Moderator: Timothy Bewes, Department of English, Brown University
Toril Moi, Duke University – “Language and Attention: Morality and Literature after Wittgenstein”
“Attention to particulars!” could have been Wittgenstein’s slogan. The “ordinary language philosophy” that builds on his work has developed a strong understanding of the moral power of attention, not least in the writings of Cora Diamond. For this philosophy, word and world are intertwined. A sharpened attention towards is a sharpened attention to reality. The best writing teaches us to see both language and reality.
Nancy Yousef, City University of New York – “Unresolved: Attention and Form in Eliot and Wittgenstein”
Isolated moments of attention in Eliot’s narratives destabilize the distinction between action and thought, event and reflection. My paper aims to link this formal feature of Eliot’s aesthetics of the “commonplace” to methods of “attending to the everyday” in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing. Suspension of telos or
aim is at work in both–a resolute commitment to irresolution.
Helen Small, Pembroke College/Oxford University – “Particular Attention”
In a much discussed essay, ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964), Iris Murdoch laid siege to the idea, explicit in the work of her contemporary Stuart Hampshire but ‘lurking behind much’ moral philosophy of the time, that morality, in order to count as morality, must be a matter of ‘thinking clearly’ and then proceeding to
visible action. In the course of arguing for the importance of the ‘inner’ moral life, Murdoch offered an ‘everyday example’: a mother-in-law, M, who feels hostility to her daughter-in-law D, but sets herself the task of ‘giving careful and just attention’ to D. M reflects deliberately, and over time revises her view: D is not silly, vulgar, pert but refreshingly simple, spontaneous, etc. Murdoch takes the term ‘attention’ from Simone Weil, and Weil’s influence shows strongly in the description of a generous effort to do justice to
another; but Murdoch adds to the argument a concern with linguistic idiosyncrasy as the marker of a moral life more complex than a ‘public reasons’ approach to morality would recognize—heavily context dependent and a matter of gradual and significant redescription of a situation. Appealing though Murdoch’s ‘particularist’ approach has been to many humanists, it presents some significant problems: not least the difficulty of accepting that ‘redescription is all there really is to figuring out what to do’ (Elijah
Millgram). Starting from Murdoch and Millgram, this paper will endeavor to open up consideration of the appeal to particularising ‘attention’ as it has featured in recent discussions of evolving disciplinary distinctions between moral philosophy and literature.
Brown University
April 7, 2017
Post time: Jul-15-2017