Wittgenstein’s Phenomenology: Bridging the Analytic-Continental Gap

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.

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.)

Those interested to attend, please write to the seminar organizer: Mihai Ometiță – mihai.ometita(at)icub.unibuc.ro.