The question has two possible outcomes so we should initially assign a 50% probability to each outcome. — Devans99

I'm terribly opposed to this method of going about things. I fail to see how it makes sense to investigate the origin of all that is, and the origin of intelligibility as such, by giving a modal binary like 'contingency vs. necessity', then exclaiming: 'Aha! That exhausts logical space, so we have our starting point and can move on...'

Obviously, with the countless logical proofs of the existence of God, I'm in the heavy minority here, but what makes you think that the origin of all of existence can be meaningfully understood by such a method?

Edit.

I don't know what "the nothing" is, and it's not clear to me anyone does. — Ciceronianus the White

That's because it's not cognizable, it doesn't admit of being put in the sort of conceptual shape necessary for knowledge.

I suspect if a definition is hazarded by anyone, it will turn out to be fittingly obscure... — Ciceronianus the White

Indeed, it will be gesturing towards an indication of the unknown, something beyond the conceptual shape required for a word, a definition, knowledge....something like, say, a mood...

...or if not that a rather mundane expression of angst. — Ciceronianus the White

...which is not the same as a mundane expression of feeling.

No, it was....oh, I see what you did there. :wink:

Well, my last remark notwithstanding, I think I raise legitimate questions and would be inclined to raise them as to any philosopher. But if this thread is to be limited to those who understand what Heidegger is saying, I'm not among them and will withdraw. — Ciceronianus the White

Perhaps I misspeak. I like your polemics. But I guess I just assume that the purpose of raising legitimate questions is to understand what a philosopher is saying. And I'm literally puzzled as to whether that's your motive, or if your motive is to critique or vent about Heidegger or what. It seems like you hate him so much you don't want to take the time to read him -- fair enough! -- but then you also want to offer a critique of his ideas, so I'm a tad confused. Of course I agree with and would be really curious to read what you have to say after actually reading the essay.

I have trouble thinking of feelings as a "self" though I find the idea that moods and feelings reflect our interaction with the rest of the world quite acceptable, even apparent. — Ciceronianus the White

Good, because feelings are not a "self"; that would be a stupid position indeed and I'm not sure what I said in my crude characterization of Heidegger to make that seem sensible to attribute to him.

Your use of the word reflect in this context also suggests to me that you're likely having trouble appreciating how fully Heidegger rejects the notion of subjectivity.

Just how the feeling or mood of dread (or whatever he may want to call it) might reveal "the nothing" is a mystery to me, though claiming that it does would seem to me to assert that our interaction with reality reveals "something" which presumably isn't real. Unless, of course, it is, or is "real" enough. — Ciceronianus the White

In plain English it's more like: the nothing reveals itself to us in the mood of dread.

My original point was more that Heidegger flatly denies the plausibility of any attempt to explain the phenomena through equating the notion of feeling to mood -- in this context the notion of a "feeling" needs to be rejected outright since it implies an ontological story about a subject who feels.

But enough. I begin to feel the dread I always feel when encountering Heidegger's work which, though potent enough to me, is evidently insufficient to reveal "the nothing." — Ciceronianus the White

I'm pretty sympathetic to your loathing Heidegger but I'm fairly puzzled by what you're doing in this or any other Heidegger thread.

So "the nothing" (which we must remember itself nothings, according to H) is nothing (pun intended) but a feeling, a state of mind? Which is, one would think, something. — Ciceronianus the White

Well, I would be curious to see how a hardcore Heidegger apologist defends his bawdy use of language in phrases like Das Nichts nichtet - which needlessly undercuts what is otherwise largely a Dewey-style pragmatist message - but I think you're doomed to misunderstand him from the outset if you start with this misleading question. There's no connection between a "State-of-mind" and a "feeling" for Heidegger. For Heidegger, what bad ontology calls "a state of mind" is better understood as something like Befindlichkeit or "so-found-ness" and a feeling is better understood as something like a Stimmung or self who is attuned to some aspect of a situation he finds himself in ("so-found-ness"). So it's important to keep in mind that Heidegger considers moods a fundamental method of human attunement to reality. If you have a problem with Heidegger on the question of "dread" it's probably the broader view which you're objecting to.

