I think of certain thinkers as "Top Shelf." These are the ones who are named and discussed BY name even in undergraduate survey courses in their field. If you are not majoring in a STEM field, but you don't want to live and die completely ignorant of physics, you might well take a survey course on the field's modern history. That will presumably discuss Newton, Maxwell, Mach, Einstein and Schrodinger: the top shelf.
If you take a survey modern-era philosophy course, an analogous list might include Kant, Hegel, James, Russell, Arendt. But even drawing up such a list surely leads some to note that the last of those names, Hannah Arendt, died almost a half century ago. Who are the top shelf philosophers of today? Who will future undergraduates study and know by name as the outstanding thinkers of the early 21st century? We cannot know -- time is the great editor and has not passed on this copy yet.
So forget about contemporaneity for a bit. When we speak of the Vienna circle in philosophy, a group of logical positivists of the period in between the two world wars, we generally think of two Top Shelf figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. But they were both in fact at least somewhat marginal to it. The heart of the movement was at least a bit below the Top Shelf.
Undergraduates do not, especially in survey courses, get to know about Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Fredrick Waismann, Herbert Feigl, etc., or even I suspect about Rudolf Carnap or Alfred Tarski. Depending on your college, there may well have been a more in-depth non-survey philosophy course, perhaps one with the phrase "Vienna circle" in its name, discussing Schlick, Neurath, etc. And surely if you have the means and opportunity to pursue philosophy into graduate school you can wallow in such names.
Thank you to Henry for sending me a book about the Vienna circle, The Murder of Professor Schlick, by the incomparable David Edmonds. It allows me to do some such wallowing without the expense of re- making myself into a philosophy grad student. The book doesn't really get to the titular event, the killing of Moritz Schlick -- the mild-mannered gentleman you see above -- his murder by a deranged former student -- until chapter 15. That event occurred in July 1936, as Nazism was on the rise. The murder reflected and anticipated the demise of the Vienna circle more broadly.
We might think of this book as a prequel to Wittgenstein's Poker, an earlier (2001) work by Edmonds [and his then co-author John Eidinow]. That, too, turned on a single incident -- an argument between two Top Shelfers mentioned above, Wittgenstein and Popper. Each had by the time of the incident resettled in Britain. After the war (in October 1946) they met at a philosophy club meeting at Cambridge University. They argued over whether there really are any philosophical issues that cannot be reduced to linguistic confusions. Wittgenstein, on the "no" side of that dispute, apparently became so agitated he was waving a fireplace poker around.
Edmonds' newer book, then, bleeds into his 2001 book, and both of them bleed into the present 21st century scene, for the issues with which the Austrians grappled -- especially in the branches of philosophy most adjacent to the physical sciences, to math, and to logic, are very must still with us.
I will likely have more to say about the Schlick book in this blog in due course.
As they asked on Sesame Street, which one is not like the others? I refer to your list of Kant, Hegel, James, Russell, Arendt as the top shelf of modern-era philosophers. The answer is obviously Arendt, whom most people would not consider a philosopher in the strict sense that the others are. I doubt that her name would even come up in a philosophy survey course. The philosopher who obviously should replace her on the list is Wittgenstein, whom you mention as a somewhat marginal member of the Vienna Circle. I think of him not as a member at all, but as an influence on the Vienna Circle, which chose to ignore his mystical side.
ReplyDeleteMy first impulse was to make it "Kant, Hegel, James, Russell, Heidegger". But then that is a bummer of a Nazi ending. That dissatisfaction and stream of consciousness brought me from Heidegger to Arendt. The change makes the list slightly more banal, but less evil! As to LW: the book suggests influence went both ways. Of course his TRACTATUS was a great influence on the VC. But LW's contacts with full-fledged circle members helped in his move away from the early to the later, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, phase of his thought.
