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Colloquium with Hannah Ginsborg (UC Berkeley)
Title: “Wittgenstein on Going On”
Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations feature several passages in which people are presented with examples of number sequences or other patterns, and “go on” from them in ways that lead us to say that they have grasped a rule. The most famous is at Philosophical Investigations §185, where a pupil who has been continuing the series 0,2,4,6,8… goes on after 1000 by writing “1000, 1004, 1008.” I raise objections to readings of these passages which have been offered by (among others) Crispin Wright, Saul Kripke, and John McDowell, and I suggest an alternative reading. On my reading, the passages illustrate Wittgenstein’s commitment to a kind of normativity — implicit in the idea of a person’s going on as she ought — which is a precondition of, rather than presupposing, grasp of a rule. Consciousness of this kind of normativity is involved in very simple prelinguistic behaviours as well as in cases requiring knowledge of language or of simple arithmetic, and we can appeal to it in order to make sense of how grasp of rules, and of the meaning of linguistic expressions, is possible. I suggest that this reading of the passages allows us to see Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations as more plausible than they might seem on competing interpretations.
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy
Colloquium with Christian List (London School of Economics)
Title: TBA
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy
Dorothy Kent Hill Lecture
Theater and Painting in Ancient Rome
A lecture by Marden Nichols, Georgetown University
Refreshments will be served at 4:30PM, followed by the lecture at 5:00PM.
Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Baltimore Society
Download the AIA-Baltimore Society lecture schedule for 2018-2019
Colloquium with Patrick Murray (Creighton University)
Title: TBA
Sponsored by Political and Moral Thought