The Department of Philosophy is delighted to announce that Professor Peter Hacker, Emeritus Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, will give six popular lectures at Kent on Ludwig Wittgenstein, on Wednesdays during term-time, 4-6pm, from December to the beginning of February. All students and university staff are welcome.
Peter Hacker is one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time, and the greatest authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He has had seminal contributions in philosophy of mind and neuroscience, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology. He defends philosophy as a humanistic discipline and is opposed to any scientistic explanation of the human mind. His criticism of contemporary neuroscience has sparked an international debate about the limits and ends of a pure scientific understanding of human nature. He has published numerous books, such as the monumental seven-volume Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wiley, Blackwell, 1980-1996; co-authored with Gordon Baker), Language, Sense and Nonsense (Wiley Blackwell, 1984), Frege: Logical Excavations (Oxford University Press, 1984), Insight and Illusion (Oxford University Press, 1986), Appearance and Reality (Blackwell, 1987), Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003; co-authored with Max Bennett), History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008; co-authored with Max Bennett), Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Blackwell, 2007), The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
The open lectures are:
4 December
‘Introduction to the Course of Lectures’
11 December
‘Augustine’s Picture of Language and the Referential Conception of Linguistic Meaning’
18 December
‘Names and their Meaning, Sentences and Descriptions’
22 January
‘Meaning and Use, Understanding and Interpretation’
29 January
‘Ostensive Definition and Family Resemblance: Undermining the Foundations and Destroying the Essences’
5 February
‘Metaphysics, Necessity and Grammar’
For more information, including room details and preliminary reading, please see here:
www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/events/index.html