VII National/IV International Wittgenstein Symposium at Unicamp (Campinas, Brazil)

Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to bring to your knowledge the upcoming VII National/IV International Wittgenstein Symposium at Unicamp (Campinas, Brazil), to be held in september 28-30, 2011. Our Symposia have been acclaimed as one of Brazil's main scholarly meetings dedicated to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. This year's Symposium will address some of its epistemological aspects. We thought you might consider forwarding this Notice of this year's meeting to your contact lists of Wittgenstein scholars – for which we would be much grateful. Among the confirmed speakers are Professors António Marques (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal), Arley R. Moreno (Unicamp), João Carlos Salles (UFBA) and Mauro Engelmann (UFMG). In previous editions we had as speakers Professors David Stern, Alois Pichler and Antonia Soulez, among others. Incidentally, it should be added that our Chairman Prof. Arley Moreno was invited as a speaker to the 33^th Edition of the ALWS's International Wittgenstein Symposium, where the three members of our Committee had the pleasure of presenting papers. Thank you in advance for your kind help. The Organizing Committee

Wittgenstein and Epistemology

Wittgenstein insists, from the time of the Tractatus to the end of his life, that philosophy is just a practice, not theory. However, much of his thinking, especially after the book of youth, is about what he there called a theory of knowledge. This and other issues will be addressed in the VII National Symposium / IV International Symposium Wittgenstein / UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil)

Visit the Symposium site and enroll yourself

One of the many intriguing questions surrounding Wittgenstein's philosophical thinking is the status of philosophical practice. Indeed, while by doing philosophy he is just intending to exercise a practice and nothing more, first as a critique of language in the Tractatus, and then as a conceptual therapy of philosophical thought, we can find numerous passages in his writings where a true theory of knowledge seems to be drafted. 

Such is the case of the reflections on mental states, which come to take up more space in his thought after the Tractatus - interspersed with others, on mathematics, logic, language, perception of shapes and colors, teaching and learning of the conceptual meaning, etc.. – Up to the point when, in the last years of his life, he devotes himself to very intense descriptions of the use of psychological terms. However, already in the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that his conception of a theory of knowledge is as a philosophy of psychology, because what interests him is the study of language as a system of symbols, not the study of mental processes, as it is done by empiricist psychology. Now this philosophy of psychology is understood as an activity of clarification of thought - at first, hazy and indistinct, hoping to make them clear and delimit them precisely. In the second phase of his reflections, as we know, Wittgenstein begins to consider the philosophical activity a therapy of thought, and no longer a criticism of language, assigning to it still, and always, a practical dimension and excluding the theory. The philosophical clarification addresses, then, the muddled thinking itself, and seeks to free it, by clarifying the foundations of knowledge and meaning, from the metaphysical aura in which it finds itself traditionally involved. The theme of the VII National/IV International Wittgenstein Symposium sets out from this conception of practical rather than theoretical theory of knowledge, to raise the question of a certain idea of epistemology that seems to be on the horizon of philosophical activity. We invite all those interested in these issues to spend with us a few days reflecting on them, in the company of Wittgenstein.