Wittgenstein and Phenomenology

This volume of new essays explores the relationship between the thought of Wittgenstein and the key figures of phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. It is the first book to provide an overview of how Wittgenstein’s philosophy in its different phases, including his own so-called phenomenological phase, relates to the variety of phenomenological approaches developed in continental Europe. In so doing, the volume seeks to throw light on both sides of the comparison, and to clarify more broadly the relations between analytic and phenomenological philosophy. However, rather than treating the interpretation of either phenomenological philosophy or Wittgenstein as an already settled issue, several chapters in the volume examine and question received views regarding them, and develop alternatives to such views. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology will be of interest to scholars working in philosophical methodology and meta-philosophy, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics.

Oskari Kuusela is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, UK. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2003, and is the author of The Struggle against Dogmatism (Harvard, 2008) and Key Terms in Ethics (Continuum, 2010), the co-editor of Wittgenstein and His Interpreters (Blackwell-Wiley, 2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (OUP, 2011).

Mihai Ometita is working on his PhD thesis at the University of East Anglia, UK on Wittgenstein’s phenomenology with reference to continental phenomenologists, especially Merleau-Ponty.

Timur Ucan is working on his PhD thesis at the University of East Anglia, UK (in a co-supervision arrangement with the University of Bordeaux) on Wittgenstein and Sartre. He has published an article on Sartre, and assisted in the editing of Stoicisme et lien social by Valery Laurand (Classiques Garnier Editions, 2014).