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A Perennial Illusion? Wittgenstein, Quentin Skinner's Contextualism and the Possibility of Refuting Past Philosophers
Author(s) -
Beaumont Tim
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
philosophical investigations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.172
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1467-9205
pISSN - 0190-0536
DOI - 10.1111/phin.12196
Subject(s) - epistemology , appeal , contextualism , philosophy , meaning (existential) , interpretation (philosophy) , argument (complex analysis) , illusion , law , linguistics , psychology , biochemistry , chemistry , neuroscience , political science
Contemporary philosophers often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims made by past philosophers. In doing so they contravene a contextualist methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner in his seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. Skinner's methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual meaning and interpretation, and yet the precise nature of the logical path from his premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. This paper seeks to refute two of the most promising variants of an argument for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws on his appeal to Wittgenstein's conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory.