James F. Conant

James Ferguson Conant ( born June 10, 1958 in Kyoto ) is an American philosopher.

Life

James Conant - a grandson of James Bryant Conant of the chemist - earned his BA in philosophy and history of science in 1982 from Harvard College in Cambridge (Massachusetts ). In 1990 he received his doctorate from Harvard University in Philosophy. From 1991 to 1999 Conant worked at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2000 he has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. In the summer semester of 2004, Conant took a visiting professorship at the University of Potsdam.

Research

Conant's research include the philosophy of language and epistemology and the philosophy of mind and aesthetics. Its associated therewith interest in the history of philosophy refers on the one hand on Kant and German Idealism, on the other seites on the Analytic Philosophy of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.

In the research on Wittgenstein's philosophy Conant belongs to the group of those philosophers who represent a resolute reading ( resolute readings ). The group, which has been developed under the influence of the philosopher Cora Diamond, opposes a Standardinterpretaton. The methodological and hermeneutic guiding principle of this reading is rather the basic assumption that a middle ground between the two extremes of a purely historical - philological access and exploitation is needed for systematic purposes. A resolute reading searches - starting from the original - for contributions of historically embedded author Wittgenstein for the current understanding of philosophical problems. So here Conant has been specifically studied in the context of Wittgenstein 's research in his method the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the central concept of logical syntax.

Conant's work on analytic philosophy dealing with Rudolf Carnap and Frege next and Bertrand Russell. Here, he has included a critical discussion of Russell's theory of types. Of particular interest in this context is that Conant shows a line of development that leads from Kant's Transcendental Logic on Frege's conception of logic toward the early Wittgenstein. This evidence has published in 1991 in the article The Search for Logically Alien Thought Conant.

Award

  • 2012: Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Publications

  • On Reading the Tractatus resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan. Together with Cora Diamond. In: M. Koelbel, B. Weiss ( ed.) The Lasting Significance of Wittgenstein 's Philosophy. Routledge 2004
  • Limits of language. A sketch of Wittgenstein's later criticisms of the Tractatus. Hans Julius Schneider, Carl Friedrich Gethmann (ed.): XXI. German Congress of Philosophy. Akademie Verlag, Leipzig 2011
  • Absorption. The ontology of a feature film world. In: History of German Literature. German Literature Archive in Marbach, 2009
  • What is pragmatism? In: Richard Raatzsch (eds.): Wittgenstein Yearbook 2003.
  • Can our cognitive faculties achieve the objects themselves? In: Marcus Willaschek, Marie- Louise raters (ed.): Hilary Putnam and the tradition of pragmatism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002
  • Freedom, truth and cruelty: Rorty and Orwell. In: Rainer Born, Otto Neumaier (eds.): Philosophy Science - economy. Think together - learning from each other. öbv & hpt Verlagsgesellschaft, Vienna 2001, pp. 75-94, ISBN 3-209-03805-8
Bachelor's degree Type theory Integrated Authority File
427052
de