Wittgensteinian Exercises: Aesthetic and Ethical Transformations

✍ Scribed by Lucilla Guidi (editor)

• Publisher: Brill; Fink
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 335
• Series: Asthetische Praxis; 3
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume explores and expands a Wittgensteinian account of philosophy as an ongoing transformative practice. It investigates the simultaneously aesthetic and ethical dimension of philosophical exercises, so as to uncover their transformative potential for and within ordinary practice, conceived of as a weave of inherited embodied habits. For this purpose, the volume focuses on three intertwined aspects. First, it analyzes the aesthetic form of Wittgenstein's writings. In particular, it considers the use of pictures, dialogues, comparisons, and instructions as exercises to be enacted by readers, thereby exploring their transformative (aesthetic and ethical) effects. Second, it draws a number of connections between Wittgenstein's philosophical exercises and particular aesthetic practices. Third, it sheds light on continuities and discontinuities between Wittgenstein's philosophy and the ancient understanding of philosophy as an exercise and a way of life, so as to sketch out an account of ethics as a practical attitude and way of being. In addition, by including pictures and a text in three different languages, this volume explores new ways of doing philosophy in a Wittgensteinian spirit.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Wittgensteinian Exercises. An Invitation to the Readers
Section I Transformative Paths: Philosophical Exercises and Aesthetic Practices
1. Are We Having Fun Yet?
2. Projective Imagination. Therapy and Improvisation in Wittgenstein’s (and Cavell’s) Vision of Language
3. Frame and Framing as Transformative Practices: On the Parergonal Constitution of Artworks
4. Wittgenstein—Philosophy as Aesthetic Practice
5. Working on Oneself. Philosophical Exercises in Wittgenstein and Valéry
Section II Philosophical Exercises and Ethical Transformations
6. The Dissolution of Philosophical Problems and the Transformation of Thinking
7. Transformative Thinking: Wittgenstein and Dewey on the Power of Reflection
8. Between Captivity and Liberation: The Role of Pictures in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy
9. Wittgenstein and the Art of Conversing with Oneself: The Philosophical Investigations as a Book of Exercises
10. Resistances of the Will Must be Overcome: Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Philosophy
Section III Practicing Philosophy in a Wittgensteinian Spirit
11. “Slab, I shouted, slab!” Gender Identities, Language, and Possibilities of Limitation and Liberation
12. Að hugsa á íslensku og útlensku / Thinking in Icelandic and Foreign Tongues / Auf Isländisch und in Fremdsprachen denken
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments