Heward Wilkinson – Philosophical Perplexity and Cognitive Dissonance: the significance of John Wisdom’s philosophy

Date/Time
Date(s) - 14/05/2023
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location
The Duke of Battersea




John Wisdom, together perhaps with Elizabeth Anscombe, was the most original of those deeply influenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Wisdom is an elusive thinker, more deeply dialectical than the much more peremptory, and directly cognitively dissonant, Wittgenstein, and one who gradually in subtle ways moved beyond Wittgenstein. In particular he developed a conception of the a priori which treats it as less trivial/grammatical, and more traditionally metaphysical, than Wittgenstein’s residually tautological concept. He starts, in particular, from his own coinage, ‘philosophical perplexity’, and his paper of that title is one way of beginning to address his special way of doing philosophy, in the context of ‘cognitive dissonance’, also.
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~francisp/NewPhil448/WisdomPhilPerplex36.pdf
His masterpiece is the never republished ‘Other Minds’ from which I shall mainly draw to fill out and discuss the somewhat cryptic argument of ‘Philosophical Perplexity’

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Minds-John-Wisdom/dp/0631084002

 

This meeting will be on the second Sunday of May to avoid the Bank Holidays and Festivities for the Coronation

We meet in The Duke of Battersea, but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom.  For details see SLPC Zoom Meeting

YouTube version of John Wisdom Philosophical Cognitive Dissonance