Niklas Forsberg

(Available from October 2021)
This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work.

Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity.

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

REVIEWS
“This fascinating book offers a valuable explication of Murdoch's relentless attempts to reveal what is missing in contemporary moral philosophy and culture. Greatly influenced by Kierkgaard, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil, the complexity and messiness of ordinary life, and with one's deepest commitments-many of which cannot be accessed, or altered by means of arguments intended to defend philosophical "positions." Forsberg (Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden) makes excellent use of the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall, who show how one might avoid the tendency of philosophers toward "deflection" from the "difficulties of reality." These are difficulties that people have when language fails in the face of experiences that refuse reduction to the abstraction of the clearly defined concepts sought after in philosophy--what Murdoch called its "dryness." Novelists like what it is like to struggle with the deeply confusing, distressing issues of the present without stepping aside from the emotional intensity of the encounters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--”
(S.A. Mason, Concordia University, Choice)

“A fair bang in the philosophy of literature ... Forsberg's addition to this scene is brilliant and necessary ... This [book] will reverberate.” 
(British Journal of Aesthetics)

“This is one of the most philosophically sophisticated contributions to these interlinked issues that I have come across in the last decade; the care, charity and ease with which Forsberg contests and dismantles one of the most influential current readings of Murdoch (that advanced by Nussbaum) is enough on its own to make it clear that standards in this area have just been raised.” 
(Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK)

“Can we lose our moral concepts? Can our culture and our understanding of the human occlude the background that alone makes sense of the ideals we want to live by? Niklas Forsberg argues that this is a basic insight of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. Moreover, this gives us the key to understanding the relation of Murdoch's philosophical writings to her novels. The latter hold a mirror to our lives, in which we could potentially become aware of this loss. This book is full of philosophical insight, not only about contemporary moral thinking but also about the relation of literature to philosophical thought.” 
(Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada)

This dissertation investigates the extent to which philosophical assumptions are inherited when we learn language. The topic is approached through an investigation into the importance of literature in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. In chapter 1 it is argued that Derrida’s interest in literature is best seen as an attempt to make room for a thinking that is not controlled by limitations inherent in the language inherited. Chapter 2 describes how the question of literature is related to Derrida’s overall deconstructive philosophical project. In Derrida’s view, our philosophical problems and metaphysical thinking as such are dependent upon a particular understanding of the linguistic sign. Chapter 3 describes why a literature that is based on and formed by a traditional conception of meaning is not going to be useful for Derrida in his deconstructive philosophy, since that notion contains, in Derrida’s view, a reinforcement of traditional metaphysical assumptions.
Chapter 4 describes Derrida’s alternative understanding of “literature” and situates this notion in his “quasi-transcendental” philosophy. It is argued that, in Derrida’s philosophy, the question of “literature” must be understood as intertwined with these three things: the transcendental/empirical distinction, Derrida’s attempt to re-think phenomenology and his conception of language. In chapter 5 Derrida’s view of language is examined. It is argued that Derrida’s notion of the sign is more restricted in scope than Derrida claims and that he has overestimated the importance of certain linguistic conceptions of language. It is argued that Derrida’s interest in “literature”, as a response to philosophical assumptions inherent in language, is dependent upon a much too detached view of language that fails to do justice to ordinary facts about language use and about language acquisition. Chapter 6 contains a summary and an elaboration of my own position.


