Nonsense

The h index: playing the numbers game

by Andy Purvis

"Il nonsense del regime. Tradurre Alice durante il ventennio fascista"

by Caterina Sinibaldi

I dilemmi del traduttore di nonsense, ed. by Franco Nasi and Angela Albanese (Ravenna: Angelo Longo, forthcoming Semptember 2012)

If Ethical Statements Say Nothing There is no Point in Making Them! How would Wittgenstein Have Responded to this? Do you agree with him?

by Daniel. J. Woolley

This was an essay I wrote as an undergraduate in my final year.

I show why ethical statements are of profound importance for Wittgenstein and therefore showing that he would disagree... more I show why ethical statements are of profound importance for Wittgenstein and therefore showing that he would disagree that there is no point in making them. To do this I am going to map out Wittgenstein’s account of reality and the limits of the world. I will clarify the three types of sentences, that are, propositions that have sense and senseless and nonsensical sentences. Then I shall state the distinction between saying and showing. Using an elucidatory interpretation of what Wittgenstein is doing throughout his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), I will then show why nonsensical statements and therefore ethical statements, as ethical statements are a type of nonsensical sentence, provide as useful elucidations because they delineate the limits of the world. This is the whole point of the Tractatus – to draw a limit to what can be thought. In agreement with Wittgenstein I will show why this is the case.

Logical Syntax in the Tractatus

by Ian Proops

An essay on Wittgenstein's conception of nonsense and its relation to his idea that "logic must take care of... more An essay on Wittgenstein's conception of nonsense and its relation to his idea that "logic must take care of itself". I explain how Wittgenstein's theory of symbolism is supposed to resolve Russell's paradox, and I offer an alternative to Cora Diamond's influential account of Wittgenstein's diagnosis of the error in the so-called "natural view" of nonsense.


This is a pre-publication copy. The published version appears in: Richard Gaskin, ed.,*Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy* (Routledge, 2001).

Undelivered Letters

by Thomas Karshan

NONSENSE AND ABSURDITY: CARNAP‟ S USE OF HUSSERL‟ S THEORY OF MEANING

by Andreas Vrahimis

The Distribution of the Nonsensical and the Political Aesthetics of Humour

by Nicholas Holm

published in Transformations 19 (2011).

The notion of “the distribution of the sensible” is central to Jacques Rancière’s critical project wherein he... more The notion of “the distribution of the sensible” is central to Jacques Rancière’s critical project wherein he advocates for aesthetics as a site of critical political importance and possibility. Understood as the way in which “the practices and forms of the visibility of art ... distribute spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular” (“Discontents” 25), the distribution of the sensible is thought of as a delimitation of the possibilities of what and who can be heard, seen and understood. Aesthetics are thus defined as the fiction that allows the real to be thought through, a proposition which opens up the possibility that aesthetic interventions might recalibrate and fracture existing political sensibilities and epistemologies (“Politics” 38-9). What does it mean, though, to frame politics as the sensible, especially in light of the resonance of the English translation, where “sensible” refers to that which is reasonable as well as that which is knowable? In my paper, I propose to consider the ways in which that which is not sensible, or nonsensical, can be understood as a manifestation of aesthetic dissensus that challenges existing commonalities of sense. Following Rancière’s notion of politics as predicated upon the sharing of sense in common, I will suggest that humour can be thought of as the sharing of nonsense in common: by which I mean, a common sense of those objects, events and attitudes which strike a viewer as amusingly incompatible.