DeleteI should have thought of Heidegger, and my not doing so was probably Freudian, not only because he was a Nazi, but because I find his philosophy worthless (not that I have read it myself, but I think its unreadability covers up its worthlessness). But some, including Richard Rorty, whom I respect, take Heidegger seriously.
ReplyDeleteI never knew that the VC influenced LW. Can you give an example?
I didn't know
Ignore the last three words.
DeleteIn the period 1930-32, Edmonds tells us, Wittgenstein was collaborating with one of the full-fledged circle members, Waismann, on a book that was supposed to present the TRACTATUS philosophy to the world in a more broadly accessible form than the original had. The prospective book had a tentative title, LOGIC, SPRACHE, PHILOSOPHIE and a book of that title was advertised as forthcoming. It was never published. The hold-up was that as the collaborators worked on that project, Wittgenstein realized that he no longer really believed in the philosophy they were working to make accessible. So Waisman, and the VC in general, must get some credit bringing LW to that important realization. [Interestingly, someone else in much the same orbit, A.J. Ayer, wrote an English language book with a similar title, published in 1936. LANGUAGE, TRUTH and LOGIC. [The literal translation of the Wittgenstein/Waisman title is of course LOGIC, LANGUAGE and PHILOSOPHY.] Ayer spent a lot of time in Vienna himself in the relevant period so that similarity has to be considered non-accidental.
DeleteAs to Heidegger, I confess I haven't read him either, beyond a quite short selection from Being and Time that I did get in, yes, a survey undergrad course. (IIRC the passage said that the mind/body dichotomy is social construct that Descartes mistook for an a priori truth.) Most of what I know of Heidegger comes from William Barrett's account of his views, in The Illusion of Technique. (A fascinating follow-up to Barrett's 'Irrational Man'.)
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DeleteReplying to your 7:23 comment, the fact that the VC helped bring W to a realization is not the same thing as the VC's philosophy influencing W's, which is what I'd thought you meant. (The deleted version of this had a serious typo: "that" instead of "not.")
DeleteIt has been years since I read Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic," but I believe that Ayer's purpose in writing the book was to bring VC's ideas to the English-speaking world. If so, its similarity to the VC's ideas certainly was non-accidental. (This last sentence I just edited for clarity.)
The book contains a good deal about the interaction of LW and members of the VC. I offered just a taste of it. On the whole I think it does amount to making the case that the philosophical influence was a two-way street.
DeleteI read both of Barret's books you mention, but too long ago to remember them. I also enjoyed his memoir, "The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals." I learned most of what I know about Heidegger from Paul Edwards' books, "Heidegger on Death: A Critical Evaluation" and "Heidegger's Confusions." These books criticize Heidegger from an analytic perspective, from which of course he does not come off well. But perhaps that misses the point of Heidegger; it might be compared to arguing with a person of faith that there is no evidence that God exists. Edwards believes that everything Heidegger wrote was either false or trivially true.
ReplyDeleteThis is interesting. I had read ABOUT LW, but, until a couple or three years ago, I had not read his Tractatus. Read it twice, the second time more carefully. After that second reading, I was more confused. To me, it reads like a manifesto. Or, perhaps, a broken record. I read repetition upon repetition, as if he meant to make a reader believe, based on a brain-washing approach. I wondered who LWs'heroes were when it came to political and/or philosophical thinkers. The last line of the T is signal. Paraphrased, it says, roughly, don't talk about what you don't know.
ReplyDeleteEmploying inference, one could translate that as: go ahead and talk about what you don't know; repeat your self a lot; and keep it short and literary so no one will notice. some call that word salad. Others mention rhetoric. A guy named Kenneth Burke wrote about the rhetoric piece. He was Harry Chapin's grandfather, among other things.
