While there are publications on Wittgenstein’s interest in Dostoevsky’s novels and the recurring mentions of Wittgenstein in Sebald’s works, there has been no systematic scholarship on the relation between perception (such as showing and pictures) and the problem of an adequate presentation of interiority (such as intentions or pain) for these three thinkers.This relation is important in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the subject and in his private language argument, but it is also an often overlooked motif in both Dostoevsky’s and Sebald’s works. Dostoevsky’s depiction of mindset discrepancies in a rapidly modernizing Russia can be analyzed interms of multi-aspectivity. The theatricality of his characters demonstrates especially well Wittgenstein’s account of interiority's interrelatedness with overt public practices and codes. In Sebald’s Austerlitz, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances is an aesthetic strategy within the novel. Visual tropes are most obviously present in Sebald's use of photography, and can partially be read as an ethical-aesthetic imperative of rendering pain visible. Tea Lobo's book contributes towards a non-Cartesian account of literary presentations of inner life based on Wittgenstein's thought.

Dedicated to educators who are not philosophy specialists, this book offers an overview of the connections between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and his own training and practice as an educator. Arguing for the centrality of education to Wittgenstein’s life and works, the authors resist any reduction of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to remarks on pedagogy while addressing the current controversy surrounding the role of training in the enculturation process. Significant events in his education and life are examined as the background for successful interpretation, without lending biographical details explanatory force. The book discusses the importance of Wittgenstein’s training and dismissal as an elementary teacher (1920-26) in light of his later, frequent use (1930s-40s) of many ‘scenes of instruction’ in his Cambridge lectures and notebooks. These depictions culminated in his now famous Philosophical Investigations -- a counter to his earlier philosophy in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein came to distinguish between empirical inquiries into how education, language or mathematics might ideally work, from grammatical studies of how we learn on the rough ground to normatively go-on as others do – often without explicit rules and with considerable degrees of ambiguity, for instance, in implementing new guidelines during a curriculum reform or in evaluating teachers. The book argues that Wittgenstein’s reflections on education -- spanning from mathematics training to the acquisition of language and cultivation of aesthetic appreciation -- are of central significance to both the man and his pedagogical style of philosophy.

Almost thirty years ago, W.J.T. Mitchell's 'Iconology' helped launch the interdisciplinary study of visual media, now a central feature of the humanities. Mitchell's now-classic work introduced such ideas as the pictorial turn, the image/picture distinction, the metapicture, and the biopicture. These key concepts imply an approach to images as true objects of investigation-an 'image science.' Continuing with this influential line of thought, 'Image Science' gathers Mitchell's most recent essays on media aesthetics, visual culture, and artistic symbolism. The chapters delve into such topics as the physics and biology of images, digital photography and realism, architecture and new media, and the occupation of space in contemporary popular uprisings.

Nicola Hoggard Creegan offers a compelling examination of the problem of evil in the context of animal suffering, disease, and extinction and the violence of the evolutionary process. Using the parable of the wheat and the tares as a hermeneutical lens for understanding the tragedy and beauty of evolutionary history, she shows how evolutionary theory has deconstructed the primary theodicy of historic Christianity-the Adamic fall-while scientific research on animals has increased appreciation of animal sentience and capacity for suffering. Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil responds to this new theodic challenge. Hoggard Creegan argues that nature can be understood as an interrelated mix of the perfect and the corrupted: the wheat and the tares. At times the good is glimpsed, but never easily or unequivocally. She then argues that humans are not to blame for all evil because so much evil preceded human becoming. Finally, she demonstrates that faith requires a confidence in the visibility of the work of God in nature, regardless of how infinitely subtle and almost hidden it is, affirming that there are ways of perceiving the evolutionary process beyond that "nature is red in tooth and claw."

Kevin Vanhoozer calls the church to a picture of theology that sees every person, thing and event in the light of God's act of reconciliation. Through essays on the church's worship, witness and wisdom, he reveals how a poetic imagination can answer the questions of life's meaning by drawing our attention to what really matters: the God of the gospel.

Hagi Kenaan argues that philosophy's concern with abstract forms of linguistic meaning and the objective, propositional nature of language has obscured the singular human voice. In this strikingly original work Kenaan explores the ethical and philosophical implications of recognizing and responding to the individual presence in language. The Present Personal fuses phenomenology and aesthetics and the traditions of Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger as well as literary works by Kafka, Kundera, and others.

Prior to his death in 2007, the self-described secular philosopher Richard Rorty began to modify his previous position concerning religion. Moving from "atheism" to "anti-clericalism," Rorty challenges the metaphysical assumptions that lend justification to abuses of power in the name of religion. Instead of dismissing and ignoring Rorty's challenge, the essays in this volume seek to enter into meaningful conversation with Rorty's thought and engage his criticisms in a constructive and serious way. In so doing, one finds promising nuggets within Rorty's thought for addressing particular questions within Christianity. The essays in this volume offer charitable yet fully confessional engagements with an impressive secular thinker. Contributors to this Volume: Stanley Hauerwas Eric Hall Barry Harvey D. Stephen Long Charles Marsh David O'Hara Jason Springs Donald G. Wester Keith Starkenburg Roger Ward

A picture of sovereignty holds the study of politics captive. Captives of Sovereignty looks at the historical origins of this picture of politics, critiques its philosophical assumptions and offers a way to move contemporary critiques of sovereignty beyond their current impasse. The first part of the book is diagnostic. Why, despite their best efforts to critique sovereignty, do political scientists who are dissatisfied with the concept continue to reproduce the logic of sovereignty in their thinking? Havercroft draws on the writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to argue that theories of sovereignty are produced and reproduced in response to skepticism. The second part of the book draws on contemporary critiques of skeptical arguments by Wittgenstein and Cavell to argue that their alternative way of responding to skepticism avoids the need to invoke a sovereign as the final arbiter of all political disputes.

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the poor, victim third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist world of the third. Building on what they characterize as an ab-original reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.