Abstract
Golub presents the book as a thought experiment on the theme of uncertainty, taking as its premise G. E. Moore’s notion of mutually incompatible statements in relation to life being held together by a shifting first-person subject that hypothesizes narrative as a single subject through-line. Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance” is recalled as a genre rather than biological or genealogical classification. Golub undoes history and memory for the purpose of discovering the self via a reconstructed language game of family resemblance in which a single self metastasizes from a family cell (or cells), drawing on events from his own and other real and fictional characters’ lives.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein’s last words appeared in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) and again in the biography of record, Ray Monk’s, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); G.E. Moore, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1942), 543.
- 2.
G.E. Moore, Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993), 211, paraphrased in Mitchell Green and John N. Williams, “Introduction,” in Mitchell Green and John N. Williams, eds., Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
- 3.
“à: could mean of, at, to, in, for, on.” https://www.quora.com/What-does-à-mean-in-French.
- 4.
Roy Sorenson, “The All-Seeing Eye: A Blind Spot in the History of Ideas,” in Green and Williams, eds., Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person, 45.
- 5.
Morris Lazerowitz, “Moore’s Paradox,” in Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, 371.
- 6.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright and trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
- 7.
The case for this manner of reading Wittgenstein’s last and unfinished book is made clearly and persuasively in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
- 8.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 1.
- 9.
Bruce Duffy, “Preface,” in The World As I Found It (New York: New York Review Books, 1987), i and 558.
- 10.
Ibid., 556.
- 11.
Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, 26.
- 12.
Ibid., 176 and 178.
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Golub, S. (2019). Preface. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_1
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