Bergo, Bettina. Review of Soren Overgaard's WITTGENSTEIN AND OTHER MINDS. NDPR (March 2009).

Overgaard, Soren. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. London: Routledge, 2007. Søren Overgaard's Wittgenstein and Other Minds (WM) makes two interesting contributions to the Wittgenstein literature. First, it approaches contemporary debates about the problem of "other minds" (WM 2) as a conceptual and ontological problem -- viz., how we conceive of mind in the first place (before turning to determinations concerning the minds of others). It also extends that question to ethics, since the way in which we pose the question of other minds, or subjects, frequently concerns what behaviors are appropriate to adopt in regard to those others. This is notably the case when questions of human well being, or suffering, arise. Overgaard's second contribution is his lucid reading of the middle and later Wittgenstein, including a close examination of the philosopher's posthumous Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Overgaard follows Wittgenstein's "problems" approach to other minds in light of concerns that prove irreducibly ethical. The author's conviction, which he demonstrates systematically, is that the later Wittgenstein does indeed help us "to think differently about the issue at hand," which he terms "intersubjectivity," thereby displacing it from rigidly epistemological frameworks. Showing the importance of Wittgenstein's thought for ethical questions also means reading him rightly, and that requires navigating past four potential dangers. The first argues that Wittgenstein's "community account" or social conception of mind evacuates most, if not all, dimensions of subjectivity in favor of a pre-existing social context. The second danger lies in the claim that, in Wittgenstein, the very idea of a subject, present differently to itself than it is to others, is eliminated. Both dangers, the individualist versus the anti-individualist, and the immanentist versus the anti-immanentist one, are exaggerations of Wittgenstein's own arguments and weaken the claims he makes for a social understanding of mind, against an inaccessible or sequestered immanence. What Overgaard proposes to do, by way of elucidation, is to reopen the problem of solipsism as it arose in debates about intentionality. He then traces Heidegger's and Sartre's criticisms of Husserlian intentionality and indicates, finally, how Levinas's conception of the asymmetrical call coming from the Other supplements both Husserl's and Sartre's rather solipsistic "intersubjectivity." Overgaard concludes that, taken together, Sartre and Levinas give us a way past solipsism that resonates with significant concerns of the later Wittgenstein, writing on philosophical psychology. To be sure -- and unlike these "continental" philosophers -- Wittgenstein was concerned with the grammar operative in ethical language games, as in the asymmetry between first and third person statements. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15450.