Keywords: This dissertation investigates the extent to which philosophical assumptions are inherited when we learn language. The topic is approached through an investigation into the importance of literature in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. In chapter 1 it is argued that Derrida’s interest in literature is best seen as an attempt to make room for a thinking that is not controlled by limitations inherent in the language inherited. Chapter 2 describes how the question of literature is related to Derrida’s overall deconstructive philosophical project. In Derrida’s view, our philosophical problems and metaphysical thinking as such are dependent upon a particular understanding of the linguistic sign. Chapter 3 describes why a literature that is based on and formed by a traditional conception of meaning is not going to be useful for Derrida in his deconstructive philosophy, since that notion contains, in Derrida’s view, a reinforcement of traditional metaphysical assumptions.
Chapter 4 describes Derrida’s alternative understanding of “literature” and situates this notion in his “quasi-transcendental” philosophy. It is argued that, in Derrida’s philosophy, the question of “literature” must be understood as intertwined with these three things: the transcendental/empirical distinction, Derrida’s attempt to re-think phenomenology and his conception of language. In chapter 5 Derrida’s view of language is examined. It is argued that Derrida’s notion of the sign is more restricted in scope than Derrida claims and that he has overestimated the importance of certain linguistic conceptions of language. It is argued that Derrida’s interest in “literature”, as a response to philosophical assumptions inherent in language, is dependent upon a much too detached view of language that fails to do justice to ordinary facts about language use and about language acquisition. Chapter 6 contains a summary and an elaboration of my own position.


Keywords: Derrida, literature, philosophy, deconstruction, grammatology, structuralism, phenomenology, language, meaning.

Iris Murdoch’s “philosophy of language” is one of the more neglected aspects of her thinking. It is, of course, natural that one focuses on Murdoch’s thoughts about love, vision and attention, which obviously are central to her philosophy. In this chapter, however, I argue that a correct understanding and appropriation of the more discussed aspects of Murdoch’s thinking hinges in a correct understanding and appropriation of her thoughts about language. In particular, I will show that Murdoch’s emphasis on vision over choice cannot be fully understood without an acknowledgment of the fact that moral differences, as differences in vision, are conceptual differences, and that the work of attention, then, for Murdoch, primarily targets what she calls “the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others” —since this is where our visions, the vulnerable background to our reasoning and our actions, take shape. Moral clarity, as clarity in vision, is, thus, for Murdoch a form of conceptual clarity.

One of the most commonly shared views when it comes to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, was that one of the main focuses of the early Wittgenstein’s work was the concept of logic; and that the turn away from logic towards the concept of grammar and “grammatical investigations” of “ordinary language” is the defining characteristic of “later Wittgenstein.” There are, of course, many different ways of spelling out differences and similarities here. What has gone more or less unnoticed though, is that when Wittgenstein writes the remarks collected as On Certainty, there are very few mentions of “grammar,” and the few mentions there are shows that this concept now does very little philosophical work. Interestingly, though, the concept of logic is much more frequently employed, and it is also a concept Wittgenstein is really working on. This paper asks the question why the concept of logic again seems to have taken on a larger role in Wittgenstein’s latest period.

Iris Murdoch is happy to call herself a 'Wittgensteinian'. But she is also known for being critical to Wittgenstein's thinking, especially regarding questions pertaining to the theme of a limit to language, and to the importance of 'inner life' for philosophy. This chapter discusses Murdoch's critical remarks against Wittgenstein, and makes clear that many of them are not necessarily directed against Wittgenstein himself, but against certain possible ways of thinking that some of his 'followers' have adopted. It also explores some of the ways in which Murdoch and Wittgenstein are clearly on the same path, especially concerning topics of conceptual change and historicity as central for philosophical clarity.

This article explores one central assumption that is guiding large portions of contemporary (analytic) moral philosophy: the idea that moral philosophy has to be forward-looking and action-guiding. By paying attention to a number of examples, it is argued that this guiding assumption fly in the face of important aspects of actual moral life. Moral situations are not (always) of the nature that we can plan for them, and reason about them in advance. Rather, the moral reality, or the moral contexts, are often such that the moral situation is created in the scene, and hence something that is only available to reflect upon in hindsight. There are, at least, two central reasons why this is so: The first is that the sense, meaning, of the actions and the concepts we use in reflection about them, are not locked beforehand, and our understanding of them are formed in the process. The second reason is that moral situations come about in a responsive, rather than planned, way. That is, we discover our moral world by means of our reactive interactions, rather than in theoretical reflection that aims to produce “anticipated beliefs.” Thus, this article suggests a way of exploring morality’s backward- looking nature that does not misrepresent moral reality.

Jan Patočka opens “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by indicating that philosophers always tend to focus on questions about the mortality or immortality of the soul, when thinking about death, and that he wants to take a different route focusing instead on the phenomenology of the afterlife, and the ways the diseased others live in us. And this is what the major bulk of the text focuses on. But as Patočka’s unfinished text is about to end, he leaves us with a peculiar addendum that signals that a return to the more traditional questions – about death as mine – is necessary. In this text, I seek to elucidate what the phenomenology of afterlife brings to the traditional discussion about death as mine (and about my “soul”).
One of the more prominent and well-developed modern theories that discuss death as mine, is Derek Parfit’s. Thus, the effort in this text is to find out what Patočka’s phenomenology can teach us about Parfit’s theory.

This article takes off from Wittgenstein’s observation that “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, §65), and Murdoch’s related observation that “We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable” (Murdoch 2003, 260). I want to show that these two sentences contain an accurate observation about how our uses of words, and more importantly, how shifts in our uses of words, partake in transforming the moral landscape itself. Taking these two lessons to heart enables us to see more clearly that political and moral changes in public opinion are not simply rooted in people changing their opinions but must be traced back to conceptual changes that a community has “accepted”, as it were, unwarily. I discuss two examples of how the undercurrent of language has been altered with rather massive effects on the more familiar and visible level of “moral discourse”: the alt-right movement in Sweden, and political election strategies in Sweden.

This paper explores the notion of “power” prevalent in Havel’s understanding of the post-totalitarian regime. With this notion of power – which is “seeping” in nature, rather than rooted solely in an individual agent’s actions – a role of the individual in the formation of the political “we” becomes a central issue. The starting point of this article, is Havel’s well-known example of “the greengrocer” who places a sign with a message from the government, saying “Workers of the world, unite.” Havel returns to this example throughout the text, and this recurring move helps to illustrate how Havel pictures the way out of the post-totalitarian regime as one where individuals move from moves from living a lie to living in truth.
In this paper, I show how Havel’s talk about truth and authenticity, and his emphasis on a life in truth, which may seem both judgmental, naive and cliché-like, is best to understood. The wrong – cliché-like and judgmental – way to understand this is simply to say that people who merely obeyed that government, like the greengrocer did, are to be held accountable because they did not put up a fight against their oppressor. Such an understanding goes wrong because it fails to take the complexity of the relationship between power and language into account. In contrast to this, it is here argued that the central issue here is not that particular agents are to be held responsible for countersigning messages that they think are false. More precisely: it is argued that the moral difficulty here is that the greengrocer’s deeds that appear as counter-signatures of the regime are possible because the messages conveyed are “innocent” on the surface, in a “literal” sense. The moral dimension of the greengrocer’s actions, aiming to shed light on the complex relation between the government and the individual, is hereby revealed as located in a field of tension between inherited sense and new projections. This, in turn, can help is see the real nature of the transition Havel’s grocer undergoes when he moves from living a lie to living in truth. It is not a matter of negating a false statement or utterance, and replacing it with a true one. It is a matter of realizing that the responsibility for meaning is, ultimately, ours – and that the way in which he, the grocer, is one of us, also is something that has to be earned.

A central, yet surprisingly neglected, theme that runs through Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason is the historical dimension of human life and language.  For Cavell, this theme enters most significantly as the moral and political undertow to the text as a whole, since it sets the frame of how we, people of a community, convene in language. The topic of and how changes of our ways of thinking and speaking come about, is, in the literature, normally approached as a more or less strictly linguistic issue, understood mainly in the light of his discussions of how words must allow themselves to be “projected” into new contexts. Such readings downplays, I will argue, the ethico-political dimension to the work as a whole, due to the neglect of the historical dimension. One central passage where this is expressed, and from which I have borrowed my title, is this:

Perhaps the idea of a new historical period is an idea of a generation whose natural reactions — not merely whose ideas or mores — diverge from the old; it is an idea of a new (human) nature. And different historical periods may exist side by side, over long stretches, and within one human breast.

