RUPERT READ works mainly on the therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein, therapeutic readings of film and literature, and ecological critiques of liberalism. He is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. For a full cv, goto: http://rupertread.fastmail.co.uk/Academic%20CV.doc [Please note that this site, publicationslist.org , carries by no means a full listing of my publications. It is a listing of what I consider to be my main philosophical publications, and so will probably be sufficient for the purposes of most visitors. My cv has a much fuller listing, including Critical Notices and Review essays, etc. For up to date work (work in press, forthcoming, etc.), please go to my academia site.] For other aspects of my work and life, please goto www.rupertread.net
Abstract: I examine one powerful real-life case-study of the impact John Rawls’s philosophy has had upon the law and politics. The case-study is the (outside Israel) surprisingly little-known significant impact of Rawls’s doctrine on the conscientious objection vs. civil disobedience issue in relation to the ‘Courage to Refuse’ movement in Israel/Palestine.
I argue that Rawls’s arguments have had an influence on preventing the ‘Refuseniks'' movement from getting a fair hearing. For those of us who believe (as virtually every country in the U.N. believes, for instance) that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a violation of international law, this is distressing -- and revealing. Rawls’s doctrine of a sharp line between conscientious objection and civil disobedience, a doctrine thoroughly grounded in the liberal private vs. public distinction -- and preserving the ‘sanctity’ of the political sphere so as not to have it invaded by ‘comprehensive’ doctrines -- has biassed the pitch against the very idea of a conscientious objection that is civil disobedience. Rawls’s -- contemporary political liberalism’s -- system of thought leaves no conceptual space for same; with the consequence that space has to be found in Israeli prisons for some of Israel’s most conscientious citizens.
Abstract: I argue that the so-called ‘hard’ problem of consciousness – the problem of how consciousness is possible at all, and how it ‘connects’ with matter – is only an artefact of the ways in which human scientists approach consciousness and (more generally) mind. Putting the point paradoxically but also quite precisely: the efforts to solve the mind-body problem, and this its latest variant form, are the very disease of which they take themselves to be the cure.
I give examples drawn from sociology and from philosophy to support this claim, and then try to mitigate this vicious consequence of cognitivism in both disciplines by offering a Wittgensteinian dissolution of the [pseudo-]problem as an alternative to [hopeless] cognitivist efforts to solve it.
Abstract: The concept of ‘time-slice’ turns out to be at best philosophically inconsequential, I argue. Influential philosophies of time as apparently diverse as those of Dummett, Lewis and Bergson, thus must come to grief. The very idea of ‘time-slice’ upon which they rest -- the very idea of spatialising time, and of rendering the resulting ‘slices’ of potentially infinitely small measure -- turns out on closer acquaintance not to amount to anything consequential that has yet been made sense of. Time is, rather, a ubiquitous lived ‘tool’ for the organisation and co-ordination of human activities, a tool so completely involved in those activities that Anti-Realism about it is as unstateable as Realism about it is unnecessary.
Notes: Prof. Sir Michael Dummett replied to this paper, in the same issue.
You can read the upshot of the whole thing in my book, APPLYING WITTGENSTEIN.
Abstract: We argue:
(1) That Mounce’s critique of ‘the New Wittgenstein’ interpretation as a form of positivism begs the question, by ignoring the possibility that any reading of Wittgenstein that is not ‘mystical’ must be positivistic; and that Mounce moreover relies -- in his defence of a ‘mystic’ or ‘ineffabilistic’ reading of Wittgenstein -- on an interpretation of the saying vs. showing distinction which is incoherent and plainly not Wittgenstein’s own.
(2) That the roots of some key misunderstandings of ‘resolutism’ may be traced to a failure to distinguish between different versions of the project initiated by Conant and Diamond, and to an unwise assumption by critics of Diamond that her work taken alone, and her work indeed of the 1980s, is already ‘resolutism’, rather than only a prolegomena, a project.
(3) That essays critical of Diamond by Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer, err, when they err, largely for just these reasons; and that, when a ‘strong’ (or ‘Jacobin’) version of resolutism is considered, instead of Diamond’s older writings, then one can justifiably say either that the ‘New Wittgenstein’ project is the true friend of the saying vs. showing distinction, or that nothing is shown, and that the very idea any ineffabilism is overcome, thus leaving one free to plot the deep continuities between Wittgenstein’s early and later thought which are real.
Notes: Michael Dummett replied to this article at length, the following year.
For an improved version of this material, please read my APPLYING WITTGENSTEIN, Part 3.
Abstract: What ‘ordinary/everyday language’ is taken to be opposed to is what’s critical. The key point of this article is to suggest, contra what still tends to be the prevailing wisdom, that the crucial mistake in Wittgenstein studies has been to massively misidentify the contrast class that Wittgenstein intended. The key such contrast-class is: ‘metaphysical’ (not, e.g. ‘scientific’.). It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that what Wittgenstein does is to identify positively an actual class of sentences or utterances, and characterise them as manifesting ‘the everyday’ or ‘the ordinary’ as an allegedly positive category. Rather, Wittgenstein identifies ‘the metaphysical’ as a (delusive, though deep) aspiration – and counterposes ordinary or everyday language to that. (To that nonsense, that nothing.)
Abstract: The key connection between therapy as Wittgenstein practices it and the psychotherapy from where he got the idea is in the authority being vested in the therapee, not the therapist. Thus Wittgensteinian philosophy gives up the standard claim of the philosopher to know, to know what others don’t. Rather, philosophy becomes about helping others to heal – and healing oneself. By means of learning how to explore and to overcome one’s own desires to mire oneself in nonsense.
Abstract: OC 501 seems a pretty plain indication of the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But is it perhaps an indication that OC is continuous with TLP (construed after the ‘ineffabilist’ interpretation of Anscombe, Hacker, etc.) and not with PI? I suggest rather that in his last writings Wittgenstein comes to recognise more explicitly the continuities between TLP and PI etc. and OC. I do this by experimenting with two apparently opposed readings of OC 501, and attempting to place them both in the context of (i.e. in contrast to) the relatively new ‘resolute’ and ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing championed by Conant, Diamond, Floyd and Goldfarb. In short, I aim to show that OC 501, read in context, simply shows that, at the last, Wittgenstein was endeavouring to philosophize in a resolute fashion, as he had more or less throughout -- and very largely succeeding.
