System and Negation (2022)
This post-doc grant was awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
This post-doc grant was awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
This project follows on from the project "Am Rand des Wiener Kreises" (also funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), which was carried out at the University of Vienna and concerned the role of poetry and philosophy in periods of scientific progress. While literary and historical questions were in the foreground of the previous project, the present project analyses the problem of representation suggested by this research from a theoretical perspective.
A fundamental assumption is the insight, taken from Wittgenstein, that meaningful assertions are only possible within logical systems, in which they have a place, a context, a negation and implications; however, such systems do not only enable knowledge, but also limit it and prevent knowledge beyond the system's boundaries, for instance because the object does not fully fit into the system, or because it is represented differently in other systems.
Awareness of the necessity of a system as well as its potentially misleading character is expressed in the thought of Nietzsche, Musil, Wittgenstein and Adorno, thinkers which the project will focus on in its efforts to find appropriate forms of representation which simultaneously create contextual clarity and make their own limitations transparent.