Education is twice over concerned with human nature, most extensively as it is presupposed in the pursuit of diverse aims, and more specifically, as understanding it and applying such understanding are themselves made objects of study and teaching. The latter was a principal concern of ancient, renaissance and enlightenment humanists. These and others who focussed on the human condition have tended to arrive at one of the three attitudes: the celebratory, the gloomy and the condemnatory. Recent decades have seen tyrannies, (...) global wars, campaigns of genocide, economic crises, seemingly irreconcilable political polarisation, man‐made environmental degradation and other evils. Besides posing practical challenges, these put in question ideas of historical progress, of social harmony and of personal flourishing, and thereby have implications for an understanding of the human condition and for what to teach concerning it, and what qualities of character to seek to inculcate. (shrink)

There are many interpretations of what Wittgenstein's later approach entails and what its motivations are. Yet, despite extensive exegesis significantly deepening our understanding, his later approach—howsoever one interprets it—remains at best marginal and at worst ignored in contemporary philosophy. This is especially puzzling given the general consensus that Wittgenstein is a very influential philosopher. I suggest a change in approach. Rather than focussing on the potential differences to be found in Wittgenstein's work, in this essay I propose that Wittgenstein's later (...) approach entails a core overarching method, which Wittgenstein summarises through a simple instruction: ‘Describe language‐games!’ (PI §486). I first explicate this instruction before contrasting it with the dominant method in philosophy and proposing that a recently promoted philosophical approach—Investigative Ordinary Language Philosophy—offers a practical way by which to put Wittgenstein's method into action. (shrink)

Some scholars suggest a puzzle presents itself in Ludwig Wittgenstein's final words in the mismatch between what Norman Malcolm describes as a ‘fiercely unhappy’ life and Wittgenstein's expression of that life as ‘wonderful’. Ronald L. Hall attempts to overcome the apparent puzzle by retranslating Wittgenstein's final words into an expression of an awakening to the wonder inherent in reality. Beth Savickey argues that Hall's approach is a philosophical abstraction that diminishes the significance of friendship in Wittgenstein's life and that these (...) friendships are what made Wittgenstein's life ‘wonderful’. I argue that Hall's and Savickey's accounts of wonder and friendship go wrong as attempts to explain away the apparent puzzle of Wittgenstein's final words. Drawing on remarks from Raimond Gaita, I argue that both aspects can be incorporated into a dissolution of the apparent puzzle if Wittgenstein's final words are heard in the register of an expression of gratitude from a perspective of his life as a whole sub specie aeterni. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

This paper examines how we are to understand the goodness of neighbourly love, using the example of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Engaging with the philosophical discussion concerning the parable's moral significance that ensued in the wake of Peter Winch's 1987 paper ‘Who is my Neighbour?’, the paper argues that framing the goodness of the Samaritan in terms of a perceived necessity—as Winch and others do—runs the risk of simplifying and thus distorting it. The proposed alternative claims that goodness (...) is better understood when framed in terms of what Kierkegaard describes as purity of heart. Developing this claim, it is shown that while the one who is pure of heart does good deeds without perceiving them as necessary, the notion of necessity may nonetheless be of moral significance for the one who witnesses such purity. (shrink)

This article situates the Australian moral philosopher Julius Kovesi (1930–1989) in the context of the ‘Quartet’ of women philosophers—Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley—with whom he was associated in various ways. His connections with the Quartet have not been documented previously, but they are not minor or incidental. Foot herself credits him with being one of the ‘members of a small band of guerrillas fighting the prevailing orthodoxy of anti‐naturalist emotivism and prescriptivism in ethics, and challenging the (...) Humean doctrine of the gap between “is” and “ought”’. The evidence shows that Kovesi made a distinctive contribution to the reshaping of moral philosophy that the Quartet were developing. In particular, it shows him as developing a Wittgensteinian but not an Aristotelian moral philosophy. (shrink)

Rush Rhees wrote extensively on Plato and on Greek philosophy in general. In this set of notes written during the late nineteen sixties, Rhees develops a number of themes concerning language, measning and life deriving from Plato's philosphy.