1. I take this to be a particular individual, an individual with a particular history: Susan. To be clear about what is involved in ‘taking this to be Susan’, we will do well to focus on cases in which it matters to us who this is. Of course, there are many ways in which the identity of an individual can matter to us. A fuller treatment of the topic would include a consideration of the individual's perspective on their own past and future: how it matters to me that it was I who did that yesterday or am going to feel pain tomorrow. This, however, will play no direct part in what I have to say. Not because I do not think it is important but because I think there are also important things to be learned from a consideration of cases in which it is the identity of another that matters to me. As is perhaps fairly generally agreed now, it is a mistake to think that the central issues in the philosophy of mind will be resolved by an exclusive concentration on the first-person case: that this case must be given primacy in the sense that our thought about others can be viewed as, so to speak, simply a projection of our thought about ourselves.

Central to what I say will be a certain feature of a concern about the identity of another – about who this is – exemplified in love, affection or friendship. Of course, concern about the identity of another is manifested in other ways. For example, our conception of this as a particular individual – an individual with a particular history – is also central to our practices of reward and punishment. However, as Strawson brings out well, we are, when considering ‘impersonal’ contexts of this kind, prone to intellectualist distortions of our practice. A consideration of love or friendship may, then, be especially helpful in an attempt to attain a clear view of the thought of another as an individual who persists through time. In so far as it does that, it will be helping us to see what it is to think of another as a person.

With the exception of the introduction and ‘Not Empiricism and Yet Realism’, all of the essays in this volume have appeared in journals or edited books in a form close to that in which they appear here. If I tried to thank everyone who has contributed in some way to my work on these essays, the list would be very long and would certainly, due to faulty memory, omit people who should be there. Some who helped me in significant ways are mentioned at particular points in the text. In the introduction I mention a number of philosophers whose writings on Wittgenstein have had a particularly powerful impact on my own thinking. Amongst people who have helped me greatly through discussion, I should mention in particular Peter Winch, Anniken Greve, Oswald Hanfling and Andrew Gleeson. I am grateful to Lynette Reid and Patrick Cockburn for helpful inputs at a late stage in producing this collection. I owe very special thinks to Lars Hertzberg for his writings, his encouragement and conversation over many years. My greatest debt, of multiple kinds, is to Maureen Meehan to whose memory this book is dedicated.

1. ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’ ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul.’ If one believes that these remarks embody important truths, one should, perhaps, feel a puzzle about why many people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by the philosophers are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways that appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many apparently find no difficulty in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being: to disembodied ‘minds’, ‘souls’ or brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing, many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed but, rather, to something contained in it. Now if this widespread tendency is a confusion, we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without that it will be difficult to undermine the tendency, and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.

It has been remarked by a number of philosophers that behaviourism and dualism are brothers under the skin. The same is true of the mind-brain identity thesis and dualism. One thing that strikingly unites them is the tendency to ‘concentrate’ the human being. Each draws attention away from the extended human form: the one locating the essential person in a lump of matter inside the skull, the other in a lump of non-matter having no position in space. In one sense this tendency to ‘concentrate’ the person is not transparent in standard formulations of materialism. These speak of a mind-brain identity thesis, not a person-brain identity thesis. The sense that both dualist and materialist attach to the term ‘mind’ is, however, itself symptomatic of this desire to concentrate. Sensations are, for example, spoken of as being part of an individual's ‘mental’ life – as occurring ‘in the mind’. In practice, however, we contrast ‘physical’ pain with ‘mental’ pain.

1. In a passage, much quoted with approval, Bentham writes, ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ Bentham should not be read as suggesting that the fact that a creature can talk is never relevant to how it is to be treated. He would, presumably, have acknowledged that the possibilities of my causing another pleasure or pain are transformed by the fact that we speak a common language, and might have endorsed the widely defended view that the possession of a language creates the possibility of certain thoughts, and so of forms of pleasurable or painful emotions, that are absent without it. Bentham's point, then, will be that an ability to talk is of no ethical significance in itself. It is only by way of its connection with something else that a capacity for speech might have a bearing on how a creature should be treated.

That general claim is, I believe, widely shared. It comes in two broad forms. We may suppose that a capacity for speech is a reflection of something in a creature that makes it deserving of special forms of concern or respect, or we may suppose that the possession of language creates certain possibilities for a creature that are relevant to our treatment of it – possibilities, for example, of certain forms of suffering.

