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We can never fully access another person’s perspective, but to what extent do our individual private experiences matter when it comes to language and shared understanding? According to the early 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the answer is ‘not at all’. A distilled rendering of Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘private language argument’, Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box Analogy explains why he believed that the meaning behind language inevitably lay in our shared understanding, and not in our private minds, because we simply can’t access each other’s experiences or sensations.
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Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
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Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes