About the Book
This volume is the first to focus on a particular complex of questions that have troubled Wittgenstein scholarship since its very beginnings. The authors re-examine Wittgenstein’s fundamental insights into the workings of human linguistic behaviour, its creative extensions and its philosophical capabilities, as well as his creative use of language. It offers insight into a variety of topics including painting, politics, literature, poetry, literary theory, mathematics, philosophy of language, aesthetics and philosophical methodology.
Table of Contents:
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. The Good, the Bad and the Creative: Language in Wittgenstein's Philosophy; Sebastian Sunday Greve and Jakub Macha PART II: OVERTURE 2. Cats on the Table, New Blood for Old Dogs: What Distinguishes Reading Philosophers (on Poets) from Reading Poets?; Stephen Mulhall PART III: READING: WITTGENSTEIN: WRITING 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Us 'Typical Western Scientists'; Alois Pichler 4. Wittgenstein on Godelian 'Incompleteness', Proofs and Mathematical Practice: Reading Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Part I, Appendix III, Carefully; Wolfgang Kienzler and Sebastian Sunday Greve 5. Wittgenstein: No Linguistic Idealist; Daniele Moyal-Sharrock PART IV: PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARTS 6. Wittgenstein, Verbal Creativity and the Expansion of Artistic Style; Garry L. Hagberg 7. Doubt and Display: A Foundation for a Wittgensteinian Approach to the Arts; Charles Altieri 8. The Urn and the Chamber Pot; John Hyman PART V: CREATIVITY AND THE MORAL LIFE 9. Wittgenstein and Diamond on Meaning and Experience: From Groundlessness to Creativity; Maria Balaska 10. Find It New: Aspect-Perception and Modernist Ethics; Ben Ware 11. Metaphysics Is Metaphorics: Philosophical and Ecological Reflections from Wittgenstein and Lakoff on the Pros and Cons of Linguistic Creativity; Rupert Read
About the Author :
Charles Altieri, UC Berkeley, US.Maria Balaska, Paris 8 University, France.Sebastian Sunday Grève, University of Oxford, UK.Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College, US.John Hyman, University of Oxford, UK.Wolfgang Kienzler, University of Jena, Germany.Jakub Mácha, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire, UK. Stephen Mulhall, University of Oxford, UK. Alois Pichler, University of Bergen, Norway. Rupert Read, University of East Anglia, UK. Ben Ware, University of London, UK.
Review :
'Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language is an exceptionally stimulating collection on a crucial new subject, the creative potential of ordinary language (artistic, scientific, philosophical). Grève and Mácha bring together a powerful group of authors whose various approaches to the topic strike a perfect balance between interpretative scholarship and philosophical originality.'
- Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
'These essays explore both the standing possibility of creative language use and Wittgenstein's own creative uses of language. In doing so they advance and enrich our understandings of distinctively human and discursive being-in-the-world as both emergent within practices and capable of exceeding them. They will captivate anyone with a sense of the uncanniness of the ordinary and the vicissitudes of the human.'
- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, US
'This book successfully challenges our received image of Wittgenstein as a closed philosopher closed language-games, a closed end-of-philosophy conception, closed possibilities of meaning and knowing. Using Wittgenstein's own philosophical practice as a springboard, the authors show him to have been an open philosopher. Their exploration of the theme of creativity artistic, linguistic, mathematical and philosophical offers us new perspectives on skepticism, artistic and philosophical style, method, modernism and idealism.'
- Juliet Floyd, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, US
'A bold, exhilarating, and rewarding collection of essays that uses Wittgenstein's reflections on language to gain new, original insights into poetry, painting, architecture, philosophy, and language itself.'
- Hans Sluga, William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley, US
