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Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle

Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle
Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle

Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ makes vivid that, when we encounter the world around us in all its concretion, that encounter is also saturated-or penetrated-by conceptual norms: when we see, we see-as. This is a realization that can provoke philosophical disquiet. It can suggest that the ways in which we deal with the world have been-in some way-already settled or prescribed. This, in turn, can provoke a sense of detachment from the world, a sense that we are not truly open to it, but only to a ‘pre-processed’, idealized version of it. A sense of its concretion as a kind of alienness-in its heterogeneous and as-yet-unanticipated ways-dawns in a recognition of what then seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that alienness: we have in some way abdicated a proper responsiveness to that world and, hence, a kind of responsibility for our actions in that world, by letting our responsiveness-and through it, our actions-be governed by norms, at whose credentials we now look askance. Do they merely represent the ways that my society, period, class, and so on understand the world? Is there some kind of unavoidable myopia imposed on us by the very need to think conceptually, to always see-as?

173-198
Taylor & Francis
McManus, Denis
95bb0718-d3fa-4982-9cde-05ac00b5bb24
Beaney, Michael
Harrington, Brendan
Shaw, Dominic
McManus, Denis
95bb0718-d3fa-4982-9cde-05ac00b5bb24
Beaney, Michael
Harrington, Brendan
Shaw, Dominic

McManus, Denis (2018) Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle. In, Beaney, Michael, Harrington, Brendan and Shaw, Dominic (eds.) Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty. Taylor & Francis, pp. 173-198. (doi:10.4324/9781315732855).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ makes vivid that, when we encounter the world around us in all its concretion, that encounter is also saturated-or penetrated-by conceptual norms: when we see, we see-as. This is a realization that can provoke philosophical disquiet. It can suggest that the ways in which we deal with the world have been-in some way-already settled or prescribed. This, in turn, can provoke a sense of detachment from the world, a sense that we are not truly open to it, but only to a ‘pre-processed’, idealized version of it. A sense of its concretion as a kind of alienness-in its heterogeneous and as-yet-unanticipated ways-dawns in a recognition of what then seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that alienness: we have in some way abdicated a proper responsiveness to that world and, hence, a kind of responsibility for our actions in that world, by letting our responsiveness-and through it, our actions-be governed by norms, at whose credentials we now look askance. Do they merely represent the ways that my society, period, class, and so on understand the world? Is there some kind of unavoidable myopia imposed on us by the very need to think conceptually, to always see-as?

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e-pub ahead of print date: 21 December 2017
Published date: 1 January 2018
Additional Information: Chapter 8

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Local EPrints ID: 419720
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/419720
PURE UUID: ba450394-bab1-45e5-9824-bac7b99364a7

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Date deposited: 20 Apr 2018 16:30
Last modified: 05 Jun 2024 17:42

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Contributors

Author: Denis McManus
Editor: Michael Beaney
Editor: Brendan Harrington
Editor: Dominic Shaw

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