these discussions. I argue that interpreting Wittgenstein's observations about the interrelations between “noticing an aspect” and other psychological concepts as a systematic theory of aspect‐seeing diminishes key lessons of Wittgenstein's explorations: these interrelations are enormously complicated and “noticing an aspect” resists neat classification. Further, Wittgenstein invites us to engage in his “placing activity,” and by doing so we are building a skill that is valuable for enabling us to help ourselves when we encounter conceptual difficulties.     

“Faith Alone”—Primus Inter Pares: Welcome to the Banquet

Faith alone represents the primus inter pares of the sixteenth‐century Reformation's four solas. Gary Simpson introduces five authors who critically explore and creatively extend the doctrine of justification by faith alone as Dialog with its Fall issues (2013–2017) leans into the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation (2017).     

“The Experience of Left and Right” Meets the Physics of Left and Right

I consider an argument, due to Geoffrey Lee, that we can know a priori from the left‐right asymmetrical character of experience that our brains are left‐right asymmetrical. Lee's argument assumes a premise he calls relationism, which I show is well‐supported by the best philosophical picture of spacetime. I explain why Lee's relationism is compatible with left‐right asymmetrical laws. I then show that the conclusion of Lee's argument is not as strong or surprising as he makes it out to be.     

“Rethinking” the Preface of the Tractatus

This paper is principally a re‐evaluation of the meaning of Denken in the puzzling third paragraph of the Preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It shows that there is a uniform misreading of this paragraph throughout the literature and suggests a corrected reading and some of its implications. The paper asserts that the influential “New Wittgenstein” reading of the Preface as containing Wittgenstein's all important “framing” thoughts on the Tractatus, is correct. However it also argues that the anti‐metaphysical reading the New view draws by way of its frame thesis is incorrect since it is still premised on the incorrect reading of the Preface's third paragraph. With the correct reading of the third paragraph, the paper shows the anti‐metaphysical reading of the Tractatus lacks substantive support.     

Using Twitter to Teach Reader‐Oriented Biblical Interpretation: “Tweading” the Gospel of Mark

Twitter offers an engaging way to introduce students to reader‐oriented interpretation of the Bible. The exercise described here introduces students to the idea that the reader has a role in the production of a text's meaning, which thus varies from reader to reader. Twitter enables us to capture the real‐time thoughts of a variety of respondents to the text of Mark as it is read aloud. Students can concretely observe the effects of particular textual moments on individual respondents as well as analyze their general interpretive stances with regard to the text as a whole. Students come to grasp that the meaning of the text varies depending on the reader, setting the stage for more complex theoretical discussion of reader‐response theory, the reader's role in the production of meaning, the adjudication of “allowed” and “disallowed” interpretations, and the appropriateness of “reader‐response” criticisms for texts that were composed to be encountered orally.     

“I am NN”: A Reconstruction of Anscombe's “The First Person”

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”.     

“Patching up Virtue”

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter‐narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper‐Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term.     

“A Big Piece of News”: Théodule Ribot and the Founding of the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger

This paper describes the founding of the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger by Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) in 1876. Like the English journal Mind, which was launched the same year, this journal introduced the new scientific psychology to France. Its founding increased Ribot's scientific credibility in psychology and led him to be regarded as the most distinguished French specialist in the field. First, we review the state of French philosophy at the time of the journal's founding, focusing on the three main French schools of thought in philosophy and on their relations with psychology. Second, after analyzing the preface written by Ribot in the first issue of the Revue Philosophique, we examine how the journal was received in French philosophical circles. Finally, we discuss its subsequent history, highlighting its founder's promotion of new ideas in psychology.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND “REVEALED RELIGION”: SOME PROBLEMS WITH CAIAZZA'S ANALYSIS

Abstract. Instead of focusing my remarks on John Caiazza's interesting and important thesis about the way in which modern technology is drastically secularizing our culture today, I examine the frame within which he sets out his thesis, a frame I regard as seriously flawed. Caiazza's argument is concerned with the broad range of religion/science/technology issues in today's world, but the only religion that he seems to take seriously is what he calls “revealed religion” (Christianity). His consideration of religion is thus narrow and cramped, and this makes it difficult to assess properly the significance of what he calls techno‐secularism. I suggest that employing a broader conception of religion would enable us to see more clearly what is really at stake in the rise of techno‐secularism. Instead of defining the issues in the polarizing terms of revealed religion versus secularity, I argue for a more integrative approach in which concepts are developed that can bring together and hold together major religious insights and themes with modern scientific thinking. If, for example, we give up the anthropomorphism of the traditional idea of God as creator and think of God as simply creativity, it becomes possible to integrate theological insights with current scientific thinking and to formulate the issues posed by the rise of techno‐secularism in a more illuminating way. This in turn should facilitate effective address of those issues.     

THE “AS‐YET SITUATION” IN WINNICOTT'S “FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS”: YOUR FATHER “NEVER DID YOU THE HONOR OF”… YET

The author proposes a new hypothesis in relation to Winnicott's “Fragment of an Analysis”: that as early as 1955, in the case described in this text, Winnicott is creating the paternal function in his patient's psychic functioning by implicitly linking his interpretations regarding the father to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit. The author introduces an original clinical concept, the as‐yet situation, which she has observed in her own clinical work, as well as in Winnicott's analysis of the patient described in “Fragment of an Analysis” (1955).     

