Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Alright, having sketched some ideas for a while and then drawn out a semi-organized second draft, it’s time to consider ways to break down and then reassemble the pieces we’ve brought together so far to produce a coherent article. We’re hoping four drafts do it, with the fourth amounting to a clean up of the third. We’re under two months to the due date, so that’s where we need to be.

Greig and I agreed that the “praxis hermeneutics” bit of the second draft interested us most, and so we sought out ways to highlight that angle while keeping to our original proposal (to analyze the relationship between language, praxis, and meaning, particularly as developed in the work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Sellars, Brandom, and Lance) as much as possible. We decided that our best approach would be to move the Taylor/Schatzki social practices piece to the front, presenting it as a broad account of the human condition, and as our endorsed take on the same, and using that as a staging ground for branching off into the work of the other philosophers we’re considering. We discussed a bit whether we wanted Taylor/Schatzki to serve as a foil for these other views, or whether we were more inclined to try to synthesize all of these views.

Not surprisingly, Greig and I opted to emphasize the latter, to ask not, “Which of these views is closest to being right?”, but rather, “How could all of these views be maximally true?” If a philosophy is not basically true in its salient points, why bother examining it?

So now we start over. I’ve got an idea for an opening section working with a quote from John McDowell’s Mind and World. Then we’ll see how fully we want to develop the Taylor/Schatzki account. In the final version I think this section should be quite large, and it has to provide the context for our sorting out what language is and how it functions in human life, as well as what praxis is both in abstraction from and in collaboration with language.