In this paper I will trace the implications if this Cavellian form of co-temporality of moral life in the framework of present moral life. Central to his thinking, is that these forms of conceptual changes of our moral frameworks must come from within. (“Only a priest could have confronted his set of practices with its origins so deeply as to set the terms of Reformation.” ) Moral advancement, and philosophical understanding of moral change, can thus not be achieved in a “top-down” way. Thus, in this article we will arrive at Cavell’s thinking by means of a series of examples.

This paper explores the notion of truth in relation to literature. It opens with a critical exposition of some dominant tendencies in contemporary aesthetics, in which narrow views of truth and reference guide the aesthetic investigations in harmful ways. One of the problems with such as view is not merely that it becomes difficult to talk about truth in art, but that it also makes the idea that we can learn something from literature problematic. The effort of this paper is thus to open up for a variety of notions of truth, that are not immediately tied to the notion of representation or correspondence. We need a way of talking about truth in art.
The effort to explore a notion of truth in art that is not tied to narrow views about reference, and which broadens our sense of “aboutness” goes, in this paper, via a reading of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture from 2005, together with some reflections inspired by some of Stanely Cavell’s reflections about the relevance of reflecting upon ordinary language. It is argued that literature engages in a form of conceptual reflection, by means of making the sense of our concepts clear and by challenging philosophical preconceptions about what our concepts must mean. What we can learn from art is thus not necessarily toed to either representation or authorial intent, but comes into view by means of the literary exercises that often (but certainly not always) require a conceptual sensitivity; that is, by means of careful attention to what words mean and what follows from them in specific contexts of use.

It is well-known that love takes center stage in Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. The general tendency has been to think that the relevance of Murdoch’s conception of love concerns romantic relations between two persons. But little attention has been paid to how this conception of love relates to the communal and to more political notions like justice and freedom. This chapter will remedy that, by means of elucidating the relations that hold between Murdoch’s conception of love and her concept of freedom. What emerges here is a call for a recognition of the many layers in which freedom is developed. Beyond a restricted notion of freedom as “freedom to choose” there’s a notion of freedom that comes in degrees.

The way that Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals begins may seem perplexing since it does not state in a clear way what the aims and purposes of the book are, nor does it say anything about methodology. This chapter aims to show how this peculiar opening, rightly understood, functions as an entrance to an understanding of the book as a whole, and to make clear why the opening chapter’s focus on the concept of art is the right place to start.
                    Murdoch’s view of metaphysics is that we are always guided by a worldview, i.e. by unified images that are historical and changing. Art functions as a mirror of its time that help to bring the background of our lives and thoughts into view.

It might seem intuitive to say that attention is a matter of looking really closely at something, zeroing in on a particular object. In contrast to such an understanding of attention, it is here argued that attentive understanding of particular persons, things or events can only be apprehended by means of attending to the world in which they belong.
Iris Murdoch’s example of M and D is often described as a clear illustration of what “attention” is. I argue that the example is rather unhelpful, precisely because we get no description of the work of attention. So, there’s a big hole in the argument. The strategy of this paper is to fill that hole by means of a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Here we get a clear view of another person is attained by to attention to the world together with the unearthing of one’s own prejudices – a view shared by Murdoch, but missing in the reception of her thought.

The idea that literature may be philosophically helpful often comes together with a theory about the specificity of two distinct forms of narrative discourse. Many philosophers take on the task to theorize about the differences between philosophical narratives and literary ones, and to show how literature may have philosophical (cognitive) value with bearing on our real world despite the fact that it is made-up. And so philosophical reflections on the concept of narrativity is often conducted to find ways to bridge the supposed gap between fictional, or dramatic narratives, and factual, or argumentative ones.
Dwelling on parts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Iris Murdoch’s philosophies, I show in this paper that the line of reasoning described above is problematic. Both Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch give us reasons to think that the whole idea of a gap to be bridged is spurious.  In contrast, I argue that attention to narrative literature can bring into view a form of conceptual elasticity that is part of all language – even if much philosophy quite often (and with good reason at times) has strived hard to eradicate it.

