Language, ethics and animal life : Wittgenstein and beyond

246 Pages·2012·1.719 MB·

by  Burley, Mikel, Hämäläinen, Nora, Forsberg, Niklas

Language, Ethics and Animal Life
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd ii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3300 AAMM
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd iiii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Language, Ethics and Animal Life
Wittgenstein and Beyond
Edited by
Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley and Nora Hämäläinen
NEW YORK (cid:129) LONDON (cid:129) NEW DELHI (cid:129) SYDNEY
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd iiiiii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square
New York London
NY 10010 WC1B 3DP
USA UK
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2012
© Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley, Nora Hämäläinen and contributors, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can
be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
E ISBN: 978-1-4411-6462-9
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America

99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd iivv 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Contents
Acknowledgements v i
Notes on Contributors v ii
Diff erent Forms of Forms of Life: A Philosophical Introduction
Niklas Forsberg 1
1 Humanizing Nonhumans: Ape Language Research as
Critique of Metaphysics Pär Segerdahl 1 6
2 Ethics and Language: What we Owe to Speakers David Cockburn 3 2
3 Th e Diffi culty of Language: Wittgenstein on Animals
and Humans Nancy E. Baker 4 5
4 Rape among Scorpionfl ies, Spouse Abuse among the Praying
Mantis and Other ‘Reproductive Strategies’ in the Animal and
Human World Olli Lagerspetz 6 5
5 Th ree Perspectives on Altruism Ylva Gustafsson 82
6 Talking about Emotions Camilla Kronqvist 9 7
7 Man as a Moral Animal: Moral Language-Games, Certainty
and the Emotions J ulia Hermann 1 11
8 Living with Animals, Living as an Animal A nne Le Goff 1 24
9 What’s Wrong with a Bite of Dog? R ami Gudovitch 1 39
10 Second Nature and Animal Life Stefano Di Brisco 1 52
11 Wittgenstein, Wonder and Attention to Animals Mikel Burley 1 66
12 Honour, Dignity and the Realm of Meaning N ora Hämäläinen 1 79
13 W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative A lice Crary 1 95
Bibliography 2 13
Index 2 25
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd vv 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Acknowledgements
Forerunners of most of the essays that constitute this volume were fi rst presented at
the inaugural conference of the Nordic Wittgenstein Society in Uppsala, Sweden, in
March 2010. We are grateful to all the speakers and other delegates who participated in
that very successful conference and to the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation
for fi nancial support.
Two anonymous reviewers for Bloomsbury provided helpful comments which
enabled us to refi ne the volume as a whole and prompted us to commission a further
contribution from Nancy Baker, to whom we are also much indebted.
T remendous thanks are due to Ika Österblad for supplying the marvellous cover
illustration and design, and Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury for seeing this volume
through to publication.
A ll the essays are published here for the fi rst time, with two exceptions. Alice
Crary’s paper, ‘W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative’, previously appeared in
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Th eory , 19(3)
(2012). We and Alice Crary are grateful to Wiley-Blackwell and the journal’s editors
for permission to republish the essay. Stefano Di Brisco’s essay, ‘Second Nature and
Animal Life’, is a substantially revised and longer version of his article by the same title
that fi rst appeared in Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy
and Animals , 13(10) (2010), 118–31, which is a journal sponsored by the Philosophy
Department and Digital Commons at California Polytechnic State University <http://
digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/>. We and Stefano Di Brisco are grateful to these
sponsors and to the journal’s editor-in-chief, Joseph Lynch, for permission to re-use
material from the previously published version of the paper.
Niklas Forsberg
Mikel Burley
Nora Hämäläinen
February 2012
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd vvii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Notes on Contributors
Nancy E. Baker is Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College where she has
taught Wittgenstein’s P hilosophical Investigations for 37 years. She has contributed a
paper to Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein, and has written on Wittgenstein’s On
Certainty and ‘Th e Role of “Confusion” in Wittgenstein’s Later Work’. She is currently
fi nishing a non-academic book to be titled, W hy Can’t A Cat Retrieve? Wittgenstein,
the Siamese Cat and I.
Mikel Burley is Lecturer in Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He
is the author of Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips
(Continuum, 2012) and two books on Indian philosophy. His recent articles include
‘Winch and Wittgenstein on Moral Harm and Absolute Safety’ (I nternational Journal
for Philosophy of Religion, 2010), ‘Emotion and Anecdote in Philosophical Argument:
Th e Case of Havi Carel’s Illness ’ ( Metaphilosophy , 2011) and ‘Believing in Reincarnation’
( Philosophy , 2012).
David Cockburn is Professor of Philosophy at University of Wales: Trinity Saint
David. His publications include Other Human Beings (Macmillan, 1990), Other Times:
Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future (Cambridge University Press,
1997) , An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave, 2001) and a wide range of
