Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book brings together David Cockburn’s best work on Wittgensteinian themes relating to 'mind' and 'language'. While none of these papers is well described as 'exegetical', most are discussions of Wittgenstein, and all are discussions of themes central to his later work and strongly influenced by it. The papers can be roughly divided between 'the philosophy of mind' and 'the philosophy of language'. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard classification of topics stands in the way of clear thinking about core issues, and, closely connected with that, united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical treatment of them. Cockburn’s approach is marked by the detailed attention given to the human bodily form, and his approach to language by the central place given to the idea of conversation. The discussions are enriched by incorporating some consideration of our relation to non-human creatures. The papers are linked by an insistence on the inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of these issues. While the debt to Wittgenstein is enormous, a number of the papers involve what may be significant criticisms of him.

Peter Guy Winch (1926–1997) was one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his early work on the philosophy of the social sciences, in particular his monograph The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), which generated controversy within both philosophical and social scientific circles. This volume unites Peter Winch’s previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King’s College London in 1989. Audio recordings of the majority of the Swansea seminars have survived. The editors have transcribed these, edited them for coherence, style and clarity, and supplemented them with material drawn from Winch’s typescripts and preparatory notebooks. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza’s work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza’s predecessors such as Descartes, but also to the philosophical views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. There is currently a resurgence of interest in Spinoza’s philosophy, and this volume will contribute to burgeoning debates within that field. Winch’s account of Spinoza is uncommon insofar as it takes as central to Spinoza’s project his conceptions of meaning, understanding and language, and directly connecting these to his ethical concerns. At the same time, Winch makes useful links to modern debates in ways that throw helpful light on Spinoza. As well as issues which are central to the philosophy of language, these include debates on the nature of the mind, naturalism and the place of the human being within the natural world.

Love for a person involves an idea of the other’s particularity, or “irreplaceability”: an idea that is linked with a fine grained attention to, and affection for, very specific features of the other. This attention is largely a consequence of—or manifestation of—my love, rather than its ground. What I see in the other is partly conditioned by an “unconditional” concern for her as an individual. A consideration of the importance of the face and of personal names in my interactions with another may bring into focus crucial aspects of the particularity and unconditionality that are characteristic of love.

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to (rather than ‘about’) those we know (rather than ‘know about’) that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’.

The hold of the fatalistic reasoning that Aristotle criticizes is dependent, first, on the idea, articulated by Frege, that the real candidates for truth and falsity are something other than particular contingent happenings such as affirmations or thinkings, and, second, on the idea that the demand for speculative reflection overrides any demand for practical deliberation. Standard challenges to the reasoning embody the same presuppositions and so simply perpetuate the core confusions. They do so most fundamentally in the assumption that we need a ‘metaphysical’ grounding for our idea of ourselves as agents who have influence on the course of events.

The hold of the fatalistic reasoning that Aristotle criticizes is dependent, first, on the idea, articulated by Frege, that the real candidates for truth and falsity are something other than particular contingent happenings such as affirmations or thinkings, and, second, on the idea that the demand for speculative reflection overrides any demand for practical deliberation. Standard challenges to the reasoning embody the same presuppositions and so simply perpetuate the core confusions. They do so most fundamentally in the assumption that we need a ‘metaphysical’ grounding for our idea of ourselves as agents who have influence on the course of events.

‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’1. A television nature programme some years ago contained a striking sequence in which a giant squid was under threat from some other creature (no doubt a human being with a video camera). The squid responded in a way that struck me immediately and powerfully as one of fear. Part of what was striking in this sequence was the way in which it was possible to see in the behaviour of a creature physically so very different from human beings an emotion that was so unambiguously and specifically one of fear. While I would guess that most who saw this film would see in the squid's response something similar to what I saw I cannot offer a description of that behaviour that might help to convince someone who has not seen the film and who is sceptical: a description such that they might agree that if it really did behave like that, then it was certainly correct to ascribe fear to it. That I cannot do so is not, I think, merely a reflection of my very limited descriptive powers. It is a reflection of the fact that there is no more fundamental description of the squid's response than ‘fleeing in fear’: no other form of description that underlies, and so might provide support for, this one. My aim in this essay is to establish this point and to bring out its significance for two very different ways in which philosophers have spoken of our ascriptions of sensations and emotions to non-human creatures.In the first chapter of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer offers what he takes to be an essential preliminary to the argument of the rest of the book. If we are to show that we have a moral obligation not to cause unnecessary suffering to animals, we must, Singer suggests, first establish that animals are capable of suffering.

1. Rhees writes, ‘Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of language, or the possibility of understanding. And in that way it is concerned with the possibility of discourse.’ It is important to be clear what Rhees does not mean by this. His suggestion is not that philosophy is concerned with ‘the conditions of the possibility of discourse’. We are tempted to think that one of the aims of philosophy is to investigate something – the nature of language perhaps – on which our speaking with each other depends. Many philosophers have seen their central task in that way, and many have taken this to be one of Wittgenstein's concerns. Rhees's opposition to the view is seen in remarks such as the following: ‘The language – what you understand when you understand the language – is not something apart from understanding people and speaking with them. Something which makes that possible’ (277). Sharing a language with another is not what makes discussion between us possible. Sharing a language is nothing other than being able to speak with them.‘You cannot say that it is because they have a common life that they are able to engage in conversation.’ You cannot say this, I take it, because their ‘common life’ is not something independent of the fact that they are able to engage in conversation. And we face the same problem if it is suggested that an agreement in our use of individual words is a condition of our being able to speak to each other with understanding. For if we take seriously the idea that in speaking of an individual's use of a word we are speaking of particular utterances, in particular contexts, into which it enters, we will not suppose that we can characterise my use of a word independently of the ways in which the word enters into my linguistic exchanges with others. I respond to your ‘Can we move him now?’ with ‘He's still in dreadful pain’; to your ‘Where is he going to sit?’ with ‘There are more chairs next door’, and so on. A characterisation of me as using a certain word in a particular way will make reference to my interactions with others into which the word enters.