An idea of the first form is, perhaps, clear in the following remark by Aristotle:

Similarly, though with a different emphasis, the Stoics argued that ‘it is not uttered speech but internal speech by which man differs from non-rational animals; for crows and parrots and jays utter articulate sounds’.

For all of the continuities that may be traced in Wittgenstein's thinking over his lifetime, there is a shift that, as I believe it can be fairly said, changes everything. The shift I have in mind has two faces. It could be characterised in terms of the place occupied in the later thought by the idea of a human being: understood as a living being of, amongst other significant features, a distinctive bodily form. It could be characterised also in terms of the place occupied in the later thought by the idea of ‘conversation’: understood in the broad sense of people talking with each other. My point here is not one about the number of times these expressions appear in the Philosophical Investigations. My point is, rather, that one cannot read that book without being reminded in more or less every paragraph that Wittgenstein is speaking about human beings, and without being reminded in more or less every paragraph in which the topic is explicitly ‘language’ that Wittgenstein is speaking about human beings talking with each other. In these respects, the contrast with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus could hardly be sharper. We are in an utterly different philosophical landscape: to a degree such that almost nothing said within the one could be said within the other without a radical change in its force and significance.

The two aspects of the shift from his early thinking are, of course, closely connected. Indeed, one of the central themes of the chapters in this volume is that what we have here is best understood as a single shift. Perhaps the most obvious connection lies in the central place occupied by language – by the fact that we are creatures that speak – in our understanding of what a human being is. That connection, however, acquires a distinctive force in a way of taking up Wittgenstein for which I owe a great debt to the work of Peter Winch.

1. It is widely assumed that there is some form of logical tension between the idea that everything that happens happens of necessity and the idea that people are sometimes responsible for what they do. If there is such a tension, it ought to be possible to characterise the notions of ‘necessity’ and ‘responsibility’ in a way such that the incompatibility is transparent.

Some insist that it is a philosophical confusion to suppose that there is any kind of tension between the thought that an action was necessary – the thought that, given her circumstances, the individual could not have done other than she did – and the thought that she is fully responsible for her action. Thus, Susan Wolf asks us to compare a woman who simply could not leave a child to drown ‘because her understanding of the situation is so good and her moral commitment so strong’ with another who, her moral commitment being weaker, could leave the child to drown but in fact does jump in to save him. It is clear, Wolf argues, that the first woman is fully responsible for her action, in just the sense in which the second is, even though she could not have done other than she did. I will return to Wolf 's case. The point I want to draw from it now is that the form of ‘necessity’ that Wolf highlights is different from that which philosophers generally have in mind when they see a conflict between ‘responsibility’ and ‘necessity’. We might speak of a contrast between a necessity of reasons and causal necessity. Whether or not that way of making the contrast is entirely satisfactory, my question is: how are we to characterise this other – the causal – notion of necessity in a way that brings out the supposed tension with the idea of responsibility?

To see that there is work to be done here, we could consider the constant conjunction account of causality associated with Hume. If one thinks that this account is of the right general form, even if requiring significant modification in its details, one might well conclude (as Hume himself does) that there is no tension between the thought that a particular action was completely causally determined and the idea that the individual is rightly held responsible for it.

1. Wittgenstein writes, ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ That is, perhaps, a readily comprehensible thought. It is closely analogous to another thought that is, at least at one level, also readily comprehensible. Speaking of his friend La Boetie, Montaigne says, ‘If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.’ It is in the same spirit that Rowan Williams writes, ‘Being in love is normally thought to mean delighting in the simple actuality of the other.’ As we might express it: in so far as I love another, it is not how they are that is wonderful or astonishing, but that they exist. I take there to be something clearly correct there: something seen in, for example, a parent's delight in her newborn child, or in the particular character of the delight or horror that someone may feel in the face of the recognition that the person before him now, radically changed through long suffering or through dreadful damage, is Deirdre, the woman he loves. Now my concern is not so much as to whether Williams's observation about ‘being in love’ will stand up as a general claim about love as with the fact that this does characterise a way in which one person sometimes matters to another. This idea is, at one level, both, as I have said, readily comprehensible and also hugely important – though there may be little space for it in a good deal of recent English-language philosophy. The way in which the mere existence of certain people matters to almost all of us is, as one might express it, a fundamental form of ‘anchoring’ in the world: one closely analogous to that in which the mere existence of certain places is a fundamental form of ‘anchoring’ in the world; and, like that, one without which life would be, for most of us, deeply unthinkable. At least in a certain range of cases, it is, one might think, a crucial aspect of what the later Wittgenstein speaks of as ‘an attitude towards a soul’.