To say we don't matter, that we lack value and have to be saved from it by an otherworldly force of God, is a lie. We've never lacked value and have a certain status on account of ourselves, as living beings in the world (afterlives included). — TheWillowOfDarkness

Very well put. And when dopes like Kant attempt to reaffirm the value of human life and dignity on the basis of some vague, indeterminate transcendental values (noumena -> practical reason -> moral law -> human dignity) they run the risk of setting the whole postmodern era on the path of once again failing to affirm the inherent value of life and world as lived from within. It's sadly a prescient concern, as our politics becomes ever-more focused on an internal power struggle in which individuals and groups battle each other by making claims to rights, and academia has almost no place for political philosophers who aren't simply doing an "analysis" of the logic of rights.

But to treat philosophy as a way of life...is a much larger concern. What does that mean, treat it as a way of life? — Noble Dust

I think it means adopting philosophy as one's belief system, and choosing to live by it. Just like some people might adopt a religion, or a political view. But everyone does this. — Pattern-chaser

So, then how does one differentiate between what is true (supposedly, the process of academic philosophy), and believing in what is true (associating what is true with one's self)? — Posty McPostface

I don't think that philosophy as a way of life is about discovering truth and internalizing that truth through synthesizing and systematizing these beliefs into larger truths. I would call it something more like learning to engage in a practice, seeking the goods internal to that practice (as MacIntyre puts it), and therefore setting one's commitments and modes of coping to work from within the practice.

Should it develop, I am confident we can work it out. — Arne

Sounds good. Give it a think and let me know. I'll try to respond to the thread (problem of sensation) more substantively tomorrow.

Not only does the Phenomenology of Perception fill in the gap you have identified, it was written for that very purpose. I have not read it. It is on my reading list. If you would wish to read it together, I can move it to the top of my list. — Arne

I'm working on a dissertation heavily focused on Merleau-Ponty. If you find sufficient interest in a reading group I would be happy to lead it or at least contribute regularly. The only thing that would make me hesitate is not wishing to detract from the Heidegger and Wittgenstein reading groups.

Thanks. I'm not claiming anything original. An embodied approach to cognition would be pretty mainstream these days. — apokrisis

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many over-caffeinated grad students are just this moment sitting in a library, writing some article or dissertation aiming to blow our minds over some new embodied approach to the nature of conceptual content. 50? 100? Still, I think this format is more interesting to read and perhaps often more edifying.

But then you can start filling back in the obvious degrees of mindfulness/world modelling represented by the distinctions between reflexive behaviour, automatic behaviour, attentive behaviour, self-aware behaviour. That's just the neurobiology of complexity. The modelling steadily becomes more sophisticated in terms of a relation between "a self" and "a world". — apokrisis

Which is what I take to be interesting about your post. It seems to imply that reflexive behavior builds up gradually into a mind thinking about itself, that the embodied know-how of a lower animal develops into the mental knowledge-that of human beings. Bodies can model the world in a way that develops into representational knowledge of the world. I like the approach much better than the more brain-centric approach to the self-world relation.

My general definition of consciousness or sentience would be being in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

Rocks don’t model anything.

Microbes are a first glimmer of world modelling, but we would hardly say they see a world. They have some chemotaxic reflexes, but not some kind of integrated picture of an environment that changes from moment to moment in some modelled fashion demanding variety of behaviour.

And so we can move on up the chain to organisms with those kinds of complex world models. But being in a modelling relation would be a suitable dividing line. — apokrisis

So on your view does the capacity to move meaningfully within an environment constitute consciousness, since it implies a bodily modelling relation with the world? Or do you mean literally having representations in the head?

Might you be willing to expand on this post? I'm not sure that I understand how your position is supposed to work. If we define consciousness as awareness of things like tickles and pains, then we can have more or less refined degrees of awareness but not "degrees of consciousness". If we define consciousness as self-awareness or discursive conceptualization, then we can have more or less sophistication and nuance in the application of concepts and exercise of embodied know-how, but this too wouldn't strike me as "degrees" of consciousness. Surely it would be bizarre to claim that a man has a "lesser degree of consciousness" than me before his morning coffee.

It's normal for a real estate developer to have a lot of debt. — Agustino

Yup. And people who have a lot of debt very often leverage positions of influence for financial gain.

Come on man, that's pocket change at that level... Talk about a couple billion dollars, and I might believe you. — Agustino

Not really, unless you believe a man who has spent most of his life in serious debt is a billionaire.