papers on themes in philosophy of mind, ethics, Wittgenstein, philosophy of religion
and philosophy of time.
Alice Crary is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research
in New York. Her main research and teaching interests are moral philosophy, the
philosophy of Wittgenstein, philosophy and literature, feminist theory, and ethics
and animals. She is the author of Beyond Moral Judgment (Harvard University Press,
2007), the editor of Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond
(MIT Press, 2007) and the co-editor of R eading Cavell (Routledge, 2006) and Th e New
Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000). She is currently completing a book on animals and
ethics entitled Inside Ethics .
Stefano Di Brisco o btained his PhD from Sapienza – University of Rome in 2011 with
a thesis on moral philosophy. He has been visiting scholar at the New School for Social
Research in New York. His interests include Wittgenstein and moral philosophy, ethics,
and philosophy and literature.
Niklas Forsberg is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University,
Sweden. He is currently completing a monograph entitled L anguage Lost and Found
which treats the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost
the sense of our own language and how that problem is dealt with in recent discussions
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd vviiii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
viii Notes on Contributors
of the relationship between philosophy and literature. In this monograph, Iris Murdoch
is his main conversation partner. He has previously written on Wittgenstein, Cavell,
Murdoch, Austin and Derrida.
Rami Gudovitch wrote his dissertation at Columbia University, entitled A Nominalist
Conception of the Extent of the Intentional. His main fi elds of specialization include
metaphysics, early analytic philosophy and the philosophy of mind. His current
research projects involve the development of a position that denies the supervenience
of the mental on the physical, and investigating the role of authority in education. He
is presently completing his post-doc at Haifa University and teaching philosophy at the
Interdisciplinary Center in Hertzliya and at Ben-Gurion University.
Ylva Gustafsson is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at Åbo Akademi
University, Finland. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis where she discusses
questions on interpersonal understanding.
Nora Hämäläinen is a post-doctoral researcher and temporary lecturer in philosophy
at the University of Helsinki, Finland. In 2009–11 she was editor-in-chief of the
Helsinki-based cultural weekly Ny Tid, which presents a mixture of literature, arts,
politics and culture. She has written about ethics, literature and the nature of moral
theory.
Julia Hermann r eceived her PhD from the Department of Political and Social Sciences
of the European University Institute and is now Lecturer in Social Philosophy at
Maastricht University. In autumn 2008, she was a Visiting Student Researcher at the
Philosophy Department of the University of California, Berkeley. In the academic
year 2010/11, she worked as a Teaching Fellow in the European Master’s Programme
in Human Rights and Democratisation in Venice. Her main research interests include
the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, moral justifi cation, moral knowledge, moral
education and human rights.
Camilla Kronqvist defended her doctoral dissertation in philosophy in 2008 at Åbo
Akademi University in Finland. Since then she has held diff erent research and teaching
positions at the same university. In her dissertation she investigated emotional,
interpersonal and moral aspects of the concept of love. Articles on the same theme
appear in Inquiry and Philosophical Investigations . She is the co-editor, together
with Ylva Gustafsson and Michael McEachrane of Emotions and Understanding:
Wittgensteinian Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), and continues working on
questions relating to emotions in her post-doctoral research.
Olli Lagerspetz has been Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University
since 2005. He was the Head of Philosophy from 2007 to 2010. In addition to Åbo, he
has studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was Lecturer in
Philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea, from 1992 to 1998. He has published a
book on the concept of trust and a book (in Swedish) on the clean and the dirty, as well
as articles on ethics, philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of mind.
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd vviiiiii 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM
Notes on Contributors ix
Anne Le Goff is currently completing her PhD at the University of Picardie in France.
She works on the philosophy of second nature of John McDowell, and is interested in
non-reductionist naturalist approaches to human life as well as animal life. She is the
co-editor of a philosophical reader of M ind and World by McDowell in French, and
the translator of many philosophical texts from German and English, including Jewish
Philosophy as a Guide to Life by Hilary Putnam.
Pär Segerdahl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University in Sweden.
His background is in philosophy of language. He has published several inquiries into
linguistic theory, for example, in L anguage Use (Macmillan, 1996). He oft en uses
examples from ape language research, above all in Kanzi’s Primal Language (Palgrave,
2005), written with ape language researchers William Fields and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
Pär Segerdahl currently works at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB)
in Uppsala.
99778811444411114400555555__FFMM__FFiinnaall__ttxxtt__pprriinntt..iinndddd iixx 88//2244//22000011 11::2211::3311 AAMM