For Tues.: §I (pp. 307-315)

For Thurs.: §II (pp. 315-324)

Like Dray and Taylor, Winch (1926-1997) studied at Oxford after WWII and was influenced by the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). He was also, like Dray, influenced by R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), an English philosopher who was also an archaeologist and historian. And, also like Dray and Taylor, he thinks the study of society should be interpretive (i.e., it should look for meanings rather than laws). In this article he considers the implications of this for the study of societies quite different from one’s own.

In the first section, he criticizes the work of the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973). Evans-Pritchard provides Winch with a convenient example but an odd one since his views of how one should think of other societies were actually not very far from Winch’s. The second section is motivated by a consequence of this similarity between Evans-Pritchard and Winch, criticisms of both by Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-), a philosopher who is best known for his later work on moral theory. The more positive content of the two sections are, first, an argument for the need to understand other cultures in their own terms and, second, some suggestions about how this is possible when the cultures are very different from one’s own. These two sides of the paper will be our topics for the two classes this week.