Reza Hosseini

By situating Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Socratic tradition of philosophy, in this paper, I argue that contrary to Wittgenstein’s misjudgment about the role and impact of the Socratic conception of philosophy, embodied in his definitional dialogues, Wittgenstein’s own way of doing philosophy shares much in common both in terms of orientation and rhetorical style with writings of philosophers in the tradition of “philosophy as spiritual exercises.” Specifically, I argue that the convergence of philosophical and personal remarks in Wittgenstein’s handwritten manuscripts is the result of writing in the form of hypomnemata or private notes or exhortations to the self with the intention of capturing the movements of thought and working on oneself.

Most objections against Henry Thoreau aim at his "unfriendly" provocations. In this article, I argue that we need to situate his exhortative style in the context of practicing parrhesia or the bold expression of truth in the Socratic tradition of philosophy. Philosophical parrhesia can be defined as the practice of speaking the truth with an eye to bringing home the realization that one must change one's life. The transformation Thoreau has in mind is hinged upon acquiring the practical knowledge of cultivating the senses through what he calls "excursion." This, I argue, is his key contribution to the said tradition. Résumé En général, la plupart des objections aux écrits d'Henry Thoreau se penchent sur ses provocations « inamicales ». Dans cet article, je propose que nous examinions son style par rapport à la pratique de la parrhésie, c'est-à-dire l'expression de la vérité d'après la tradition socratique de la philosophie. La parrhésie est la pratique consistant à dire la vérité dans le but de prendre conscience de l'importance de changer sa propre vie. La transformation envisagée par Thoreau dépend de l'acquisition d'un savoir-faire à l'égard de la culture des sens, et ce, à travers ce qu'il appelle « l'excursion ». Voilà ce qui constitue sa contribution fondamentale à ladite tradition. Keywords: Socrates; Henry Thoreau; parrhesia; philosophy as spiritual exercises; 19 th century American philosophy Socrates: [T]hey do say that I am a very odd sort of person, always causing people to get into difficulties. You must have heard that, surely? Theaetetus: Yes, I have. Socrates: And shall I tell you what is the explanation of that? Theaetetus: Yes, please do.

Socrates’ early dialogues end in aporia. Interlocutors walk away perplexed or ashamed of what the dialogue has brought to daylight, that is, their ignorance about their basic beliefs. But Socrates was after something far more fundamental. He saw aporia as a prelude to a search for areté, commonly translated as “virtue” or “excellence.” There are at least two narratives on the impacts of Socratic method on his interlocutors. The first group argues that aporia is a precondition for realizing the urgency of the care for the self by searching for true knowledge. Advocates of the second narrative are concerned that embracing philo-sophia requires more than just an acknowledgment of aporia. For even if the interlocutor admits that she is unable to defend her position or sees that her account is untenable, the move toward philosophia is not guaranteed. Embracing philosophical life or desire for wisdom requires something else besides or beyond the acknowledgment of inconsistency in one’s argument or aporia. If the arguments of the second group withstand scrutiny, then I suggest that the Socratic project can be supplemented with what I call the Emersonian method of enquiry, one that aims at a fundamental areté which is as important a precondition as Socratic aporia for the life of philosophy.

Persian poetry has a notable presence in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most commentators, however, see and discuss this presence in the context of Emerson’s poetry (for example, in poems such as “Saadī,” or “Bacchus”). What is less developed and fleshed out is the extent to which not only Emerson’s poetry but also his prose, from Nature (1836) to Society and Solitude (1870), corresponds to questions and concerns that shaped the overall orientation of Persian literary humanism (Adab), exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Furthermore, by establishing the link between literary excellence and moral persuasion in the classical Persian poetry, I show the extent of Emerson’s attachment to this connection and his attempts, exemplified in “Divinity School Address,” to persuade us morally (for the attainment of “unattained but attainable self) through a disarming quality of literary excellence.

In this paper, I focus on a less developed aspect of Emerson’s philosophy and argue that his writing was as much defined by an ecstatic vision of life as it was marked by the reality of what he calls “shabby experience.” No account of Emerson’s philosophy of life is balanced without taking into consideration his jubilant outlook in conjunction with his more sober notes and reflections on the limiting conditions of life. I suggest that the tone and the nature of Emerson’s reflections on “the quiet mediocrity of talent and condition” are less about a romantic resignation and more about the realization that often in the absence of a poetic vision the despair manifests itself as a form of shame. For this reason, I see some points of convergence between Emerson and Raymond Carver, and I am going to explore them in this Chapter. Emerson’s admission that “Our life looks trivial and we shun to record it,” anticipates Carver’s parsimony with words in his stories about lives that are “too tedious to talk about.” Further, I argue that there is a striking resemblance between their respective emphasis on “patience” and “tenderness” as solutions to the problem of experience.

