Dr Rupert Read

Job Title	Contact	Location
Reader	R dot Read at uea dot ac dot uk Tel: +44 (0)1603 59 2079	Arts Building 01.26

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Biography

I studied PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, and the blend of philosophy, politics and economics was perfect for me. I learnt Wittgenstein at the feet of Tony Kenny, Peter Hacker, Gordon Baker and Stephen Mulhall, and took a First. I determined to subject what I had learned (the philosophy of Wittgenstein) to the severest possible challenge, and so I took the rather bold course of turning down a British Academy scholarship and studying for several years at Rutgers University (NJ, USA), where my teachers such as Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn taught me ‘mainstream’ philosophy of language and mind – but did not sway in the least my conviction that Wittgenstein had revolutionised philosophy, and had in effect pre-emptively dissolved ‘analytical’ philosophy. I pursued and broadened my interest in Wittgenstein by working with James Guetti, Louis Sass, Cora Diamond and others at Rutgers and Princeton, and took my Ph.D in a Wittgensteinian exploration of the relationship between Kripke’s ‘quus’ problem and Nelson Goodman’s ‘grue’ problem. My time in the States also politically radicalised me, as I saw first-hand the dire cultural and ethical consequences of more or less untrammelled capitalism.

I lectured for two years at Manchester, encountering properly for the first time the impressive Wittgenstein-affiliated ethno-methodological critique of sociology. I landed a permanent job at UEA in 1997, where I have stayed for the last decade, working to grow the philosophy post-grad community, the Department as a whole, and the Wittgensteinian side of the Department in particular. All three goals have now been successfully realised. And I have published a very substantial number of books and papers while at UEA, perhaps notably the epoch-marking collection, ‘The New Wittgenstein’.

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Additional Contacts

Academia.edu Personal Page

Website

http://eastanglia.academia.edu/RupertRead

Key Research Interests

Philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Philosophy of Literature and Film, Philosophy of Psychology.

Research Interests

Wittgenstein runs throughout my interests and my work. I write and publish exegesis, but principally I apply Wittgenstein’s thought, resolutely interpreted, to diverse subject-matters. A picture of this can be garnered from my new book, ‘Applying Wittgenstein’.

I interpret Kuhn and Winch after Wittgenstein, and think accordingly the status of various science and ‘science’ disciplines. My ‘There is no such thing as social science’ will appear in 2008, and after that my next project in this area is provisionally entitled ‘Wittgenstein among the sciences’: this will take in everything from maths through environmental science to linguistics.

As regards philosophy of literature, I am particularly interested by ‘deranged narratives’; my interest in the philosophy of literature intersects with my interest in the philosophy of psychopathology.

I am motivated by a desire to understand the roots of philosophical discontent and delusion. This brings together my interest in Buddhism (particularly Zen), in psychopathology and in ‘the psychopathology of philosophical delusion or illusion’, and in propaganda and the framing of language and of political ideologies.

I want to know from whence in our biology, our psychology, our language and our culture philosophical problems come. Wittgenstein has typically been badly misunderstood as saying that these problems come only from our language. This is a superficial and more or less positivist error or illusion.

But there is a profound difficulty in getting clear on the origin of these problems: because this aim can seem to imply the absurd ambition of exiting entirely and permanently from such problems, in order to see how they have clouded our vision. By contrast, I am interested in exploring the ways (e.g. through desire, fear, and political ideology – thus see especially my ongoing work on ‘The Lord of the Rings’) in which such problems most deeply ensnare us; and how (e.g. through meditation, honesty with oneself, a therapeutic engagement with one’s problems, and a sane society) one/we can most effectively learn from them and change through and beyond them.

I believe that philosophers cannot abdicate the challenge of thinking about how we ought to live, and thinking against the grain of the times to change those times. Now more than ever.

Research Projects

1) Wittgenstein, resolutely interpreted and applied - I regard Wittgenstein (and the Wittgenstein Research Centre at UEA) as the heart of my open-ended research project into philosophy, thought and life. I aim in the next five years to complete at least one and possibly two books joint-authored with Phil Hutchinson, laying out what it really means to think of Wittgenstein as a radically therapeutic thinker, after the fashion of ‘the New Wittgenstein’ and Gordon Baker. I expect also to pursue this project in the intellectual companionship of UEA PHI colleague Eugen Fischer, who nurtures a similar ambition. Along the way, I expect to say quite a lot more than has yet been said about the precise sense in which later Wittgenstein was in his considered prose a thoroughly ‘resolute’ thinker.

2) An ecological alternative to the political philosophy of liberalism -My other key research project for the years ahead is to challenge, chiefly on grounds of the call upon us made by future generations (and by non-humans), the dominant ideology of our times: individualist materialism … and its legitimating ideology in the academy: political liberalism. I am working on a series of papers in which Rawls’s liberalism is put severely to the test by the climate crisis which we are inhabiting, and also by its evisceration of the possibility of a response to that crisis taking seriously the claims of spirituality and religion. I believe that a true egalitarianism and a sense of the sacred is incompatibly with the political philosophy of liberalism.

This project brings together somewhat the philosophical with the other side of my life: my active involvement in ‘Green politics’.

At UEA I am involved in the Wittgenstein Workshop and organize the annual Philosophy Public Lectures and the event Philosophers at the Cinema.

Past Research Projects and Grants

Project Title	Start Date	End Date	Funding Body	Project Members
Accounting for literary language: An interdisciplinary symposium (British Conference Grant)	1/9/2002	2/9/2002	British Academy	N/A
Accounting for literary language	1/9/2002	2/9/2002	British Academy	Rupert Read, Jon Cook
The hidden greatness of the Canon: (Research Leave Scheme)	1/9/2001	31/12/2001	Arts and Humanities Research Council	N/A

Teaching Interests

Teaches: Wittgenstein; Philosophy & Literature; Philosophy & film; Theories of Politics and Society; Mental Health and Philosophy; Philosophy of the Sciences; Nietzsche and 20^th Century Continental Philosophy.

Jump to: Article | Book Section | Book

Number of items: 33.

Article

Read, Rupert (2011) Beyond an ungreen-economics-based political philosophy: three strikes against ‘the difference principle'. International Journal of Green Economics (IJGE), 5 (2). pp. 167-183. ISSN 1744-9928

Read, Rupert (2010) On Philosophy's (lack of) progress. Philosophy, 85(3). pp. 341-67.

Read, Rupert (2008) The hard problem of consciousness is continually reproduced and made harder by all attempts to solve it. Theory, Culture and Society, 25(2). pp. 51-86.

Read, Rupert and Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, (2008) Perspicuous Presentation: a Perspicuous Presentation. Philosophical Investigations, 31(2). pp. 141-160.

Read, Rupert (2007) Economics is philosophy: Economics is not science. International Journal of Green Economics, 3 (1). pp. 307-325.

Read, Rupert and Phil Hutchinson, (2006) The elucidatory reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14 (1). pp. 1-29.

Read, Rupert (2005) Throwing away the bedrock. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105 (1). pp. 81-98.

Read, Rupert and Rob Deans, (2003) Nothing is shown. Philosophical Investigations, 26 (3). pp. 239-268.

Read, Rupert (2003) Literature as Philosophy of Psychopathology. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 10 (2). pp. 115-124.

Read, Rupert (2003) Against 'time-slices'? Philosophical Investigations , 26 (1). pp. 24-43.

Read, Rupert (2003) Time to stop trying to provide an account of time. Philosophy , 78. pp. 397-408.

Read, Rupert (2003) Kuhn: le Wittgenstein des sciences? Archives de Philosophie , 66 (3). pp. 463-480.

Read, Rupert (2003) On delusions of sense: a response to Coetzee and Sass. Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry , 10 (2). pp. 135-142.

Read, Rupert (2002) Is 'What is time?' a good question to ask? Philosophy, 77(2). pp. 193-209.

Read, Rupert and Wes Sharrock, (2002) Thomas Kuhn's misunderstood relation to 'Kripke/Putnam essentialism'. Journal for the General Philosophy of Science, 33 (1). pp. 151-158.

Read, Rupert (2001) What does 'signify' signify? Philosophical Psychology , 14 (4). pp. 499-514.

Read, Rupert (2001) On approaching schizophrenia via Wittgenstein. Philosophical Psychology, 14 (4). pp. 499-514.

Read, Rupert (2001) On wanting to say: "All we need is a paradigm". The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 9. pp. 88-105.

Read, Rupert and Jon Cook, (2001) Recent work: the Philosophy of Literature. Philosophical Books, 62 (2). pp. 118-131.

Read, Rupert (2001) What is Chomskyism? Or: Chomsky against Chomsky. The alternative Raven. pp. 33-51.

Book Section

Cook, Jon and Read, Rupert (2010) Wittgenstein and Literary Language. In: Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Blackwell, pp. 467-91. ISBN 9781405141703

Read, Rupert (2009) Wittgenstein and Zen: one practice, no dogma. In: UNSPECIFIED OUP, pp. 13-24. ISBN 978-0195381566

Read, Rupert (2007) The first shall be last and the last shall be first"… A New Reading On Certainty 501. In: Readings of Wittgenstein on Certainty. Palgrave, pp. 302-321. ISBN 9780230535527

Read, Rupert (2005) 'Memento': a philosophical investigation. In: Film as Philosophy Essays in Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 256. ISBN 1403997950

Read, Rupert (2004) Wittgenstein and Faulkner's Benjy: reflections on and of derangement. In: The literary Wittgenstein. Routledge, 0-00. ISBN 0415289734

Read, Rupert (2002) Nature, Culture, Ecosystem: or 'The priority of Environmental Ethics to epistemology and metaphysics. In: Feminist Readings of Wittgenstein. Penn. State Press, pp. 408-431. ISBN 0271021985

Read, Rupert (2002) Wittgenstein and Marx on vampirism and parasitism. In: Wittgenstein and Marxism. Routledge, pp. 254-281. ISBN 0415247756

Book

Read, Rupert (2008) There is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis). Ashgate, p. 156. ISBN 9780754647768

Read, Rupert (2007) The New Hume Debate. Routledge, p. 284. ISBN 0415399750

Read, Rupert (2007) Philosophy for life. Continuum, p. 165. ISBN 0826495605

Read, Rupert (2007) Applying Wittgenstein. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, p. 208. ISBN 0826494501

Read, Rupert (2005) Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Palgrave MacMillan, p. 256. ISBN 140394900X

Read, Rupert and Wes Sharrock, (2002) Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution (Key Contemporary Thinkers). Polity Press, p. 233. ISBN 0745619290

This list was generated on Thu Feb 9 09:30:29 2012 GMT.

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