Lee Braver, “Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger” (MIT Press, 2012)
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What is the central thesis of Lee Braver’s *Groundless Grounds*?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor from the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese. In our bi-monthly podcasts, we interview philosophers about their ideas as expressed in their newly published books. Today's interview is with Lee Braver, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hiram College about his latest book Groundless Grounds A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger just out from the MIT Press. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are both considered among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Both were born in eighteen eighty nine in German speaking countries, both studied under leading philosophers of their day, Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, respectively.
and were considered their philosophical heirs. Both ended up critiquing their mentors and thereby influencing the direction of thought in both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. In this engaging volume, Braver attempts to build what he calls a load bearing bridge between these often polarized traditions and Arguing that both thinkers have similar arguments for similar conclusions on similar fundamental issues. Both blame the disengaged contemplation of traditional philosophy for confusion about the nature of language, thought, and ontology. And that attention to normal, ongoing human activity in context presents alternative fundamental insights into their nature. The groundless grounds of the title is the idea that finite human nature gives us everything we need to understand meaning, mind, and being, and that to insist that this ground requires justification itself betrays confusion.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Lee? Yes. Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Well,
thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
I'm looking forward to our to talking about your new book, Groundless Grounds. Let me just uh ask you to start us off with uh a little background about your interest in this topic in philosophy and and maybe in philosophy in general, how you came to write the book, um and uh what you found exciting about uh building a bridge between these these two. Two uh these two philosophers.
Well I I started becoming interested in in it when I was writing my first book, uh A Thing of This World, and that book tried to kind of create a very large scale conversation between analytic and continental philosophy. By setting up a uh a definition of anti realism That I get from analytic philosophers and then applying it to continental thinkers. And uh throughout it I I talked about a quite a a large number of different thinkers And one of the pairings that I kind of kept going back to was Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Lee Braver’s *Groundless Grounds*?
0:00–10:01
2
How did Braver become interested in linking Wittgenstein and Heidegger?
10:01–23:19
3
Why does Braver focus on early Wittgenstein and early Heidegger rather than their later work?
23:19–37:14
4
What fundamental similarity does Braver see between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s critiques of traditional philosophy?
37:14–54:57
5
How do Wittgenstein’s ‘meaning‑objects’ and Heidegger’s ‘present‑at‑hand’ objects illustrate their shared solution?
54:57–1:11:17
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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