Convenor: Mihai Ometiță (ICUB Humanities Fellow)
For long, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was primarily associated with the Anglo-American analytic tradition, construed in opposition with the continental phenomenological tradition. In line with more recent strands of research, the seminar aims to challenge that traditional reception. We will explore the explicitly phenomenological project developed by Wittgenstein in manuscripts from late 1920s and early 1930s, namely, in his less known “middle period”, between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. We will discuss sections (provided in Romanian translation and the German original) from Manuscript 213 of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, and thus get an overview of the rise and fall of his phenomenological project. Among the themes in focus: the notion of phenomenological language; thought experiments vs. scientific experiments; immediate experience; visual, physical and Euclidian space; varieties of images (e.g. visual, mnemonic, cinematographic); memory time vs. historical time; the grammar of colours and their mixtures; the experience of pain and its communication.
Those interested to attend, please write to the seminar organizer: Mihai Ometiță – mihai.ometita(at)icub.unibuc.ro.
Venue
Wittgenstein’s Parting With Phenomenology
The research seminar questions the traditional association of Wittgenstein’s philosophy with the Anglo-American analytic tradition, understood in opposition with the Continental phenomenological tradition. We will focus on an under-explored episode in Wittgenstein’s development: his sketch of an explicitly phenomenological project in manuscripts around 1930, as well as his coming to criticize various methodological assumptions and expectations of that project. Significantly, his critiques pertain also to various aspects of classical phenomenology, paralleling reservations towards it that emerged on the continent in the meantime. Among the themes in focus: the desideratum of a pure description, the notion of immediate experience, the use of indexicals such as “here” and “now”, memory in relation to perception and history, first-person vs. third-person expressions of pain, the idealist temptations of philosophy.
The seminar meets once every two weeks (in weekly alternation with the Permanent Seminar on Recent Phenomenology) on Wednesdays 18:00-20:00, in the Office of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology (1 Dimitrie Brândză St.).
First meeting: Thursday, 21 November.
Second meeting: Wednesday, 4 December
The seminar will meet once every two weeks – in alternation with the Permanent Seminar on Recent Phenomenology – on Wednesdays 18:00-20:00, in the Office of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology (1 Dimitrie Brândză St.)
First meeting: Wednesday, 27 February 2019, 18.00.
Wednesday, 22 May 2019, 18h – Babrak Ibrahimy (University of Derby, UK), ‘Einstimmung’ and ways of life in Wittgenstein – a political interpretation
Faculty of Philosophy, Titu Maiorescu Room (Splaiul Independentei 204)
Abstract: Wittgenstein uses the terms Einstimmung (consensus) and Lebensformen (ways of life) in a peculiar way. In his own work, they are rarely used politically, and yet, for students of political theory it is hard to see how these terms can been understood apolitically. It is therefore not surprising that, while always implicitly present, recent years have seen a rise of explicit use of Wittgenstein’s work in political theory. In this paper, I want to borrow Wittgenstein’s insights and connect his view to Carl’s Schmitt’s notion of the political. On the one hand, the move is not too radical precisely because at the outset of his treatise Schmitt refers to politics as competing ways of life. On the other hand, Schmitt and Wittgenstein could not be more different. This paper does not therefore aim to synthesise the two scholars, but only to show a possible political reading of Wittgenstein’s work.
Talk organised within the Wittgenstein’s Phenomenology: Bridging the Analytic-Continental Gap seminar, in collaboration with the Department of Theoretical Philosophy.