This is a really excellent summary/analysis. :up: I just wish to mention one thing:

So unless the goal of the US was to get nothing here and give several things away, they failed. Simple as that. That doesn't mean the whole thing will be a failure. — Baden

My feeling is it's a failed incentive structure. Trump -- who is engaging in unilateral diplomacy on behalf of the entire United States -- has the goal of a few wins he can market to fox news viewers and low-information independent voters. He's willing to concede everything that doesn't affect him personally in order to get these wins. This then allows him to maintain power while he pockets $300mil in a Rosneft deal with Russia, sells trade policy to China in exchange for $500mil loans to his company, and forces more and more rounds of diplomatic horse-trading that go through his hotel in D.C. My problem with this is moral: even if the whole thing ends up not being a failure it's by mere chance, and only to the extent that short-term personal profit coincides with the common good of Americans and the world.

Out of curiosity: Do you also have a problem with the history of the US meddling in the affairs of others around the globe? — Erik

I consider any and all election meddling an affront to basic human dignity, be it committed by foreigners playing power politics, racist sheriffs playing the whip master, or Affrikaners playing colonial thug.

Call me old fashioned, but when the Russian government is actively trying to influence and manipulate our democratic elections, while the Trump administration and GOP-controlled three branches of government do nothing, I find it hard to care about yet another round of empty promises from the DPRK.

I think the following video btw conveys Trump's childlike mentality — Baden

Trump's "brilliance" is to be so childish that it's distracting. I mean, this video is just so desperately screaming at cable news "look over here I'm presidenting!" I don't know. For me, every media moment that's spent ignoring the transnational cabal of corrupt authoritarian capitalists who have successfully subverted our democratic system -- and how to learn from our mistakes in 2016 and take back congress these midterms, and how to heal our state department, justice department, and department of education from two years of manic neoliberal gutting -- is a waste.

Heh, you don't have to go far for examples - no need for intergalactic travel - just look at us. Kantian or not, that's what we've been doing with each other, not to mention other animals. — SophistiCat

I mean, I take the really interesting question that is gesturing towards -- let's call it the upshot of Tyson's slightly flippant talk -- is what aspects of human life are distinctly human and which aspects of human life are inherent to any creature endowed with the capacity for rationality.

Of course, it's not that black-and-white, there could possibly be a nexus of family resemblances, but the thought experiment is still very interesting. There's nothing like scientific proof available to us as self-interpreting creatures alone on earth in our capacity for rationality. So I take it that, on what I understand to be a Kantian view, what we have "been doing with each other, not to mention other animals" is a failure to properly exercise our moral capacity for practical rationality, or something (imo slightly dumb) like that. Or, like, if early Heidegger is right, then I take it these aliens would be self-interpreting Daseins. And then it would be interesting to see how they grapple with the issue of authenticity/inauthenticity since they are capable of more refined rationality.

This is actually why I doubt the possibility of rationally-capable extraterrestrial life, I just think we're too unique to be a meaningful basis for inferences about life elsewhere in the universe.

Just to give some idea of what an idealized version of this thread ought to look like, here's a syllabus from the University of Chicago. Intense! — Posty McPostface

Definitely intense -- that's a course designed for graduate students looking to market themselves as a specialist or competent in Wittgenstein scholarship for tenure-track jobs. And it's Conant, who is the great exponent of what I glean to be your take on Wittgenstein. So if you actually manage to follow some of that you'll be very smart by the end. :)

I will check back latter and see if I can search those books through the website. — Posty McPostface

Yeah, it's better if you just cruise around memoryoftheworld.org for yourself. A lot of great stuff there and you don't have to hunt around the web each time you want a book.

Because you've essentially accepted that The Right is absolved of agency, — Maw

No I have not. And I have explained why this accusation is wrong. I accept that democratic politics is about winning elections and making institutions and practices more just. The right wing authoritarians are seizing power and people are voting for them. And this all happens while a vile right wing ideology develops and feels more and more emboldened. So let me say it again. Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. Human action is complex. If there are a rash of burglaries in a neighborhood, it is appropriate to ask about police procedures and the local practice of leaving the front door open, and this does not absolve the burglars of agency or culpability. Yet you continue to claim erroneously that this is my position, or what my position amounts to, while ignoring that your accusation is baseless. You have then twice now pivoted and used this baseless accusation to call me an idiot.

I dislike Reddit immensely, but I call a spade a spade, and this idea that the Right has no agency in the ascendancy of Trump is immensely stupid and dangerous. — Maw

See, this is what I do not understand. You call me an idiot. Then you double down -- calling me an idiot is like calling a spade a spade (viz. because you are an idiot) -- and you again and again come to this notion that it's because I have "accepted that The Right is absolved of agency" or you claim that I think "the Right has no agency". Yet all my claim amounts to is that those of us involved in leftist politics - in whatever intellectual and/or institutional capacity - need to understand our own responsibility for the state of politics. So, for example, when you decry --

First, no where did I say or suggest that asking such questions: how did we lose, where did we go wrong etc. are invalid or wrong questions to ask. — Maw

-- well, yes you do, because you refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for the rise of right-wing authoritarianism by purposefully misinterpreting my call to do so as "absolving the right of agency".

Then it's not that you are not a member of the Far Left. It's just that you are an idiot. — Maw

Well that's needlessly personal. I'm a graduate student in philosophy who recently joined this forum, I am largely sympathetic with your political beliefs, and am openly discussing my concerns with your position as best I can while trying to articulate my own position clearly. I have at no point directly insulted you.

I'm genuinely surprised by you, and pretty disappointed that discourse on a philosophy forum is so terribly Reddit-like. If you can't discuss matters with me before reverting to personal insults within three posts, then I truly despair for the state of politics in the US.

You'd need a party to represent you to be able to have done anything wrong and you live in the wrong country for that. If you're under the illusion the US has a leftist party, then you need to travel abroad more. — Benkei

Well, I've been living in Europe for the past four years. But that's immaterial because the rise of right wing authoritarian thought and practice is a global problem.

Well, you lost by never running, that's the point. There's never been a single far left presidential candidate. You weren't even anywhere close to the marathon.

Shit, even the Greens have more political clout than the wsws.org nutjobs who keep calling everyone else Pseudo-Left. — Akanthinos

Huh. Interesting that Maw critiqued me for not giving Sanders near-win enough credit and you critique me for espousing beliefs that were nowhere close to the marathon.

But I am certainly misunderstood if you think that I am a nutjob who is calling everyone pseudo-left. I mean, I thought I was arguing against being accused as pseudo-left by Maw, so maybe I should just retire since it's 3:30 in the morning and this whole conversation is going in circles.

The only point I'm attacking is the only point that was explicitly offered:the hypoxic conservative analysis that we "Got Trump" because of liberals, whether it's due through the Democratic Party, or the concept of "Social Justice Warriors", or left-wing intellectual elitism, etc. [...] this is an absurdity that requires - demands - countering and correcting. — Maw

It's not conservative analysis. We as members of the far left are asking: How did we lose? What did we do wrong? Why were we on the left not capable of preventing the real threat of authoritarian from winning power? What can we do to make sure that in the future, when the next right-wing cabal with authoritarian intent and an actually smart figurehead attempts to take power, we're able to defeat them from the start? Your response appears to be to demean us as not *real* leftists by virtue of the fact that we ask these questions.

Moreover, for some reason, you put this sort of soul-searching in opposition to anti-Trump action. As though thoughtless resistance to Trump is the solution. Trump is the symptom of an intellectual-institutional nexus of practices that run very deep and there's nothing progressive about refusing a discussion right now, precisely when it's most urgent, about what we need to do to counter these practices, and how we might be surreptitiously furthering them.

And it is unequivocally not a critique in harmony with the Far Left. I know of no one on the Far Left who would claim that " the Democrats bear significant responsibility for his election", as if the Right is somehow absolved of agency. — Maw

Well, obviously you do, because you're conversing with members of the far left who make that claim. So it would seem that you are suggesting that we're not allowed to be members of the far left if we're brazen enough to actually wonder aloud why the left has so far been institutionally and intellectually weak in preventing the rise of authoritarianism. You also seem to think of responsibility as an all-or-nothing game, which strikes me as simplistic and dangerous, because it shirks all personal responsibility. It's why so many on the left continue to feel entitled to not give any reasons to vote democratic. Why bother questioning our own strategies and beliefs if others are to blame and nothing is our fault.

As it happens, he has made my country worse. — tim wood

For what it's worth, I think this is the correct response to what he has done to each of us *personally*. I had been away from the US for four years before going back for a few weeks earlier this year and the difference was absolutely astonishing. People have become very noticeably more selfish, resentful, disrespectful, etc. in all kinds of small ways it's hard to characterize. I'm not sure if Americans have noticed this or if it's a bit of a frog-in-boiling-water situation. And Republicans have to be staggeringly credulous to believe that this general atmosphere of resentment is unrelated to a sitting president who constantly insults millions of citizens.

Beyond that, I find it sort of perplexing that so many people are being duped by such an obviously repugnant, mean-spirited, narcissistic, truly ugly human-being. My best guess is that it's because the politics of team sport and hate the other side has consumed people's psyche. People would rather heap adoration on a cheap huckster than admit those they hate have decent points to make.

It's a defense of misdirection. In your case mindless incomprehension. — tim wood

To 's point, I think his response to you is emblematic of those of us - I hope he'll allow me to lump him in here - who are as disgusted by Trump, and everything he does and represents, as humanly possible, yet worry that the left has become engulfed with an attitude of resentment and hate which is far less bad than the Republicans but still deeply troubling and certainly compounds matters.

(Sorry, couple small edits for fear I might be misconstrued.)

II love how the party of "personal responsibility" will point fingers at nearly everyone but themselves as the reason for "How We Got Trump". Conservatives vigorously accuse 'Social Justice Warriors', the 'miasma' of Political Correctness, or the wild idea that labeling someone a Nazi or Fascist or Racist, will transform them into a Nazi/Fascist/Racist. — Maw

Fishfry said nothing in his post to indicate that he was a Republican. On the contrary, his points were all in line with a far-left critique of the democratic party. So I find it concerning that you jump straight into attacking republicans, thus misrepresenting his points straight off as some sort of republican projection, rather than substantively engaging with someone who is offering a much needed critique of the democratic party's behavior. I find it concerning because I don't feel that we on the left are engaging in anything like the soul-searching we need, and the left seems to simply attack anyone who offers the types of complaints that ought to be the basis of this much needed soul-searching.

As a far left progressive, I'm not a big proponent of the centrists Democrats or Hillary Clinton, but I'd greatly prefer them to the Republicans, whose 40+ years modus operandi have, much more than the Democrats, is responsible for the nomination of Trump, his Presidential win, and the incomprehensible fact that he enjoys a 85%+ approval rating by self-described Republicans. — Maw

Indeed, I think that every left-leaning person agrees that the democrats are currently much better than the Republicans. And the Republicans are responsible for Trump. But this still doesn't absolve the democratic party and far-left movements of responsibility. The left needs to ask how we got to this place, and what level of responsibility we have for the current situation.

I think the concern which fishfry raises - if I read him correctly - is that the far left is not in any meaningful sense an alternative to a corrupt democratic party. It's possible, for example, to be a hedge fund manager and a feminist. So the democratic party is currently catering to the far left by playing social justice games which are more about enabling certain opponents within a corrupt power struggle internal to the rich and powerful. Social justice as crony-capitalist window dressing. I'm reminded of something I saw on MSNBC a few months ago. Chuck Todd said: Sure, Gina Haspel is a craven torturer, but it's a refreshing sign of progress that we have broken the glass ceiling and will - for the first time ever! - have a female director of the CIA. Personally I don't want to live in a world where torture becomes "progressive".

The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? What can they do that we cannot? And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood

Well I suppose at that point Kantian vs. Utilitarian vs. Virtue ethics will be settled. I guess I'd just pray that Kant was right -- that any hyper-intelligent "rational" being is confined to deontological morality by virtue of practical reason -- though I'm not a Kantian, so I suspect it's more likely we'd be tortured to death, enslaved, or just plain obliterated.

t's 35 USD and I will make the companion available for free in ebook format to other members in a private PM. I'm not so worried that someone will come after me over making the ebook available on philosophy to other members. — Posty McPostface

Hey Posty, sorry I was unclear in my original post! The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has made the PDF publicly available for anyone who wishes to use it for educational purposes. :) It's through a project called Memory of the World. You can find the PDF here. It is also available in ebook format here.

Other books are available as well, such as Anscombe's Introduction to the Tractatus, Essays on the History & Interpretation of the Tractatus, and Routledge's version of the Tractatus.

Also, I think that I might possibly have a decent handle on later Wittgenstein works like On Certainty - if such a thing is possible - but I'm really terrible with the Tractatus so please take my suggestions with a mountain of salt.

Another reaction that pisses me off is the jump to a “mental health issue”, often insinuating that he should have sought “help” and if he had done so, he would still be alive. It’s nobody’s bloody business if someone else wants to be alive or not. It’s their decision and their decision alone. The reason may not necessarily be a troubling psychological issue. — Vinson

Yes, I agree, and this same reasoning is exactly what absolutely infuriates me about the idiotic cliche belief everyone seems to hold that suicide is a "selfish" act. Like, one person felt for whatever reason that they could not or would not go on living, while the other person has so little disregard for that person's will to die that they wish that other person to be trapped in life, and somehow the suicidal person is the selfish one in that equation.

