Final Installment of Wittgenstein Lectures

Sean Wilson has posted the remaining lectures in his Wittgenstein course. You need a flash player to hear the slides talk. Ipad users may want to try an app called photon. The three final topics are:

1. Wittgenstein on Intelligence and Insight
2. Wittgenstein on Religion
3. Wittgenstein on Minds and Brains

For Your Enjoyment ...

A rather useful thing:

Two Lectures on Wittgenstein (Nuno Venturinha)

The publication of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass has made clear that what is generally regarded as his second philosophical masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations, is in fact an unfinished book. There are many other examples of unfinished books in the western tradition and Wittgenstein’s book would seem to fall under the category of works whose authors could not finish in their lifetimes. I shall discuss some of these examples and show that there is something peculiar regarding Wittgenstein’s enterprise, specifically that the unfinished nature of his book mirrors his view of philosophy as an unfinishable task. I shall conclude by ... suggest[ing] that this does not mean completely abandoning substantial theses.

Click to read more ...

Consciousness Without Inner Models ...

There has been much criticism over the years of the idea that conscious experience depends on inner representational models of the environment. Enactive accounts (e.g. Thompson 2007) and the sensorimotor account more particularly (O’Regan & Noë 2001; O’Regan 2011) have prominently criticized the reliance on inner models and they have offered an alternative way of thinking about experience. The idea of sensorimotor approaches is that experience involves the perceiver’s attunement to the way in which sensory stimulation depends on action. But how then should we conceive of what happens in the agent’s head to allow for this attunement? In this symposium we focus on two questions. First, how does an enactive sensorimotor theory offer guidance for the interpretation of neurophysiological findings? Second, how are its predictions about neural processes different from the predictions of representationalist accounts?

Click to read more ...

OLP on BBC

Picked this up from Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Studies Online. OLP

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such ‘ordinary language’ were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and JL Austin.

Here is the broadcast: Broadcast
Here is the complete program: Complete Program