Paul, I second Henry's views as expressed below. He and I disagree about a lot of things philosophically -- just to take one point, I have a good deal more sympathy for the mystical tone at the end of that TRACTATUS than Henry does. Still, we are at one in recognizing Wittgenstein's importance, and his admirable analytical rigor. Allow me to add to the reading that Henry has suggested. I mentioned Edmonds' earlier book, WITTGENSTEIN'S POKER, in the above entry. It is excellent, and that fact is what got me so desirous of getting and reading the new one. The thesis of POKER is roughly this: after the war, in 1946, Wittgenstein and Popper were the two possible and competing heirs to Bertrand Russell, the reigning King of analytical philosophy. The incident in which the two men argued face to face when they met at Cambridge, whatever exactly happened there (it is much debated) was clearly a symptom of their sibling rivalry. You mention political philosophy. In those terms, it is well to remember that both Rawls and Nozick, a generation later, were heirs of that analytical tradition.
DeleteConsider the questions over which Rawls and Nozick disagreed. Nothing less than "is the existence of a government, with coercive power over the residence of a certain defined terrain, ever even legitimate? If so, why? And, how far should this coercive power extend?" For the purposes of justifying a war for independence in North America, a group of determined rebels once declared certain answers to those questions "self evident." But really, they aren't self evident, if that means "settled." Subsequently history, especially the war that was newly over when Popper and Wittgenstein met, makes this pretty clear. The issues continually have to be debated again in each new generation. With hindsight anyway we can see that 1946 argument between Popper and Wittgenstein is about whether and how thoughtful people can help advance understanding of foundational political issues of that sort.
To understand THAT, it helps to understand Wittgenstein, and both of these two Edmonds books help.
Paul, one cannot understand Wittgenstein's writings until one has read about them. You say that you've read about Wittgenstein. If you mean about his philosophy as opposed to about his life, then you haven't read the right books. That is evident from the fact that you do not at all understand the final sentence of the Tractatus, which means that you don't know what the Tractatus is about. I don't mean to criticize you, as I once stood in your shoes. I read about Wittgenstein's philosophy, but nothing helped much (a short introduction won't help) until, about 40 years ago, I read "The Philosophy of Wittgenstein," by George Pitcher. That book gave me an aha experience -- So that's what Wittgenstein is all about! Pitcher enabled me to start to read and understand Wittgenstein's writings.
ReplyDeleteNow to the last sentence of the Tractatus, although I'll start with the opening of the book. (I'll quote from the Pears and McGuinness translation, because that became the standard one when it was published in 1961, although there are now six -- three published in 2023 and 2024 -- listed in the Wikipedia entry on the Tractatus.) The Tractatus opens, "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts...." Facts mean empirical facts, not opinions or judgments or feelings. Facts thus exclude ethics, religion, aesthetics, and mysticism. They are the things referred to in the final sentence of the Tractatus that we cannot speak about and therefore must pass over in silence. You shouldn't talk about them not because, as you say, you don't know about them. Rather, you shouldn't talk about them because no one can know about them because they are not facts and therefore are not of this world. Yet Wittgenstein believed that they are what is most important in life. That he believed that means that he was a mystic. The best place to read about this aspect of Wittgenstein is not Pitcher's book but is the second half (chapters 6-9) of "Wittgenstein's Vienna," by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin.
In his "Philosophical Investigations," Wittgenstein decided that we can talk about things other than facts, but we must use the language game appropriate to what we are talking about.
I haven't mentioned more recent books, because I haven't dipped seriously into Wittgenstein for years. Incidentally, his life is utterly fascinating, and, when I read Ray Monk's 1990 biography of him, "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius," I found it the best biography I'd ever read about anyone. Monk is a philosopher, and he discusses in the biography how Wittgenstein's philosophy fits into his life.
I hope that I've helped get you started, if you wish to pursue Wittgenstein.
My thanks to both of you. There is a lot I don't know because I did not receive schooling in philosophy. Relationships described involving key thinkers I just never knew about. So, I 'll just have to read more, or take LW's advice---I need to put up or shut up....PDV
ReplyDeleteBut you can't put up, if by that you mean speak about things that are not of this world. These things can be shown, however, but I am not competent at this point to explain what Wittgenstein meant by that.
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