Kris Kelvin, Snow, Gibrarian, and Sartorius are all puzzled and perplexed; as other educated and intelligent residents of Station Solaris–a sophisticated scientific laboratory–have been before them. They are stumped and bewildered by their interactions with the planet Solaris, with the ocean that covers its surface, the one that plays host to mimoids and symmetriads andContinue reading “Wittgenstein’s Lion And Solaris”
Tag Archives: Wittgenstein
Ayer On Wittgenstein As Pragmatist
In Wittgenstein (Random House, New York, 1985), A. J. Ayer writes: [Wittgenstein] never adopted the phenomenalist thesis that physical theories can be translated into the set of propositions describing the observable states of affairs that would confirm them…he declared the confirmation of a hypothesis is never completed. In the same set of remarks he characterizedContinue reading “Ayer On Wittgenstein As Pragmatist”
Szasz On The Myth Of Mental Illness
This semester, in my Landmarks in Philosophy class, I used Thomas Szasz‘s The Myth of Mental Illness as one of the three texts on the reading list (The other two were Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William James’ Pragmatism.) Szasz’s argument that mental illness does not exist, that psychiatry is aContinue reading “Szasz On The Myth Of Mental Illness”
The Dependence Of Autobiography On Biography (And Vice-Versa)
A few weeks ago, I briefly spoke at a conference hosted in honor of my dissertation advisor’s eightieth birthday. In my talk I offered some personal recollections of having worked with Distinguished Professor Rohit Parikh, his intellectual influence on me, and the various lessons–personal, technical, moral–that I learned along the way from him. As IContinue reading “The Dependence Of Autobiography On Biography (And Vice-Versa)”
RIP Hilary Putnam 1926-2016
During the period of my graduate studies in philosophy, it came to seem to me that William James‘ classic distinction between tough and tender-minded philosophers had been been reworked just a bit. The tough philosophers were still empiricists and positivists but they had begun to show some of the same inclinations that the supposedly tender-mindedContinue reading “RIP Hilary Putnam 1926-2016”
Philosophy, ‘Pseudo-Philosophy’, And Claiming To Be Philosophy
In his foreword to Jacques Bouveresse‘s Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (Princeton University Press, 1996, New French Thought Series), Vincent Descombes writes: [S]cience alone is opposed by a counterfeit called ‘pseudo-science.’ ‘Pseudo-philosophy’ does not seem to be a term we can use, much as we might be tempted to when dealing with what weContinue reading “Philosophy, ‘Pseudo-Philosophy’, And Claiming To Be Philosophy”
Women In Philosophy And Reconceptualizing Philosophical Method
This past Monday, on 20th April, Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, delivered the Philosophy Department’s annual Sprague and Taylor lecture at Brooklyn College. The title of her talk was ‘How Women Changed The Course of Philosophy’. Here is the abstract: The story we tell about the development ofContinue reading “Women In Philosophy And Reconceptualizing Philosophical Method”
A Bad Teaching Day
Yesterday, I had a bad teaching day. First, I was scattered and disorganized in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class; I repeated a great deal of material we had already covered; I offered only superficial explanations of some important portions of the assigned reading; I did not answer questions from students satisfactorily. (It was pretty clearContinue reading “A Bad Teaching Day”
Teaching Wittgenstein And Making The Familiar Unfamiliar
I’m teaching Wittgenstein this semester–for the first time ever–to my Twentieth-Century Philosophy class. My syllabus requires my students to read two long excerpts from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations; bizarrely enough, in my original version of that exalted contract with my students, I had allotted one class meeting to a discussion of the section from the Tractatus. Three classesContinue reading “Teaching Wittgenstein And Making The Familiar Unfamiliar”
The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses
In his review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories W. H. Auden wrote, Polar opposites as in appearance they look, the two literary doctrines of Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s-Sake, as propounded by Zola and Mallarmé, are really both expressions of the same megalomania. The aesthete is, at least, frank aboutContinue reading “The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses”
Samir Chopra 