Wittgenstein and Democratic Politics

Wittgenstein and Democratic Politics
Author: Lotar Rasiński
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040188850

This volume demonstrates how Wittgenstein’s philosophy can illuminate our understanding of politics and open new ways of conceptualizing democratic theory and practice. Its focus is on language, reason and communication as central to identifying present confusions in our understanding of democracy. The book seeks to engage Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights, aiming to go beyond the dichotomous oppositions and conceptual entanglements pervading existing frameworks of social and political theories of democracy. Its key topic is the irreplaceable role of dialogue in civic democratic engagement as a condition for the understanding of self and others and, hence, for political life in which reason has a role. Indeed, it presents concrete examples of how Wittgenstein can be constructively applied to current political discourse. Part I of the volume focuses on the general idea of applying Wittgenstein’s philosophy to political and democratic theory and explains the deep and intrinsic relation between Wittgenstein’s thought and politics. Part II discusses Wittgenstein’s concrete concepts as illuminating for understanding selected aspects of democratic politics. Part III deals with a possible exchange between Wittgenstein and other political thinkers, especially Hannah Arendt. Wittgenstein and Democratic Politics will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, political philosophy and democratic theory.

Wittgenstein and Justice

Wittgenstein and Justice
Author: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1985
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780520054714

Hanna Pitkin argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy offers a revolutionary new conception of language, and hence a new and deeper understanding of ourselves and the world of human institutions and action.

Transformative Philosophy

Transformative Philosophy
Author: Thomas Wallgren
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780739113615

125.00 The recent cross-fruition between analytical philosophy and continental philosophical traditions has stimulated an intense interest in the philosophy of philosophy. At stake in the debate is our understanding of the role of philosophy and of the use of argument and reason in culture.Transformative Philosophy articulates a new conception of philosophy through a discussion of salient themes in the analytical tradition, in the work of the later Wittgenstein, and in critical theory. Wallgren traces the genealogy leading to the present impasse on the discourse of philosophy; discusses authors such as Quine, Peter Winch, Michael Dummett, and Ernst Tugendhat; and considers Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and of the private language argument. Drawing on an analysis of the relations between truth, communal agreement, and the role of the personal will in philosophical argumentation, Transformative Philosophy develops an image of philosophy as a transformative care for self and others. This work makes a great contribution to the study of philosophy and social theory

Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy

Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy
Author: Rupert Read
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 100028882X

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein ‘school’, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations: 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130–3, 149–151, 186, 198–201, 217, and 284–6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others. Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation.

Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics

Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics
Author: Michael Temelini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1442646330

In Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics, Michael Temelini outlines an innovative new approach to understanding the political implications of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Most political philosophers who have approached Wittgenstein have done so through the idea of therapeutic skepticism, implying politics that privilege conservatism or non-interference. Temelini interprets Wittgenstein differently, emphasizing his view that we come to understand the meanings of words and actions through a dialogue of comparison with other cases. Examining the work of Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully, Temelini highlights the ways in which all three, despite their differences, share a common debt to that dialogical approach. A cogent explanation of how Wittgenstein's epistemology and ontology can shed light on political issues and offer a solution to political challenges, Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics highlights the importance of Wittgensteinian thinking in contemporary political science, political theory, and political philosophy.

Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry

Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry
Author: John G. Gunnell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2020-02-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022666127X

When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual and practical authority, they typically assume that truth, reality, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our conventional discursive practices. John G. Gunnell argues for conventional realism as a theory of social phenomena and an approach to the study of politics. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s critique of “mentalism” and traditional realism, Gunnell argues that everything we designate as “real” is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. The terms “reality” and “world” have no meaning outside the contexts of specific claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. And rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the “mind” is simply our linguistic capacities. Taking readers through contemporary forms of mentalism and realism in both philosophy and American political science and theory, Gunnell also analyzes the philosophical challenges to these positions mounted by Wittgenstein and those who can be construed as his successors.

Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom

Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom
Author: James Tully
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2008-12-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113947331X

These two ambitious volumes from one of the world's most celebrated political philosophers present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. Professor Tully takes the reader step-by-step through the principal debates in political theory and the major types of political struggle today. These volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory. In this second volume, Professor Tully studies networks and civic struggles over global or imperial relations of inequality, dependency, exploitation and environmental degradation beyond the state. The final chapter brings all of the author's resonant themes together in a new way of thinking about global and local citizenship, and of political theory in relation to it. This forms a powerful conclusion to a major intervention from a vital and distinctive voice in contemporary thought.

The Democratic Paradox

The Democratic Paradox
Author: Chantal Mouffe
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1789604710

From the theory of 'deliberative democracy' to the politics of the 'third way', the present Zeitgeist is characterized by attempts to deny what Chantal Mouffe contends is the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Far from being signs of progress, such ideas constitute a serious threat to democratic institutions. Taking issue with John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas on one side, and the political tenets of Blair, Clinton and Schrder on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy in which the category of the 'adversary' plays a central role. She draws on the work of Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, to propose a new understanding of democracy which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism in its workings.

Practical Action

Practical Action
Author: Albert Ogien
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1527517926

This book delineates a pluralist and dynamic model of practical action which thoughtfully takes into account the reflexive conception of agency that is, by and large, prevailing in current social sciences research. Such a model will challenge the one the cognitive sciences have rather successfully imposed on our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action. To make this model available, the book compares Wittgenstein’s theses on knowing, the pragmatist outlook on inquiry and the analysis of action in common offered by interactionist sociology. It thus shows how an integrated theory of practical action would warrant a radically contextual conception of human individual and collective behaviour.