Essays

The philosopher Wittgenstein famously said in Culture and Value: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” My interest in this article is to analyze what Wittgenstein here means. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein described the task of philosophy as being “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Humor has a certain way of cutting through language, of getting to the truth of whatever game is at hand....

The law is not philosophy. Therefore, lawyers are not philosophers? My interest in this article is to show that lawyers may not produce philosophy but can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in philosophical reasoning some of the time. Of course, this claim is not entirely original. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes: “Lawyers are always philosophers because jurisprudence is part of any lawyer’s account of what the law is, even when the jurisprudence is undistinguished and mechanical....

Call a ‘comprehensive doctrine of the good’ a set of beliefs affirmed by citizens concerning a wide range of values, including moral, metaphysical, and religious commitments, as well as beliefs about personal virtues and political beliefs about the way society ought to be arranged; they form a conception of the good concerning “what is of value in life, the ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole....

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes: 6.54: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. At least two interesting things are going on here....

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Jacques Lacan introduces a philosophical conception of the subject into psychoanalysis. He primarily responds to Freud’s conception of the developed subject as an “ego” which serves as a broad referent for the subject’s constellation of raw, biological drives. He thinks the ego as such does not account for the transformation that occurs within the subject when developing an ego, and he deduces the mirror stage as a solution that he thinks even Freud ought to accept....

In An Autobiographical Study, Sigmund Freud defines the process of free-association broadly as speaking one’s mind without direction or censorship.1 As Jonathan Lear aptly points out, Freud calls free-association the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis2 not only because it is essential to therapy but also because it is a sublime exercise of the capacity for human freedom.3 Despite this apparent freedom in free-association, Freud also notes: “we must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free....

Kuhn distinguishes two meanings for ‘paradigm’: in a narrow sense, (1) the examples a discipline uses to articulate its assumptions that set the template for solving puzzles that arise in the discipline during a period of normal science, and in a broad sense, (2) the key theories, instruments, values, and metaphysical assumptions that are made prior to puzzle-solving which constitute the disciplinary matrix of normal science. Count two paradigms ‘incommensurable’ when the new paradigm is a radical alteration of the matrix of measurements, observations, and language adopted by the scientific community not for good reasons but by a non-rational kind of religious conversion to a new world that is different than, and discontinuous with, the one represented by the former paradigm....

Measuring things seems quite straightforward. Most of us already learned in primary school to measure how far apart two points are on a piece of paper: draw a line between them, and compare its length with the length of your ruler. After checking how many marks on the ruler your line covers, you can express the outcome of your measurement numerically. You may now see that the points are 10 centimeters or 4 inches apart, but the knowledge of such units is hardly necessary for your purposes....

In “Kripke and Functionalism” (Episode 61), Buechner describes how Kripke’s criticism of the dispositionalist response to the ‘rule-following paradox,’ found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,can be generalized as a criticism of functionalist accounts of mental states, the thesis that mental states are abstract computational states realized in physical objects, like a brain. Here, I’d like to give a sketch of the rule-following paradox, the dispositionalist response, and Kripke’s criticism in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, in order to give you a clearer idea of the criticism of functionalism Buechner points to....

A central distinction in “Thoughts About Oughts” (Episode 60) is that between epistemic and deontic uses of ‘ought.’ As a quick review, here’s an example of an epistemic use of ‘ought.’ Imagine that you open the window in the morning, feel a strong breeze and suffocating humidity, and see a massive, dark wall of clouds on the horizon. You declare to your roommate: (Ep) It ought to rain today. And for an example of a deontic use of ought: Imagine that you have a final exam tomorrow, which you need to pass in order to graduate....