John Wisdom Philosophical Cognitive Dissonance

Trial talk for South London Philosophical Circle 14-05-2023
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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.
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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’
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