Rhetoric & Persuasion

Wittgenstein famously argued that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. But I find that position increasingly difficult to sustain.

A clever formulation, but I'd argue it conflates pointing at a limit with transcending it. The word 'unspeakable' doesn't actually convey what's unspeakable — it merely designates the category.

Precisely. Which is why I think artistic forms — music, painting — carry semantic content that propositional language structurally cannot.

Your lecture suggests that the Western conception of progress is, at its core, a secularised eschatology. Could you unpack that?

Certainly. The idea that history moves teleologically toward some culminating state — liberal democracy, technological utopia, or otherwise — mirrors the structure of religious salvation narratives, just stripped of the metaphysics.

But isn't that framing potentially paralyzing? If progress is a myth, what grounds normative claims about, say, human rights?

A sharp objection. I'd distinguish between progress as a grand narrative and progress as a local, provisional improvement. We can reject the former without abandoning the latter.

So a pragmatic rather than teleological grounding of values?

Essentially. Though I'd resist the label 'mere pragmatism' — there's a difference between contingent agreement and arbitrary preference, and that difference is where ethics lives.