Wittgenstein was strongly influenced in his formulation of the role of description in philosophy by Goethe’s conception of description as a scientific method. However, despite retaining some superficial similarities, Wittgenstein’s notion of the role of description in philosophy turns out to be an extreme morph of its scientific predecessor. Wittgenstein extends description’s domain of application to such an extent that, unlike for Goethe, it becomes much more than a method for elucidating facts or principles, and confl icts with some of Goethe’s original reasons for favoring description over explanation.

A Theory of Justice maintains that we are morally bound to further those institutional arrangements that support those principles that would have been agreed to by contracting parties in the original position. However, some critics have rejected the implicit premise that hypothetical contracts yield contractual obligations. But this critique is misplaced according to a different interpretation of the contract’s role. Rawls arguably claims that justice is binding and that in virtue of specifying the content of justice the hypothetical contract is likewise binding. To determine whether we are bound to uphold Rawlsian justice, I shall discuss both approaches and then further analyse charges of triviality, circularity, an alleged similarity to intuitionism and the contractarian rebuttal of utilitarianism.

Professor Block has written extensively on a number of topics in the philosophy of mind, from consciousness to cognitive science, and is particularly known for his work on Functionalism. Many of his papers are collected in Consciousness, Functionalism, and Representation (2007). This interview was conducted in New Haven on March 6th, 2007.

Robert Pippin is the chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor. Most well-known for his work in German idealism, he is the author of Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989), Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991), and The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (2005), among other works. We felt that his insights on a number of topics both philosophical and non-philosophical easily warranted the relatively unedited version you see here. Even so, our discussion with him far outlasted an hour of tape, so a good deal has still been left out. The interview was conducted in Linsley- Chittenden Hall of Yale University on March 28th, 2007.