Wisdom, Arthur John Terence Dibben (1904–93)

John Wisdom worked first at the University of St Andrews and then at Cambridge, where he later held the Professorship of Philosophy. At the beginning of his career he was an analytic philosopher much in the style of Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein. But when he moved to Cambridge the encounter with the Wittgenstein of the 1930s brought about deep changes in his approach to philosophical problems. Although greatly influenced by Wittgenstein he remained highly individual, indeed rejecting what was arguably the ‘later’ Wittgenstein’s most central claim, namely that metaphysical statements are the result of a misunderstanding of the workings of language.

Alma migrante

A partir do termo “alma”, utilizado originalmente na obra de Freud, o artigo discute a migração humana em seus componentes intra e interpsíquicos, aspectos identitários e as ansiedades despertadas em processo de potencial traumático podendo levar a experiências de despersonalização e desrealização. As migrações apresentam a necessidade de elaborar lutos. A resiliência psicológica significa poder retornar ao modo de ser em outro espaço. O artigo se pauta, além de Sigmund Freud, em contribuições de importantes autores da psicanálise, como Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, John Wisdom, Leon Grinberg e Rebecca Grinberg, Nicole Berry, Salmon Akhtar.

Letter to John O. Wisdom

Winnicott’s letter to Professor John Wisdom on John Bion and on Bion’s book Learning from Experience, addressing, in particular, that Bion’s terms ‘reverie’ and ‘tantalising’ are concepts Winnicott feels he has been describing for several decades, without recognition from Klein and her supporters.

Cambridge Philosophers VII

John Wisdom studied ‘moral sciences’ in Cambridge under G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad. His first post as a teacher of philosophy was at St Andrew's University under F. G. Stout (1929-34). His early books Interpretation and Analysis (1931) and Problems of Mind and Matter (1934) and a series of articles on ‘Logical Constructions’ in Mind 1931-33, later published as a book (1969), belong to this time.

Rorty and the New Hermeneutics

Wittgenstein's genius, John Wisdom has suggested, was uniquely revealed in his ability to formulate such questions as ‘Could one play chess without the queen? Would it still be chess?’ The central questions raised by Richard Rorty's work may be cast in a parallel form: ‘Could one do philosophy without the notion of truth as “correspondence with the Real”? Would it still be philosophy?’ Both pairs of questions, Wittgenstein' and Rorty's, are quintessentially anti-essentialist. The scope and ingenuity of Rorty's ‘philosophy without mirrors’ has challenged philosophers to reconf ront basic questions about the nature and purposes of philosophical inquiry.