Wittgenstein (Ludwig) Archives

Uncategorized

Was Wittgenstein a Realist or an Antirealist?

January 25, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

(A while back, in my post “The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer”, promised a series of philosophically oriented posts that would explore “whether Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Dewey successfully evaded the dualisms they struggled with, or how well they manage to avoid the extremes of nihilism and ...

Uncategorized

The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I think it safe to say that 1971 was a watershed year for philosophy, in that it saw the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Prior to the publication of that work, political philosophy was in a kind of self-imposed exile. Still in thrall to the metaethical constraints of ...

Uncategorized

Common Decency: Kurt Vonnegut as Moralist

November 25, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Kurt Vonnegut is often remembered these days as a humorist, a cynic in the Mark Twain mold, a novelist whose imagination ranged far and wide but lacked gravitas, even though he dealt with tragic themes like the Dresden firebombing and the fictional apocalypse of ice-nine. These recollections are, I believe, ...

Education

Canonized Thoughts, or Thoughts on the Canon

September 1, 2015 • by Angelica Stathopoulos

In 2013, I applied to the Graduate Program in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. I had for some time nourished a persistent fantasy regarding that specific program at that specific school. My fantasy regarded the canon. At The New School, I imagined, the philosophical canon is surely ...

Uncategorized

Religion, Essentialism, and Violence

Cherry picking on the left

June 15, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

There has been a contentious theme circulating around the Left-wing blogosphere for quite a while now, sharpened by the atrocities of ISIS and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. The theme usually begins with the accusation that Islam as a religion is soft on violence, a consequence of its vehement rejection of ...