Wittgenstein and Marx: Language, Mind and Society

Front Cover
Pietro Garofalo, Christoph Demmerling, Felice Cimatti
Mimesis International, 2022 - Philosophy - 159 pages
The volume tries to offer a comparison between two philosophers who belong to two different philosophical traditions and who have thus been rarely discussed together: Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite these thinkers' many distinctions, the contributions to the current volume try to reconstruct not only how the 'second' Wittgenstein was influenced by the Marxist tradition, but also - and above all - the theoretical affinities between the two philosophers. In this way, the book underlines the potential that Marx's political thought holds for philosophers of language as well as the social implications of Wittgenstein's thought and the political potential of some of his central topics, such as his critique of the private language argument and his theory of language games.

About the author (2022)

Pietro Garofalo studied philosophy at the University of Calabria and completed his PhD in the Philosophy Department of the University of Palermo in 2011. He was a visiting doctoral candidate at the University of Münster and at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is a member of the editorial board of the "Rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio"; he is also the editor of "Frammenti di realtà sociale" (LiminaMentis, 2015), co-editor with Michael Quante of "Lo spettro è tornato. Attualità della filosofia di Marx" (Mimesis, 2017) and editor and translator of Michael Quante's volume "Studi sulla filosofia di Karl Marx" (FrancoAngeli, 2018). His research interests include philosophy of language, social ontology and philosophy of money. Christoph Demmerling is a professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. He is co-editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. His main research areas are philosophy of emotions, philosophy of language, and phenomenology. His many publications include Sinn, Bedeutung, Verstehen. Untersuchungen zu Sprachphilosophie und Hermeneutik (2002) and Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn (2007; with Hilge Landwer).