Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Naomi Scheman, Peg O'Connor, Peg O’Connor

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780271021973
• eBook ISBN: 9780271032979
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in judgments and forms of life.

Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems.

In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume's twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism's Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in (analytic) philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to (in Wittgenstein's words) "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity's Others.

Contributors (besides the editors) are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Section I: The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject
• 1 Philosophy, Language, and Wizardry
• 2 Wittgenstein, Feminism, and the Exclusions of Philosophy
• 3 Speaking Philosophy in the Voice of Another: Wittgenstein, Irigaray, and the Inheritance of Mimesis
• Section II: Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions
• 4 What Do Feminists Want in an Epistemology?
• 5 Making Mistakes, Rendering Nonsense, andMoving Toward Uncertainty
• 6 Tractatio Logico-Philosophica: Engendering Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
• 7 The Moral Language Game
• 8 The Short Life of Meaning: Feminism and Nonliteralism
• Section III: Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds
• 9 ‘‘Back to the Rough Ground!’’: Wittgenstein, Essentialism, and Feminist Methods
• 10 Wittgenstein Meets ‘Woman’ in the Language-Game of Theorizing Feminism
• 11 Using Wittgensteinian Methodology to Elucidate the Meaning of ‘‘Equality’’
• 12 Eleanor Rosch and the Development of Successive Wittgensteinian Paradigms for Cognitive Science
• Section IV: Being Human: Agents and Subjects
• 13 Words and Worlds: Some Thoughts on the Significance of Wittgenstein for Moral and Political Philosophy
• 14 Big Dogs, Little Dogs, Universal Dogs: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Patricia Williams Talk About the Logic of Conceptual Rearing
• 15 Developing Wittgenstein’s Picture of the Soul: Toward a Feminist Spiritual Erotics
• 16 ‘‘No Master, Outside or In’’: Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Proprietary Subject
• Section V: Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games
• 17 Wittgensteinian Vision(s) and ‘‘Passionate Detachments’’: A Queer Context for a Situated Episteme
• 18 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour as Remarks on Racism
• 19 Culture, Nature, Ecosystem (or Why Nature Can’t Be Naturalized)
• 20 Moving to New Boroughs: Transforming the World by Inventing Language Games
• Bibliography
• Index
• Contributors
• Back Cover