LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889 – 1951) Part One: Early Work During the War to End all Wars, it would be the self-appointed task of an obscure Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein but bring Kantian philosophy to its logical conclusion. As biographer Edward...
ERWIN PANOFSKY AND ICONOGRAPHY Part Three: Icon, Iconography and Iconology As has often been pointed out, the exodus of Jewish scholars from Germany was one of the greatest brain drains of talent of the 20th or any other century. “Hitler shakes the trees, and I...
ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part One: The Antecedents of Iconography To be an art historian in Germany or Austria, the sites where the study of the discipline was both founded and developed, was to be a member of an intellectual elite. The study of art in the late...
EDMUND HUSSERL (1859 – 1938) It is the dead date of Edmund Husserl that is of great interest. The fact that the philosopher died in the year 1938 speaks volumes of, not just his fate, but the history of the reception of his work. Like the philosophers of the...
THE LINGUISTIC TURN How do words mean? How is meaning constructed? These seemingly innocent questions are lethal to the entire edifice of knowledge. If we imagine knowledge, not as wisdom, but as an architecture of writing, then the foundation of “truth”...
SIGMUND FREUD (1856 – 1939) PART THREE REIFICATION AND FETISH The only access the psychoanalyst has to his or her patient is the words of that patient who undergoes the “talking cure.” Sigmund Freud believed in simply listening to and interpreting...
