My Late Father’s Pain and the Later Wittgenstein

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My late father’s pain and the later Wittgenstein: Is it possible to speak about pain?

In this talk I discuss my late father’s pains and his attempts to communicate these excruciating experiences to his consultant. According to the later Wittgenstein, the meaning of word is fixed by its correct usage within a language community. A private language that refers to my own individual experiences is, according to Wittgenstein, impossible. At first glance these limitations seem to render it impossible to speak about highly individualized experiences, as for example: my father’s pain. However, in this talk I show that this is not the case. Wittgenstein’s arguments do not pose a limit to our ability to communicate subjective experiences; rather, they provide us with the condition for the possibility for such communication to be successful.

Speaker profile

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Tom Feldges ia a retired public servant. He is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Philosophy on a specific aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology. Having previously studied Sociology and Psychology, he is also very interested in philosophical questions regarding both of these disciplines.