Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/10/2025
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
The Rose Battersea
Heward says
“My old teacher the critic F.R. Leavis towards the end of his life referred to himself as The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. I realised that there were definitely both philosophers and quasi-philosophers also who can be plausibly seen in this light. As well as Leavis, Freud comes into the frame, and then Nietzsche and then the Oxford philosopher, J.L. Austin, and perhaps Derrida and perhaps Rousseau.
“Then I found myself asking, how much of philosophy as such is Anti-Philosophy? How much of philosophy puts philosophy itself in question? What about Herakleitos (Heraclitus)? What about Zeno and Parmenides in Plato’s dialectical tour de force about the young Socrates? What about Socrates himself? Further names popped up: the later Heidegger; Wittgenstein early and late; John Wisdom; the theologian Karl Barth; Hume; Russell; Samuel Johnson; Newman; Levinas; Julian Jaynes; F.H. Bradley in Appearance and Reality – and so it goes on. Cases can be made for any or all of these.”
Heward has provided some further notes in the attached PDF Philosophy as Anti-Philosophy
Heward has also recommended viewing
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 20, Logic and Reality (1946), pp. 122-197 Symposium: Other Minds
Author(s): J. Wisdom, J. L. Austen, J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer
The three authors present three positions: Wisdom a Meta-Philosophy dialectical position; Austin an Anti-Philosopny position; and Ayer a traditional philosophy position – empiricism
The full document is available on JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/4106432
We meet in The Rose Battersea, 74-76 Battersea Bridge Road, London SW11 3AG but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom. For details see SLPC Zoom Meeting