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RAYMOND MARTIN, Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness by hagberg, garry l, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 68, Issue 1, February 2010, Pages 81–84, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01392_10.x
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HAGBERG, GARRY l. Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness.Oxford University Press, 2008, xv + 288 pp., $70.00 cloth.
The first stated, and most inclusive, aim that Garry Hagberg gives for his book is “to mine Wittgenstein's later writings (and then to extend the discussion well beyond those writings but along discernibly Wittgensteinian lines) for an account of the self of a kind that stands in striking, indeed revolutionary, contrast to the initially intuitively plausible alternatives” (p. 2). He lists six additional aims, several of which are closely related to this first one. Hagberg illustrates his progress toward these objectives by reference to autobiographical writings, and he does this in a way that will be of interest to philosophers of art, particularly philosophers of literature. His discussions of interpretation, and its role in selfunderstanding, should also interest aestheticians.
In working toward his account of the self, Hagberg spends more space explicating Wittgenstein's views, which he never criticizes, than anything else. From his tone of voice, it seems that he endorses virtually everything that he attributes to Wittgenstein, but it is hard to be sure. To make matters even more uncertain, Hagberg's method of proceeding, as he notes, is more like “an archeological dig” than a “sequential progression along a single argumentative line” (p. 13). All of this often makes it difficult to determine which views discussed in the book are supposed to be Wittgenstein's, which Hagberg's, and which both Wittgenstein's and Hagberg's.