“It Can Happen to You”: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management

This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape prevention's habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a woman's best line of defense. 1 suggest changes that must be made in the anti‐rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.     

The Tactual Ground,Immersion, and the “Space Between”

I ask whether figure‐ground structure can be realized in touch, and, if so, how. Drawing on the taxonomy of touch sketched in Katz's 1925 The World of Touch, I argue that the form of touch that is relevant to such consideration is a species of immersed touch. I consider whether we can feel the space we are immersed in and, more specifically, the empty space against which the surfaces of objects, as I shall urge, “stand out.” Harnessing M. G. F. Martin's account of bodily awareness and touch, I defend a positive thesis, pace Graham Nerlich on whose The Shape of Space (1994) I otherwise rely, both to defend the supposition that empty space can in principle be felt and to argue that touching empty space is not a mere species of absence perception. Along the way, I defuse a causal worry that might be thought to arise in the case of touching empty space.     

Derrida's “Antigonanette”: On the Quasi‐Transcendental

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi‐transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi‐transcendental indicates a re(con)striction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi‐transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is not prior to the re(con)striction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi‐transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts.     

Questions of Proximity: “Woman's Place” in Derrick and Irigaray

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.     

“Superabundant Being”: Disambiguating Rilke and Heidegger

Rilke's impact on the generation of writers reshaping philosophy and theology during the interwar years is arguably without parallel. Within this constellation, the case of Heidegger as a reader of Rilke presents unique challenges. For Rilke's poetry neither quite allows for a wholly appropriative reading such as, for better or worse, Heidegger accords Hölderlin's oeuvre; nor can Heidegger quite bring himself to subject Rilke’s poetry to critical appraisal. Instead, Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as worked out in Part I of Being and Time (1927) and in his lectures on The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929) seems haunted by an intellectual and expressive debt to Rilke that he can neither acknowledge nor fully resolve. For to do so would be to confront a possibility of human finitude, so luminously traced in Rilke's Duino Elegies (1922), still defined by moments of transcendence – moments that can be captured in the fleeting plenitude of poetic intuition (Anschauung) and lyric image (Bild). Whereas von Balthasar, in volume 3 of his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939), reads Rilke as fundamentally embracing Heidegger’s notion of strictly immanent and finite Dasein, I argue that the oeuvre of the later Rilke, without being reclaimed for a metaphysical, let alone religious position, nevertheless is shaped, both intellectually and expressively, by insistent, if enigmatic, moments of transcendence.     

Criticising from “Outside”

I look at a disagreement between Elizabeth Anscombe, on the one hand, and Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some alien system of belief; and I look also at the question what Wittgenstein's view was. I try to show that our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language‐games, and I argue that an important element in our thinking about what is and is not real emerges in our response to conflicting modes of thought.     

“LONG LIVE THE WEEDS AND THE WILDERNESS YET”: REFLECTIONS ON A SECULAR AGE

While we are deeply appreciative of Taylor's A Secular Age, we nonetheless worry that his use of the immanent/transcendent duality may introduce a certain kind of Christian Constantinianism that he wants to disavow. In particular, we worry that the immanent/transcendent duality is far too formal in its character. In order to develop this concern, we draw on Talal Asad's account of the secular to suggest how liturgy may provide an alternative way of understanding as well as challenging Taylor's worries about “the immanent frame.”     

On Reinstating “Part I” and “Part II” to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

The Editors’ Preface to the fourth edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is disparaging of the earlier editorial efforts of G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees and in particular of their inclusion and titling of the material in “Part II”. I argue, on both historical and philosophical grounds, that the Editors have failed to refute the editorial decisions of Rhees and Anscombe – a failure born both of a neglect of the historical circumstances and Wittgenstein's own expressed hopes and intentions for his writings, and of a myopic understanding of his philosophy. Wittgenstein's legacy has not been well served by their interventions, which should be undone in future editions.     

“Idiographic” vis-à-vis “idiodynamic” in the historical perspective of personality theory: Remembering Gordon Allport, 1897–1997

The centenary of Gordon W. Allport provides an occasion for reappraising his special position regarding uniqueness in personality. Allport's theory of personality, as first presented in his 1937 textbook, highlighted the idiographic in conjunction with the nomothetic approach, and the fundamental unit in his formulation was the trait. He described common and unique traits as well as the unique organization of traits. In contradistinction, the idiodynamic orientation, introduced by Saul Rosenzweig in 1951 and, in more detail in 1958, focused on events which over a lifespan constitute an idioverse—a population of phenomenological events. Allport's original emphasis on the idiographic and his later confusion concerning idiodynamics, can, in considerable measure, be understood by recognizing the role of religious spirituality in his conception of the person. That conception, which derived from an early religious indoctrination, asserted itself with renewed vigor in his later years. His scientific conception of personality thus remained unconsummated, subordinated by him to the unsolvable mysteries of ontology which properly belong, he believed, in the domain of faith. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.