Residency Period: August 1, 2017 to July 31, 2018
IEAT resident, Professor Mauro Luiz Engelmann holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2008) and a Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2000), having carried out part of his studies at the universities of Berlin ( 1996), Munich (2001-2) and Jena (2006). In 2015 he was a visiting fellow at the IHPST-Sorbonne and the University of Cambridge. He works in the area of Contemporary Philosophy, especially Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and Quine, with the focus of his research being the middle period of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He is the author of the book “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development: Phenomenology, Grammar, Method, and the Anthropological View” (Macmillan Palgrave, 2013) and of articles in specialized magazines, among them: “Wittgenstein’s Most Fruitful Ideas and Sraffa” in Philosophical Investigations (UK Kingdom) 2013, “Wittgenstein’s New Method and Russell’s Analysis of Mind” in Journal of Philosophical Research (USA) 2012, “Le Langage comme Calcul dans le Big Typescript” in Philosophiques (Canada) 2012, “What Wittgenstein’s Grammar is Not” in Wittgenstein -Studien (Germany) 2011 and “The Original Position Revisited: Duty and Justification” in Manuscrito (2010). His most recent publications are “The Faces of Necessity, Perspicuous Representation, and the Irreligious Cult of the Useful” (in “Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer: The Text and the Matter”, De Gruyter 2016) and “What Does a Phenomenological Language Do? (Revisiting “Some Remarks on Logical Form” in its Context)” (in Colors in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Macmillan Palgrave 2017).
PROJECT: WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS: RATIONALITY WITHOUT FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES AND THE HARMONIZATION OF SCIENCE, ETHICS, POLITICS AND RELIGION.
According to Wittgenstein, the logical symbolism of the Tractatus shows the tautological nature of any necessary proposition. From this, a deflated idea of ‘necessity’ guides a worldview that excludes the foundation of any principle in logic, mathematics, science, ethics, religion and politics. From the logical point of view of the Tractatus, supposed a priori propositions of ethics of the form “You must …” cannot exist. If they did exist, as Russell and Moore wished, they would simply be contentless, like the “intrinsically necessary” propositions of logic. Since nothing makes ethical judgments binding, ‘ethical necessity’ is an empty sign and Occam’s razor must be applied. The principles of science are just as unjustifiable as the principles of ethics. In the absence of a model that shows the need for philosophical principles of science (such as causality, for example), the idea of necessary fundamental principles must be abandoned. It follows that the function of science is to unify the true propositions about the world in a conceptual network (theories) – according to Bolztmann and Hertz, for example. The objective of the project is to explain how the worldview promoted by Wittgenstein is in accordance with essential features of Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky’s conceptions of religion, and to show that, if we consider that a society consists of the cooperation of several individuals with different conceptions of what is good or right, the most reasonable understanding of politics in the Tractatus’ conception of the world is expressed by the ‘original position’ along the lines of John Rawls, when correctly understood, in Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness.