Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?". I answered: The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge. Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off. Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent. He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts." As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing. It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real. A Hegel/Wittgenstein link? That is a different trick. You COULD try to see the movement from th...
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On February 4th in this blog I wrote about the three models of PhD education in philosophy, as per Brian Leiter. I passed along Leiter's comment to the effect that one of the models, by working too hard to integrate substantive philosophical work with history-of-philosophy work, ends up doing strange things like positing an inferentialist Hegel. I noted that I didn't know what an "inferentialist" was or is. That is where we pick up today. A friend wrote to me to say that I could ASK Leiter. I did so, and he replied with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on theories of meaning (philosophical semantics). Theories of Meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) It appears that there are three combatants in the field of the theory of philosophical semantics: the classical, the internalist, and the inferentialist. To be clear, these are not different theories of meaning. They are a level of abstraction up from that. They are different theories about wha...
The philosophical novel is alive and well as a literary form, and a venue of philosophizing. I think of John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION (1986), Rebecca Goldstein, THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (1993), David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST (1996), E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014), and John Irving, AVENUE OF MYSTERIES (2015). But let us go back to Wallace. I included INFINITE JEST in my little list above because it is explicitly philosophical, built as it is around the challenging notion that "the truth shall set you free. But not until it is finished with you." Confronting reality may indeed set us free from the impediments of our preferred delusions. But it is painful to let them go. Separately, an earlier book of Wallace's, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, make an intriguing use of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a use that justifies the title. BROOM starts with the news that an elderly woman is missing from her retirement home. The missing person was once, in her youth, a stud...
There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938. In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was. But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific? The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...
As a fitting remembrance of the late Matthew Perry, the fellow who brought Chandler Bing to life, allow me to reflect in academic form on a contradiction at the heart of the FRIENDS' theme song. The first line of the first verse: No one ever told you life was gonna be this way seems in pretty direct conflict with the fifth line of the third verse: Your mother told you there'd be days like these. The predicate of the two sentences is identical: "to tell." The subject affirmed by the latter would seem pretty clearly to be included in the subject denied in the former. That is: Mom is somebody. And, considering the object case, life is a succession of days. Perhaps some philosopher could defend the song from the charge that there is a DIRECT contradiction in the lyrics by contending that the object case in the former sentence seems to refer to a more pervasive condition of "life" than simply that it contains "days like these." But is it possible...
Colin McGinn, a contemporary philosopher of some importance, (google "new mysterians") often discusses the history of the discipline in his blog. I'm fascinated by his recent comment on "Wittgenstein's Ontology," which you can find by clicking here. Wittgenstein’s Ontology - Colin McGinn Let us start our consideration of it with a simple question: what is ontology? By standard definition, it is the study of being, discussing for example what types of thing constitute the furniture of the universe. Sample questions: Are numbers real? Are only the numbers we call "real numbers" real or are "imaginary" numbers also real? This is distinct from questions about cosmology or the mind-body problem, which are puzzles ABOUT certain of the pieces of furniture in the universe. These inquiries all fit under the broader framework of metaphysics. Anyway, McGinn's first point is that Wittgenstein sets out his own ontology clearly in the opening...
Wittgenstein said: "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." Here is an example. At a press conference after an American football game, a reporter asked the coach, "What do you think won this game for you?" The coach, in a puckish mood, replied: "We got more points than the other team." The room laughed. If you understand that laughter, you may understand the abiding appeal of the analytic/synthetic distinction. You may also have the beginnings of an understanding of its limits. Compare and contrast "we got more points" with "we have a superior offensive line."
The whole theory-versus-practice thing. Here is a link from Existential Comics. Fireworks and a Theory of Language - Existential Comics When people say, "X works in theory, even though it fails in practice," what do they mean? The phrase is on its face open to the rather facile reply suggested by the above link: if the theory leads to disastrous practice, it is surely also bad as theory, and needs to be abandoned. There is no split, there is only a feedback loop. If you are reading this blog post on your phone you can simply turn the phone around and the above calligraphy will say "Practice," right? Well, maybe. But what people mean by a cliché is itself context specific. Meaning is defined, as Wittgenstein above all would remind us, by use. Use is not limited by meaning.
A distinguished philosopher, and historian of philosophy, Brian McGuinness, passed away on December 23, 2019. Here is a list of some his publications. As you may notice, he was an authority on Wittgenstein and on related matters such as the Vienna Circle. Oddly, I haven't found a decent obituary. Please let me know if you see one, dear reader. Thanks. https://philpapers.org/s/Brian%20McGuinness
Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were two of the giants of mid-century philosophy, especially of the Anglo-centric sort. They could each legitimately claim to the the true heir to Bertrand Russell as Russell receded from the central issues under debate in favor of a role as senior sage for antinuclear activists. There is an oft-today story of a ten minute argument between the two at a meeting hosted by the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper argued that there are substantive moral issues that philosophy can address, Wittgenstein replied that all Popper's examples of such questions were in fact linguistic confusions. Wittgenstein was standing next to a fireplace and started waving a poke around as the discussion, no pun intended, became heated. By way of winding up the discussion, Popper said that there was at least one moral certitude, that one should not "threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." I bring up this familiar story because a student of ...
A somewhat novel reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is offered us by Ahmet Suner, a professor at Yasar University in Turkey. I confess that I had never heard of Yasar University, and it even came as something of a surprise to me that a close reading of the early Wittgenstein can be found in the work of a Turkish scholar -- but that is a righteous rebuke to my provincialism. https://www.academia.edu/36457027/The_Ambiguous_Pictures_in_the_Theory_of_Language_in_Wittgensteins_Tractatus?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest The western world has no business hogging Wittgenstein to ourselves, after all.
"We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man." I believe the point he is trying to make here is akin to Ludwig WIttgenstein against the possibility of a private language. But Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937), being Gramsci, phrased the point so as to make it more political. Amartya Sen suggests that Gramsci may have influenced Wittgenstein's move away from the picture theory of knowledge.
If the word "chair" packed an emotional punch: if for example, people measured their neighbor's worth by the number of chairs owned, considering it a disgrace even to visit a house with an inadequate number of chairs, then there would of course be lots of disputes over the meaning of the word. What exactly is a chair? As a first approximation, we might define a chair as a piece of furniture designed to seat one person. But this counts a stool as a chair, and that might be controversial. In our hypothetical world, elitists who were proud that they had a lot of chairs in their homes might resent the poseurs who boost their numbers by bringing in inexpensive stools. As a more demanding definition: a chair might be defined as a piece of furniture, defined with a single seat, that is also supplied with a back. But does it need to have arms as well? Is it something that looks a lot like the paradigmatic chair portrayed above? There might be semantic pressure in the opp...
I wrote here last week about William James' discussion of what "philosophy" means in the early pages of his last book. I paraphrased his views somewhat, saying that "James believes that philosophy is only thinking about the world in an exceptionally rigorous way.” A friend wrote and questioned the validity of this paraphrase. In one of my direct quotes from James, after all, I have him referring to exceptional men’s “imagination,” not their “rigor.” My friend finds this significant because if we define philosophy by the “rigor” of one's thought, we suggest that any intelligent person, by dint of application, can make a contribution to philosophy. On the other hand (says further my inquisitive and analytical friend) to say that philosophers are distinguished by “imagination” implies that some faculty of which some people have far more than others is required. So which is it: are philosophers a specialized caste, naturally as well...