This chapter brings together Murdoch’s thoughts about language with other central aspects of her thought such as love, attention, perfectionism and morality. By making clear how Murdoch’s variety of linguistic philosophy differs from contemporary philosophy of language, this paper also shows that Murdoch’s philosophy contains the seeds for a fruitful form of philosophizing which brings the moral and aesthetic dimensions of language into view. “Taking the linguistic method seriously” means making clear the ways in which all concepts belong to a fabric that is changing on a personal level as well as an historical one. One of the things that Murdoch can help us see is that one problem with contemporary philosophy of language, is that it does not take the linguistic method seriously enough.

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as “Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.” How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world – learning from one’s teachers for example – is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world.

What is it that we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to go about as we ask the philosophical question par excellence: ‘what is …?’ How can we survey the uses of a word in such a way that we can form a philosophical theory, or account, of it? These are questions addressed in this paper, with particular focus on Troy Jollimore’s recent book Love’s Vision and contemporary philosophies about love.

Jollimore’s account, fruitful in many respects, illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are often prone to believe (unwittingly most of the time) that even though ‘the sense of the word’ that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words that we use when we do these investigations and renegotiations are not. Jollimore’s exploration of the concept of love depends upon specific conceptions of ‘reasons’ and ‘rationality’ that guide his thinking but remains unquestioned, even when his own account should lead to a reconsideration of them.

It is argued that we may have to rethink a great number of words and concepts as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word or concept.

One of the most persistent myths about philosophies that “proceed from the ordinary” is that any kind of philosophy that emphasizes the ordinary does so in order to find true and original sense, not contaminated by “philosophy.” This is pretty much as a far as one may come from the real significance of philosophical attention to the everyday. Indeed, if one looks at, for example, Austin and Wittgenstein, they both share the view that the everyday and the senses of our ordinary lives in language, are ever so difficult to bring into view, and it is precisely the failure to acknowledge these kinds of difficulties that often lead philosophers into philosophical problems and metaphysical speculation.
In this paper, I aim to investigate this pent-up dimension of the significance of philosophical attention to the everyday. The philosopher who most clearly have stressed that “the everyday” is something immensely difficult to get into view, is Stanley Cavell, and he has also linked the concept of the ordinary to the Freudian concept of the uncanny. The concept of the uncanny has a particular ring to it in German. Since the word “Heimlich” means “familiar” and “secret,” it suggests a fairly thick layer of connotations of the no-(longer-)secret, the disclosed, where everything is open to view, as it were. In short “Unheimlich” contains the claim that there is something uncanny about that which is open to view because it is open to view.
The second half of this paper, is a reflection upon the short stories of Raymond Carver’s. I turn to these in order to elucidate the uncanniness of the ordinary – an uncanniness that often is a part of (but certainly not the only cause of) the philosophical desire to generalize, destabilize and regiment language. I also aim to show that there is a sense in which Carver’s short stories make it possible for us to see this fact about our lives in language clearly, in a way that ordinary forms of philosophical discourse hides from view. Thereby, Carver’s short stories – being a specific form of literature – can help us see more clearly the sources of our philosophical confusions. In this respect, Carver’s short stories function, not as an exemplification of a philosophical thesis, but as (more or less) philosophical investigations their own right.

This paper is an investigation into Iris Murdoch’s variety of moral perfectionism. It starts off from Stanley Cavell’s reservations against Murdoch’s view, as it come to be expressed in Murdoch’s famous example M and D, about a mother in law who changes her perception of her daughter in law. Cavell’s principle complaint is that, as the example is set up, there’s no reason to think that the mother in law, M, comes “to see herself, and hence the possibilities of her world, in a transformed light.” This, Cavell, argued, differentiates Murdoch version of moral perfectionism from Cavell’s. In this paper, it is argued that Cavell has pointed out a genuine deficiency of Murdoch’s example, but that he nevertheless misunderstands her position. With an adequate of Murdoch’s philosophy in general, and of her views of conceptual change, attention, love and perceptions in particular, Cavell’s charges become unwarranted.

