Emmanuel Bermon – författare

This volume sheds a new light on Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s master opus, by taking a new approach to its first stretch (sections §§1-88), with special emphasis on its atypical opening. The methodological conviction that subtends the volume is that the highly unconventional form assumed by the book is internal to its content and crucial to its reconception of the relation between logic and language. This disconcerting form is dictated by the new modes of criticism deployed by Wittgenstein as he engages the philosophical tradition in the new terms afforded by the revolutionary “method of language-games”. In the essays collected here, seven authors, including some of the most influential figures in the field, offer close and often unorthodox readings of pivotal passages from the beginning of the book. These readings are also shaped by the conviction that the Philosophical Investigations are hardly intelligible apart from an appreciation of the concerns that they inherit from Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The authors contend that we need to consider the continuities between the early and the later works if we are to disclose the true discontinuities between them.

This volume sheds a new light on Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s master opus, by taking a new approach to its first stretch (sections §§1-88), with special emphasis on its atypical opening. The methodological conviction that subtends the volume is that the highly unconventional form assumed by the book is internal to its content and crucial to its reconception of the relation between logic and language. This disconcerting form is dictated by the new modes of criticism deployed by Wittgenstein as he engages the philosophical tradition in the new terms afforded by the revolutionary “method of language-games”. In the essays collected here, seven authors, including some of the most influential figures in the field, offer close and often unorthodox readings of pivotal passages from the beginning of the book. These readings are also shaped by the conviction that the Philosophical Investigations are hardly intelligible apart from an appreciation of the concerns that they inherit from Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The authors contend that we need to consider the continuities between the early and the later works if we are to disclose the true discontinuities between them.

Écrite entre 386 et 390 dans l’effervescence de la découverte du néoplatonisme, la correspondance entre Augustin et son ami Nebridius est un concentré de questions platoniciennes sur l’infini, la distinction entre le sensible et l’intelligible, l’imagination et la réminiscence, les rêves inspirés, l’assimilation à Dieu, le « véhicule » de l’âme, l’intériorité et l’individualité. S’y ajoutent des développements théologiques majeurs sur l’Incarnation et la Trinité. Grâce à ces lettres qui font tour à tour « entendre le Christ, Platon et Plotin », comme le dit Nebridius lui-même, nous comprenons mieux ce moment incandescent de la vie d’Augustin où il se convertit à la fois à la philosophie et au christianisme, comme en témoigneront plus tard les Confessions.Written between 386 and 390 during the excitement of his discovery of Neoplatonism, Augustine’s correspondence with his friend Nebridius is a distillation of Platonic questions concerning the infinite, the distinction between sensible and intelligible phenomena, the imagination and recollection, inspired dreams, assimilation to God, the “vehicle” of the soul, interiority, and individuality. In addition, the exchange contains major theological insights concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity. Thanks to these letters, which, as Nebridius himself says, make “Christ, Plato, and Plotinus heard,” we can better understand this incandescent moment in Augustine’s life when he converted to both philosophy and Christianity, as the Confessions will later testify.