Given the religious character of Emerson's writings as a whole, what would happen to the reception of him if one is not sympathetic to his religiousness? In this paper, I argue that any response to this question would be incomplete without taking into the account the reasons he was invested in the "religious sentiment" in the first place. George Kateb argues that Emerson's religiousness is not an integral part of his philosophy and that we have reasons to suggest that a secular sense of wonder has as much of a strong presence in his works as his religious sentiment. I argue that appreciating Emerson is not hinged upon sharing a similar attitude toward religion not because we can discern a secular sense of wonder in his writings, as Kateb claims, but also because Emerson's literary excellence shows us how to wonder at the ordinary in the first place. Further, I show that though there is a brief exchange of similar ideas between Emerson and Thomas Nagel in the latter's engagement of "the religious temperament" in his Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, their response to what they call the tremendousness of existence is fundamentally different.

In his book, Philosophy's Cool Place, D. Z. Phillips poses a question that I would like to address in this paper. He asks "if a philosopher gives a course on the meaning of life can he tell his students what that meaning is?" Here I modify the question and ask if a Wittgensteinian philosopher gives a course on the meaning of life can she tell her students what that meaning is? The orthodox position among Wittgensteinian philosophers is that it is not a philosopher's job to engage with such questions, that the focus should be on second-order or "grammatical" questions about life's meaning. However, I argue that the massive literature on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion shows that these so-called grammatical investigations are not entirely grammatical and that more often than not a conception of life's meaning emerges in these types of investigations. Further, I argue that Wittgenstein's engagement with what he calls the "problem of life" shows itself in two distinct ways: first in his private reflections on the nature of religious beliefs; second in his steady yet quiet interest in a naturalist account of life's meaning, culminated in his last text On Certainty.

The current literature on the meaning of life among analytic philosophers is founded upon a couple of delicate distinctions with far-reaching implications. Firstly, a great deal of effort and care has gone into establishing " meaningfulness " as a normative category distinct from " morality " and/or " happiness ". The idea is that although traditionally philosophers would appeal to morality or happiness to give an account of what makes a good life or good action, there are other things that we usually take into consideration when we contemplate ways of justifying a course of action; things that are neither shaped by our need for happiness nor guided by moral considerations, and which we do because they have a capacity to make our lives more meaningful. And it seems that most of us don't think that any random thing could have that capacity. We wouldn't think, for example, that the sum total of all the times we had ice cream, overslept, brushed our teeth, took selfies and filtered them, or stayed home to play computer games, are serious candidates for what would make our lives meaningful. We might prefer to think of things like gardening, friendships, our jobs, mastering an art or a craft, travelling to faraway continents, raising children, meeting someone by accident and meeting them again (for the heart is pounding). There seems to be something in common in the

A recurrent theme in Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings is his struggles with the problem of scholarly inaction. Commentators have given much attention to " The American Scholar " but less to his remarks about the " pale scholar. " In this paper, I focus on the latter and argue that understanding the evolving nature of Emerson's views about what counts for action could not only deepen our understanding of his philosophy and its orientation toward the conduct of life but also explain why, according to Emerson, there seems to be no reconciliation between " the theory and practice of life. " RÉSUMÉ : Le problème de l'inaction des intellectuels est un thème récurrent dans les écrits de Ralph Waldo Emerson. Les commentateurs ont accordé beaucoup d'attention à «l'intellectuel américain», mais moins à ses remarques concernant l'«intellectuel pâle». Dans cet article, je me concentre sur ce dernier point, en montrant qu'une compréhension de la manière dont évoluent les idées d'Emerson sur ce qui compte pour l'action permettrait non seulement d'approfondir notre compréhension de sa philosophie ainsi que son orientation vers la conduite de la vie, mais aussi d'expliquer pourquoi, selon Emerson, il ne semble pas y avoir de réconciliation possible entre «la théorie et la pratique de la vie».

In this paper, I focus on the provocative nature of Emerson's prose. In the face of its fragmentary nature and its apparent inconsistency it seems the reader of Emerson is left alone with the challenge of coming to a point for herself. But she is not utterly left alone. I examine Emerson's scattered remarks about his style, I take a clue from F. O. Matthiessen, and then I argue that the problem of Emerson's prose is the manifestation of a key problem in his philosophy of life: How to integrate the " knowledge of life by indirections " into a unified whole?

This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as “spiritual exercise”, arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates’ call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson’s provocative style of writing, Hosseini contends that his prose is shaped by a desire to bring about psychagogia, or influencing the soul through the power of words.

This book furthermore examines the evolving nature of Emerson’s thoughts on “scholarly action” and its implications, his religious temperament as an aesthetic experience of the world through wonder, and the reasons for a resounding acknowledgment of despair in his essay “Experience.”  In the concluding chapter, Hosseini explores the depth of Emerson’s engagement with the classical Persian poets and argues that what we may call his “literary humanism” is informed by Persian Adab, exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Weaving together themes from Persian philosophy and Emersonian transcendentalism, Hosseini establishes Emerson’s way of seeing as refreshingly relevant, showing that the questions he tackled in his writings are as pressing today as they were in his time.

What could Wittgenstein's work contribute to the rapidly growing literature on life's meaning? This book not only examines Wittgenstein's scattered remarks about value and 'sense of life' but also argues that his philosophy and 'way of seeing' has far reaching implications for the ways theorists approach an ancient question: 'How shall one live?'.