How do we know when learning has taken place? When is a teacher's job done? One answer that may be drawn from Wittgenstein's work is: when the pupil is able to go on alone. One temptation here is to say that a child has learned how to go on alone when she has grasped the regularity underlying the phenomena at hand – we know how to use a word in new contexts when we know what it means; or, we know how to use the words we have learned when we know the rules that guide their correct use. This paper aims to show that we often misunderstand the point where the student is ready to part way with his or her teacher if we focus to strongly on rules. It is argued that it may be helpful here to think more about kinds of regularities in language use that are not so self-evidently " rule-like " in order to further make clear that regularity in language use, the normative force of language, does not depend on, or fall back upon, a kind of rule, or form of language, that precedes all articulations (correct and incorrect).

Abstract
J. L. Austin is commonly known as an ‘ordinary language philosopher’. Ordinary language philosophy, in turn, is generally known as a philosophy of language which employs everyday language as a standard of correctness – an arbiter between meaningful speech and nonsense. By means of a return to the somewhat heated debate between Austin and Ayer, this paper challenges this picture.
Austin’s criticism of Ayer is not that Ayer is using language in a way that deviates from the ordinary (as Ayer thinks). Rather, Austin’s work serves to show both that Ayer’s reasons for deviating are confused and that Ayer’s aspiration to construct a new language, with its own criteria, will fail. The distinction between the philosophical and the ordinary that Ayer relies on must collapse, otherwise it would be entirely unclear what Ayer’s theory is about.
It is argued that if there is one philosophical tradition that encourages us to turn ‘ordinary language’ into a problem for philosophy, it is ordinary language philosophy. And so, there is no simple instruction of the form ‘If you are philosophically troubled, then turn to ordinary language and you will see the true sense’ coming out of Austin’s work (rightly construed).

This paper investigates a categorical dimension of morality that is part of our everyday lives. By means of a reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, it is argued that the philosophical thrust of literature is not that it illustrates philosophical views, or presents ideal characters whose actions are “exemplary for conduct.” Borrowing thrust from Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell, it is argued that the deeper significance of literature is not dependent upon the presence of “philosophy” in novels. Literature can help us see how moral lives take shape in language, and how literature may enable us to get an understanding of how philosophical problems arise by means of philosophical abstractions and intellectualizations.

This paper discusses Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical investigations and shows how such an investigation, rightly understood, can elucidate the concept of pain. Philosophical attention to the concept of pain tends to lead philosophers in very different directions. A certain set of examples of uses of the concept might lead your thinking ‘outwards’ towards behaviourism, whereas another set of examples might lead you inwards. 
I develop an understanding of grammatical investigations which does not hide complexities of language, arguing that grammar is as complex as the phenomenon of pain is, and vice versa. In divergence with e.g. Peter Hacker, I try to show how “grammatical investigations” cannot result in rules for the correct uses of language. The formulation of such rules tend to come together with a ‘one-sided diet’ (PI § 593). In contrast, I argue that what pain can teach us about grammar is that grammar, in Wittgenstein’s sense, is not, and cannot be, regulatory, and that it is the elasticity of a concept, if anything, that is its essence.


Key Words
Pain, Wittgenstein, grammatical investigation, grammatical rules, Hacker, McGinn, Cavell, ordinary language philosophy

Iris Murdoch has argued that we need a new conception of original sin. This paper aims to elucidate and respond to the many questions that such a proclamation entails. What is a secular notion of original sin? Why do we need it? What does it mean to make a new version of an old concept? What role can such a concept play in contemporary moral philosophy and how does such a philosophy relate to other forms of moral theories?
It is argued that the concept of original sin is central to Murdoch’s philosophy. The reconquered, reclaimed, concept of original sin functions as a handrail into Murdoch’s conception of human morality as something that cannot be fully understood in terms of rational actions and well-reasoned judgments. For it is here that we can come to see that we human beings are “guilty not of what we do but of what we are.”
Pace many common interpretations of Murdoch, I argue that this is not a matter of “accepting” a Christian doctrine. The ways which we are properly described as fallen, can only be revealed by means of a careful attention to the ways we lead our lives in language.

