Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing examines two related and neglected aspects of Wittgenstein's work: his conception of philosophy and his search for a style to embody his revolutionary practice. The landscapes of Wittgenstein's texts are surrealistically flat--no theories, arguments, or conclusions, nor chapter headings, notes, or narrative structures. Genova explores Wittgenstein's early style of logical poetics with its emphasis on elucidation and critique and his later rhetoric of grammatical reminders with its turn to therapy. She shows how Wittgenstein appropriated Kant (...) and then Freud to present distinctive visions of the nature of philosophy, namely as clarification in the Tractatus and as performance in the I nvestigations , and how Wittgenstein shows how language, logic and the world take care of themselves. _. (shrink)

Recent attempts by the neurological and psychological communities to articulate thought differences between women and men continue to mismeasure thought, especially women's thought. To challenge the claims of hemispheric specialization and lateralization studies, I argue three points: 1) given more sophisticated biological models, brain researchers cannot assume that differences, should they exist, between women and men are purely a result of innate structures; 2) the distinction currently being drawn between verbal/spatial thinking abilities is fraught with ideological commitments that undermine the (...) intelligibility of the distinction; 3) the model of thinking as information processing which underlies all this research confuses thinking with internal processing strategies. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein's Way of Seeing, Judith Genova provides a an illuminating introduction to two surprisingly neglected aspects of his work: his conception of philosophy and his search for a style to embody his revolutionary practice. Genova examines the nuances, contours, and texture of logical twists of language. She elucidates Wittgenstein's reliance on the work of Kant and Freud, and presents how words are acts for Wittgenstein.

Recently, commentators such as Kenny and Hacker have disagreed about whether Wittgenstein's early picture theory of meaning is at all compatible with his later theory of “meaning‐as‐use”. Arguing in favor of their compatibility, Kenny finds that meaning‐as‐use supplements, rather than rivals the earlier conception of meaning.