Prochaine séance ONLINE du séminaire Wittgenstein: Jasmin Trächtler (7 nov. 2020)

La prochaine séance du séminaire Wittgenstein aura lieu online.

Pour vous inscrire et recevoir le lien, veuillez envoyez un mail à l’adresse suivante: Pierre.Fasula@univ-paris1.fr

Samedi 7 novembre 2020

10h30-12H30

Jasmin Trächtler (University of Bergen)

On the Methodological Use of Fictional Narratives”

Abstract: The questions of how we can understand others and how we can know what they feel, think and sense have repeatedly preoccupied Wittgenstein since the 1930s and became especially important to him during the last few years before he died. Wittgenstein approached these and other questions related to the so-called ›other minds problem‹ from different vantage points and in various contexts, among which the private language argument is probably the best known. In this talk, I will deal with the other minds problem by focusing on the other as other or strange. For it is also the strangeness of others, their otherness as such, that makes it difficult and even impossible to recognize and understand their inner life. As I want to show, such otherness can be made comprehensible by fictional narratives, in which certain aspects of other’s lives are related to our own inner experience, such that we can find ourselves in them. Moreover, I will argue that this idea of making something comprehensible by means of a fictional narrative also has a special methodological relevance for Wittgenstein, inasmuch as he uses fictional narratives especially when it is a  matter of understanding what is ›one’s own‹ in the broadest sense; and he achieves this understanding of the own by its alienation in fictional narratives.

Pierre Fasula

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