Yet these ways of talking may seem to involve a difficulty of a kind that marks them off from the early Wittgenstein's remark about the ‘mystical’.

The Colombian Gothic of the twentieth century is Tropical and Tropicalized, a hybrid product of the encounter between the sugar magnates of the Valle del Cauca and popular European and North American Gothic monsters. The twenty-first century brought with it a return of the Gothic to the mountainous regions of the Colombian Andes as well as to the underbellies of colder cities like Bogotá. This city is a vastly different Bogotá from the dark little capital in which Silva lived and wrote. It is a metropolis affected by decades of industrialization and urbanization, factors that, according to Sara Wasson, made possible the “Gothicization” of the city space in nineteenth-century Europe. According to Wasson, “by the 1880s, the labyrinthine streets of Europe had become a perfect platform for updating the themes of earlier Gothic, and in the 130 years since, cities and suburbs have remained rich sites for Gothic production” (132). Writers such as Mario Mendoza and Hugo Chaparro Valderrama have contributed to the gothicization of the city from a practice that mix elements of the Gothic with literary and cinematic genres and subgenres such as noir fiction, pulp fiction, and film noir. In this sense, several of their novels belong to what Nadina Olmedo and Osvaldo Di Paolo denominated negrótico or the noir Gothic. In this chapter, I use the concept of negrótico to approach Mendoza and Chaparro Valderrama's gothic narrative. I will assert that the selected Colombian novels engage the negrótico, intentionally mixing elements of the literary and cinematographic Gothic with the crime genre, to give the Colombian Gothic of the twenty-first century a more urban, gritty tone that reflects the socioeconomic problems of a giant metropolis like Bogotá. This hybridization also emphasizes the idea, shared by both the crime genre and the Gothic, of the monstrosity of humanity and the human capacities of the monster.

Despite the change in weather, literary and cinematographic productions of the twenty-first century maintain the transgressive character of the Tropicalized Gothic—and the Gothic genre in general. In this chapter, I also analyze a film in which the Gothic is used as a political tool to address the abject elements of the Colombian armed conflict: El páramo (The Squad, 2011) by Jaime Osorio Marquez.

“Hot land” is the frequently pejorative term that the inhabitants of Bogotá and central Colombia use to refer to the country's coastal areas and the periphery of the landlocked capital. Paradoxically, it was in the warm weather region of Valle del Cauca where the Gothic—traditionally set in cold climates—was adapted most effectively during the second half of the twentieth century. With their movies and short stories, Carlos Mayolo, Luis Ospina, and Andrés Caicedo, the so-called Cali group (also referred to by many as Caliwood), Tropicalized the Gothic genre, hybridizing tropes and characters initially created for the damp and foggy areas of Northern Europe and New England. The Valle del Cauca sugarcane plantations became new haunting grounds for vampires, ghosts, and other gothic horrors. These Northern Gothic monsters mixed perfectly both with monsters from Colombian folklore, such as the Madremonte, a mythical protector of the Colombian jungles, and with the monstrous local bourgeoisie, such as violent sugar plantation landlords. In turn, the sunny and humid city of Cali and the wooded Valle del Cauca were turned into gothic settings, full of haunted mansions and enchanted estates.

In this section, I will focus my attention on the Tropical Gothic productions of Caliwood and on the gothic horror of film director Jairo Pinilla Téllez, a pioneer of horror films in Colombia and also a native of Cali (caleño in Colombian Spanish). Besides, I will analyze one of the most innovative transformations in the Colombian Gothic in recent decades: the movie Saudó, laberinto de almas (Saudó, Labyrinth of Souls) . Directed by Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza, the film mixes elements of the gothic tradition with Afro-Colombian myths from communities that inhabit the state of Chocó, also on the Pacific coast of Colombia. The result is a gothic film that powerfully addresses the racism against Afro-Colombian communities.

Hendrix Hinestroza uses tropes and techniques of the Northern Gothic, such as nightmares and omens, witchcraft and occultism, and the impossibility of escaping past sins to construct a Colombian Gothic filmic narrative. Hendrix Hinestroza's protagonist, a successful Afro-Colombian doctor living in Cali, begins to have nightmares and suffers supernatural occurrences that compel him to return to his hometown of Chocó. This return to his past means going back to one of the poorest regions of the country and an affirmation that the problems represented by Colombia's oppression of Chocó demand redress.