By means of a reading of the penultimate chapter of Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method, this paper offers a re-evaluation of several points in leading interpretations of his philosophy. It is argued that this chapter, ‘Philosophy as a Branch of Literature’, invites us to rethink the relation between a systematic or problem-oriented and an historical or exegetical philosophy; how linguistic analysis (particularly in the form of ordinary language philosophy) relates to the history of philosophy; and how the question of literature in philosophy is not merely a question about literature, but of philosophy.
In contrast to Connelly and D’Oro, it is here argued that Collingwood  (a) offers a profound criticism of the idea that philosophical problems are eternal, (b) invites us to deepen our understanding of ordinary language philosophy as well as (c) the idea of a therapeutic method in philosophy, and  (d) problematizes the tendency to think that the question about the form philosophical writing takes is a secondary issue that can be side-stepped.

Key Words
Collingwood, philosophical method, history of philosophy, ordinary language philosophy, literature, analytic philosophy

This paper discusses Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical investigations and shows how such an investigation, rightly understood, can elucidate the concept of pain. Philosophical attention to the concept of pain tends to lead philosophers in very different directions. A certain set of examples of uses of the concept might lead your thinking ‘outwards’ towards behaviourism, whereas another set of examples might lead you inwards. 
I develop an understanding of grammatical investigations which does not hide complexities of language, arguing that grammar is as complex as the phenomenon of pain is, and vice versa. In divergence with e.g. Peter Hacker, I try to show how ‘grammatical investigations’ cannot result in rules for the correct uses of language. The formulation of such rules tend to come together with a ‘one-sided diet’ (PI § 593). In contrast, I argue that what pain can teach us about grammar is that grammar, in Wittgenstein’s sense, is not, and cannot be, regulatory, and that it is the elasticity of a concept, if anything, that is its essence.


Key Words
Pain, Wittgenstein, grammatical investigation, grammatical rules, Hacker, McGinn, Cavell, ordinary language philosophy

This paper discusses the question of dogmatism in relation to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I argue that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is both a break from, yet dependent upon, the analytic philosophical tradition. If this fact is not acknowledged one runs the risk of appropriating Wittgenstein’s philosophy dogmatically. Glock’s reading of Wittgenstein is employed to show the mistake in reading Wittgenstein as if he worked entirely within the analytic philosophical tradition. Such readings generally attribute theses to Wittgenstein – in direct contrast to his own intentions – and they tend to disregard or misrepresent Wittgenstein’s deeply critical attitude towards the «scientific spirit» of the age.
It is also argued that a reading that focuses solely on Wittgenstein’s more methodologically oriented remarks runs the risk of misrepresenting them, if they are disconnected from the particular philosophical problems that they are internally connected to.

Finally, it is argued that the struggle against dogmatism is a constant struggle. Dogmatism is, in Wittgenstein’s conception of it, not something that can be fully avoided since dogmatism is inherent in the philosophical desire itself. Dogmatism in philosophy is not merely dogmatism in academic philosophy, but comes together with a very natural desire to establish one fixed meaning for our words.

Key Words: Cavell, dogmatism, Glock, method, Wittgenstein.

Making a Difference: Rethinking Humanism and the Humanities is a collection of fourteen conference papers written in response to a call for new ways of thinking about the humanities within an academic system in transformation. A guiding principle of the conference was to allow the arts — film in particular — to have a voice in the process of possible reorientation. The unifying theme is the continual reconsideration of its own aims, purposes, practices and critical potential as the most salient characteristic of humanist thinking, something which is ultimately up to each individual to work out for herself, as the various responses to our call in this volume testify.
Making a Difference includes papers by James Conant, Martin Gustafsson, Margareta Hallberg, Lars Hertzberg, Morten Kyndrup, Sabina Lovibond, Joseph Margolis, Stephen Mulhall, Gunnar Olsson, Sharon Rider, Hans Ruin, Richard Shusterman, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, and Sören Stenlund.

Review of Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, edited by Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain (London: Routledge, 2018). Penultimate Draft. The final version is published in Philosophical Investigations, 15 May 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1111/phin.12206