The notion of understanding is pivotal in the humanities and the social sciences. But what does it mean to understand something? The logical grammar of “understanding” seems to suggest that we understand something as something, i.e. as falling under a certain concept. We understand a sentence like “this is red” if we are able to assign it a place in our conceptual framework. This amounts to acknowledging certain consequences that follow from this sentence being true such as “this is coloured”, “this has the same colour as blood” and “this is not green”. In other words, it looks like a necessary condition of understanding that we can make explicit pertinent bits of knowledge.
Understanding Beyond the Linguistic Dogma – Conceptual Metaphors, Embodiment and Performance as Non-Propositional Knowledge
Prof. Dr. Markus Wild, University of Fribourg
Dr. Neil Gascoigne, University of London
Datum: 31.05. - 01.06.2013
Zeit: 09:15 - 17:45 Uhr
Ort: Universität Bern, UniS, Schanzeneckstrasse 1, Raum A301
Markus Wild
Markus Wild is Professor for Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He specializes in early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind. Currently, he is editing a volume on embodied cognition for Suhrkamp (with Rebekka Hufendiek and Joerg Fingerhut).
Neil Gascoigne
Neil Gascoigne trained as an Engineer and retrained as a Kremlinologist before taking his MA (surrealism and psychoanalysis) and PhD (naturalism and transcendental philosophy) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. His research interests are historical-conceptual in nature and include metaphilosophy, pragmatism and scepticism. His publications include the books Scepticism (2003), Richard Rorty: Liberalism, Irony and the Ends of Philosophy (2008) and (with Tim Thornton) Tacit Knowledge (2013). He is currently guest editor of an issue of the journal Humanities on the ‘Legacy of Richard Rorty’ and is working on a book on scepticism. He has been head of philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London since 2008.
