Showing posts with label Wittgenstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wittgenstein. Show all posts

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Question To Those Who Know More Than Me: Wittgenstein and Latour



I'm reading Prince of Networks by Graham Harman right now. I'm still very early into it. He says this:

"It also ends the

tear-jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the un-

knowable outside world, since for Latour the isolated Kantian human is no

more and no less an actor than are windmills, sunflowers, propane tanks,

and Thailand."


Wittgenstein also seems to do this in a way. He purposes a public world where questions of an isolated human being just gives rise to problems which can be untangled by viewing a human being as inside a form of life. The objects a person uses and the way they interact with him are part of this form of life or language. Viewing everything language encircled whole, where the language games function and rules are followed, things seem to be in their proper place and act as they do without problem (a philosophical problem that is). The description of the Stalingrad encircling movement reminded me of LW's example of people bringing stones (I would consider the stones to be just a much part of the game). Yet I wonder if this is still too reductionistic for Latour, as it does in a way reduce the function of objects to their function in the language. Also LW always seemed to put humans in charge of setting up this game which may give them too much credit for Latour (though I'm not really sure as I may have interpreted him wrong and I may misunderstand Latour) To what extent do Wittgenstein and Latour overlap/ agree?


"Latour’s difference from present-day analytic and continental thought

should now be clear. Whereas Latour places all human, nonhuman, natu-

ral, and artificial objects on the same footing, the analytics and continentals

both still dither over how to bridge, ignore, deny, or explain away a single

gap between humans and world. While graduate students are usually drilled

in a stale dispute between correspondence and coherence theories of truth,

Latour locates truth in neither of these models, but in a series of translations

between actors."


I think my question also has relevance to this passage because LW could be seen as having a coherence theory of truth. I recall him saying that religion and mysticism play different games and are therefore true despite the completely different view of science. Though maybe that is stretching the word "coherence" and LW is beyond both with Latour.

LW could also be said to explain away the gap... but it seems more likely that he rejects any notion of a private space in the mind. Does Latour's series of translations (and by extension the notion of truth) exist in the public space, or is its location somewhere else?

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Reading List



This summer I finished Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I still haven't really come to terms with it in a way, so I think I might need another dose of him. But that will have to wait. Last year was all about Heidegger. This summer was all about Wittgenstein (and some Plato). So I'm going back into phenomenology now with Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness and a book about Phenomenology in general. If I get through those this semester what then?Maybe I'll finally actually read a book by Derrida. I read an essay by him that was in Writing and Difference and while not fully understanding it I got the point I thought. So maybe I'll read that one. My school appears to have a lot on Foucault also. But I'd rather get around to going back to reading Parallax View and In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek. But recently I was reading Countermemory and he mentioned this thing called speculative realism. I did some research and this looks very interesting and very promising. But first Husserl.