Private Language and the Mind as Absolute Interiority

In Ralph Stefan Weir & Benedikt Göcke (eds.), From Existentialism to Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Stephen Priest. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. pp. 105-122 (2021)
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Abstract

For several decades, Stephen Priest has championed a picture of the mind or soul as a private, phenomenological space, knowable by introspection and logically independent of behaviour. Something resembling this picture once dominated Western philosophy, but it suffered a severe setback in the mid-twentieth century as a result of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. While Priest has written about the threat posed by Wittgenstein’s argument to the picture of the mind that he favours, he has not explained how advocates of that picture should respond to Wittgenstein. The present essay takes up this challenge, defending the picture of the mind as a private phenomenological space against four lines of argument drawn from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations § 243-315.

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Ralph Stefan Weir
University of Lincoln

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References found in this work

Causation.David Lewis - 1986 - In Philosophical Papers, Volume II. New York, US: Oxford University Press. pp. 159-213.
Insight and Illusion.P. M. S. Hacker - 1974 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1):201-211.
Wittgenstein.Anthony Kenny - 1973 - Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Theories of the Mind.Stephen Priest - 1993 - Philosophical Quarterly 43 (170):121-121.

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