ZfL INFO 22/2026: James Conant (University of Chicago): Family Resemblance, Composite Photography, and Unity of Concept: Goethe,

This lecture will start with a picture and an accompanying puzzle about it. The picture is a reproduction of one found in an album of photos Ludwig Wittgenstein carried around with him his entire life. It contains pictures of people who mattered to him: dear friends, philosophers he admired, and especially family members. And then there is this picture: apparently of a woman. It looks like a picture of a woman who must be a Wittgenstein sibling. The question that puzzled scholars for years was this: “Who is this member of the Wittgenstein family?” It certainly looks as if it must be a Wittgenstein sibling. The only problem was that the album already contains pictures of all four of Ludwig’s sisters. There is no fifth sister; that is the puzzle. The lecture will be about why Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have been delighted by this picture, how Francis Galton introduced Wittgenstein to its possibility, and why Wittgenstein’s abiding interest in it leads to the heart of his later philosophical concerns. Along the way, we will briefly touch on Locke’s theory of what a concept is, Kant’s devastating critique of it, and Goethe’s and Galton’s respective dissatisfactions with where that left a philosophical account of the unity of a concept. We will then consider Wittgenstein’s way of inheriting and fusing insights he draws respectively from Goethe and Galton.

Moderator: Eva Geulen (ZfL)

The lecture is part of the closed workshop “Aesthetic Forms of Mindedness” (March 19–21), organized by Matthias Haase (University of Chicago), Eva Geulen (ZfL) and Jutta Müller-Tamm (FU Berlin).