quarta-feira, 3 de setembro de 2008

AFTER WITTGENSTEIN, ST. THOMAS

Wittgenstein não é nada fácil, comecei a estuda-lo por acaso, em 1987, quando estava escrevendo a dissertação de mestrado sobre Sraffa. Achei curioso o agradecimento no prefácio do "investigações filosoficas": quem sabe poderia ajudar a comprender o trabalho do próprio Sraffa. A paixão manteve-se viva ao longo dos anos, mas a compreensão não melhorou muito, seja em relação ao Sraffa ou ao Wittgenstein. O trecho abaixo é de uma resenha , escrita pelo Fergus Kerr,OP, do livro AFTER WITTGENSTEIN, ST. THOMAS by Roger Pouivet - translated and introduced by Michael S. Sherwin OP , St. Augustine's Press 2008 , pp xiv + 138 , $24.00 hbk - e é uma indicação da atualidade do pensamento destes dois grandes filósofos. Vale lembrar que Wittgenstein era leitor de Sto Agostinho.

"In 1957, after a few weeks, Cornelius Ernst concluded that the only way to make Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul intelligible to his first-year class of Dominican friars was to re-read them in the light of the later Wittgenstein's recently published Philosophical Investigations (1953). He had himself heard Wittgenstein lecture at Cambridge ten years previously.

Since the early 'fifties the Dominicans had hosted an annual conference at Spode House, bringing together teachers of neoscholastic philosophy in seminaries and other Catholic institutions with the young Catholics (often converts) with posts in British universities, trained in what would eventually become known as analytical philosophy, much influenced at that date by Wittgenstein's Investigations. The encounter, on the neoscholastic side, bore little lasting fruit apart from reviews and articles by the future Cardinal Cahal B. Daly. The most substantial interaction with neoscholastic epistemology from a late-Wittgensteinian standpoint is to be found in Mental Acts, brought out in 1957 by Peter T. Geach. Having studied in Rome at the Gregorian University and then at Oxford with G.E.M. Anscombe, Anthony Kenny brought both Aquinas and Wittgenstein together in a series of studies, beginning in 1963 with Action, Emotion and Will."

Para ler o texto completo é preciso acessar a última edição da "New Blackfriars"