{"product_id":"wittgensteins-liberatory-philosophy-9780367548711","title":"Wittgensteins Liberatory Philosophy","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this book, Rupert Read outlines the first resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein school, of the \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations\u003c\/i\u003e. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"Highly engaging and thought-provoking. Read’s central claim that it is time to cash in the worn-out metaphor of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as therapy in exchange for a liberatory understanding of his work, together with the detailed readings of the \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations \u003c\/i\u003ethat support it, is likely to provoke much debate.\"\u003c\/strong\u003e –\u003cem\u003e Edmund Dain, Providence College, co-editor, \u003c\/em\u003eWittgenstein’s moral thought\u003cem\u003e.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"This timely, provocative and original reading of Wittgenstein's \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations \u003c\/i\u003eargues that the point of his later philosophy is fundamentally ethical and political: to free us from our preconceptions. In pursuing this goal, Read has the courage of his convictions, criticising not only Wittgenstein's previous interpreters, but even Wittgenstein himself. A reader comes away from this book with a new appreciation of Wittgenstein's relevance to our current global and environmental challenges.\"\u003c\/strong\u003e – \u003cem\u003eDavid Stern, author, Univ. of Iowa, \u003c\/em\u003eWittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"Rupert Read’s book is a seminal contribution to the conversations that Wittgenstein’s daring approach to the practice of philosophy initiated. It contends that if liberation constitutes the ethical heart of philosophy, and is one of the ultimate justifications of philosophical activity, then philosophy must be conducted in a dialogical, social spirit. Philosophy comes, and \u003ci\u003emust\u003c\/i\u003e come inevitably, with an ethical attitude.\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cstrong\u003eRead presents a radically relational interpretation of Wittgenstein, as distinct from an individualistic one. Wittgenstein is wise when he observes that language cannot be private. Language only has its being in a living cultural context that necessarily transcends the individual. What is less obvious is that if this is true, nor can freedom be a private affair. This is the \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eburden of \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ethe courageous book the reader holds in his hands. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRead cautions against a passive reliance on an ethical \u003ci\u003esystem\u003c\/i\u003e, as though that exempts us from the active responsibility to be good, something Read quotes Gandhi on. As successive chapters throw light on a wide range of questions pertaining to language, freedom, and the good life, the book serves as an insightful guide to Wittgenstein’s master-work \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePhilosophical Investigations.\"\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e– \u003cem\u003eAseem Shrivastava, Ashoka University, author, \u003c\/em\u003eChurning the Earth: The making of global India.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"Rupert Read has long been one of the most passionate and prolific contributors to contemporary attempts to get Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy properly into focus. This systematic engagement with the \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations\u003c\/i\u003e pulls together his previous work in a way which highlights the unity of its underlying concerns, and clarifies the internal relation between its content and its very distinctive form. For this book presents Read’s eagerness to engage so widely with the work of other commentators, and to make startling connections with writers in other disciplines, all in prose of ummistakable idiosyncrasy, as a sustained expression of his belief that Wittgenstein’s work is meant to attract us to the task of liberating ourselves from compulsions and prohibitions that inhibit our capacity to achieve individuality in community. And if that task requires dispensing with stances central to his earlier writing, or even reformulating Wittgenstein’s own signature concepts and claims – what one might call liberating himself from his philosophical exemplar, and from himself – then Read doesn’t hesitate. It’s a radical embodiment of an ethics and politics of thinking.\"\u003c\/strong\u003e – \u003cem\u003eStephen Mulhall, Oxford Univ., author, \u003c\/em\u003eInheritance and originality.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"In this bold and precise book Rupert Read provides a careful reading of Wittgenstein's posthumously published \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations. \u003c\/i\u003eThe book will obviously be of interest to all Wittgenstein specialists. One hopes it will reach many more readers as well, because Read's work presents nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the formidable resources Wittgenstein offers\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003efor political philosophy. The key to Read's success is his resolute overcoming of the influential notion that there are two Wittgensteins: One, who was a great philosopher of language, meaning, logic and other topics familiar to professional philosophers, and another, who was a conservative, Viennese critic of progressive modernity. The persistence of this schizophrenic image of Wittgenstein is one of the great scandals of philosophy in our times. Read's work invites us to read Wittgenstein as a philosopher whose work is indispensable for all who are engaged in the theory and practice of justice, dignity and freedom in the age of ecological crisis and authoritarian capitalism.\"\u003c\/strong\u003e – \u003cem\u003eThomas Wallgren, Univ. of Helsinki, author, ‘Transformative philosophy’\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"An impassioned and exciting call to see the philosophy of Wittgenstein (and beyond) in a radically new light: as second-person in perspective, transcending the merely subjective or objective, \u003ci\u003efundamentally\u003c\/i\u003e ethical in nature, and yet avoiding the pitfalls of ‘philosophy as therapy’. An inspiring work.\" \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e– Iain McGilchrist, All Soul’s, author, \u003c\/em\u003eThe master and his emissary.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRupert Read’s \"liberatory\" account of Wittgenstein opens up an exhilarating new way of looking at this philosopher. In his detailed and sympathetic analysis of key sections of Wittgenstein’s \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations \u003c\/i\u003eRead seeks to show how the idea of liberation from ideologies, ideas, and assumptions that we have adopted unthinkingly is crucial to that text and how Wittgenstein conceives of liberation as an interactive and interpersonal process. In highlighting this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought, Read seeks to bring out its deep ethical and political significance. We can be sure that the book will stimulate a whole new line of thinking about Wittgenstein’s work.\u003c\/strong\u003e –\u003cem\u003e Prof. Hans Sluga, Berkeley, author, \u003c\/em\u003eWittgenstein.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"The phrase ‘philosophy as therapy’, especially as a way of looking at Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedure, now tends to elicit either a shrug or a snarl. Rupert Read, like the late Gordon Baker, sees that what is central to Wittgenstein’s analogy with therapy is \u003ci\u003eliberation\u003c\/i\u003e. On the one hand, those who are genuinely gripped by a picture that they cannot see beyond, or whose craving for generality is so insatiable that they gloss over vital differences, may be freed from such tyranny by ‘the liberating word’; on the other, such freeing is entirely non-coercive: in Waismann’s famous words, ‘There is to be no bullying with the stick of logic or the stick of grammar’.\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cstrong\u003eRead, moreover, sees something that Baker never quite did: clinging to Baker’s later work were, in Read’s words, ‘\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ethe eggshells of our civilisation’s \"individualism\" and concomitantly … its reluctance to take the 1st-person- and 2nd-person- \u003ci\u003eplurals\u003c\/i\u003e seriously’. And, wonderfully, Read does something which Baker almost never did: apart from his work on the disastrously misnamed ‘private language argument’, most of Baker’s later writing was programmatic. In this magnificent book, Read shows in detail how this vision of Wittgenstein’s \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ephilosophical procedure sheds new light on all the familiar passages and ‘topics’ in \u003ci\u003ePhilosophical Investigations\u003c\/i\u003e. This is the Wittgenstein book I have been waiting for.\" \u003c\/strong\u003e– \u003cem\u003eDr. Katherine Morris, Oxford Univ., co-author with Baker of \u003c\/em\u003eDescartes’s Dualism \u003cem\u003eand editor of Baker’s posthumous \u003c\/em\u003eWittgenstein’s method.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e0 Introduction: Thinking \u003ci\u003ethrough \u003c\/i\u003eWittgenstein 1\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1 The Philosopher and Temptation: Wittgenstein’s Augustinian Opening Move 42\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e2 “It Is as You Please”: \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e16 as an Icon oWittgenstein’s Philosophy of Freedom 78\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e3 What Is (Wittgenstein’s Own Account of) Meaning?: \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e43 and Its Critics 108\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e4 When Wittgenstein Speaks of ‘Everyday’ Language, He Means Simply \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLanguage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e: A Liberatory Reading of \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e95–124 143\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e5 Objects of Comparison to the Real (Philosophical?)Discovery: \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e130–133 188\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e6 Wittgenstein Dissolves the Know-How vs Knowledge- that Debate: \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e149–151 206\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e7 Logical Existentialism?: An Approach to \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e186 226\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e8 The \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eFaux\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e- Freedom of Nonsense: Kripke’s Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein at \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e198–201 260\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e9 Overcoming Over- Reliance on ‘The Bedrock’?: On \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e217 279\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e10 The Anti-‘Private-Language’Considerations as a Fraternal and Freeing Ethic: Towards a Re-Reading of \u003ci\u003ePI \u003c\/i\u003e284–309 297\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e11 Conclusion: (A)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLiberating Philosophy 327\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBibliography 363\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIndex 382\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Taylor \u0026 Francis Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51017952002391,"sku":"9780367548711","price":39.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780367548711.jpg?v=1750775183","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/wittgensteins-liberatory-philosophy-9780367548711","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}