Suicide is a tabu subject because the strength to face another day often comes from a group-think "everyone else is doing it." — darthbarracuda

For me, as with many others, the option of suicide is precisely what gives me the strength to face life. I've never felt genuinely suicidal because of this. Were it not an option, life would be much more of a burden -- I feel liberated to take risks and live the life I want because of this option.

But what I'd like your insight on -- since you are spot on in your post yet don't bring this up -- is how the empowering aspect of suicide is also a tabu subject. Like, my impression is that anyone with my philosophy of suicide who brings this thought up to people is immediately scolded to seek counseling, not to live alone, etc. And if you try to argue the point the mere desire to think abstractly about suicide is taken to be a sort of perversity; like, the group-think doesn't need to give you reasons, the demand for reasons betrays you as a headcase in need of re-programming.

I feel as though, this is an area of confusion or uncertainty about the totality of what Wittgenstein had to offer to the philosophical community. — Posty McPostface

I don't know if other people view the two works as such, hence me posting this to clear that ambiguity. — Posty McPostface

Indeed they do, that's why it's the perhaps core issue of Wittgenstein scholarship, and certainly the most aggressively contentious one. It doesn't help that people with your reading -- the "mono-Wittgenstein" view -- are derided as "American" readers by UK pedants. Anyway, perhaps James Conant's lectures/papers The Alleged Heresy of Mono-Wittgensteinianism and Wittgenstein's Methods might interest you.

Here in France they simply publish the Tractatus and Investigations together in one book, though I think they can't do that in the US/UK for copyright reasons. I'd be really curious if anyone knows how they do it in Austria.

Can anyone recommend a good companion to use for the tractatus? — Posty McPostface

Assuming you are looking for clarity and consistency over abstruse technical insight, I would highly recommend you all consider using this book. It is available in PDF on UNESCO's library site, along with many others here. (There is no copyright infringement.)

Indeed it is. But I wonder why anyone would deny themselves the whole toolbox to choose from? Each person, for each problem (or problem type) might choose differently from the toolbox, but why would anyone deliberately restrict their own choice of tools? — Pattern-chaser

Here are some of my thoughts, since I have been struggling a lot recently with the question you are posing. My underlying issue is this: Are you sure it's an either/or? Can we not support a tradition or even individual philosopher while also drawing from the toolbox? It's a bit of a rant; sorry about that.

1. Depth: If I believe a certain philosophical outlook to be the most consistently appropriate (meta-philosophically, phenomenologically, etc.) then it behooves me to focus on studying those thinkers within the tradition which espouses that outlook. And this does not mean that I have to shut my eyes and be insular. Rather, this support gives me a strong perspective, and an historical grounding, from which I can continue to study in a way which leads to meaningful progress for me. To use an analogy, it's like building a home from which I can travel, rather than remaining peripatetic and homeless.

Let's take an example. There is a deep philosophical kinship between virtue ethics, existentialism, phenomenology, and French post-modern political thought (e.g. Foucault, Deleuze). I take it that real philosophical issues are at stake in the way in which these 'schools' broadly contrast with: Deontological ethics, neo-Kantianism, and analytic political thought (e.g. Rawls and Habermas).

Now think about the number of arguments at stake in epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, etc. etc. No human being can understand all sides of these issues with equal seriousness and rigour. (Nor would this be philosophically desirable.) So, after a while, you have to pick the sources you plan to study within this big debate, and it behooves you put aside this 'meta' debate to make some progress on your own thought. This is why it's impossible to achieve any nuanced philosophical thought without either implicitly or explicitly siding with a school of thought. That's why every original thinker can be retrospectively labeled -- consider how angry Heidegger was at being labeled an existentialist.

2. Mentorship and Friendship: I have struggled a lot with the question you are posing, because I love philosophy and want to continue in academic philosophy. But what I started to notice about a year ago is that a really particular type of person succeeds in graduate school and academia: people with shockingly narrow, straight-forwards interests, who are not bogged down by calling these interests into question. For example, I have a friend who has published like crazy because Nietzsche is his favorite philosopher, he's been reading all of his works backwards and forwards since he was 15 years old, subsequently read all the secondary literature in undergrad, and now publishes about him often. So if someone asks what his interests and publications are it's very straight-forward. Now, it would be one thing if I could say - aha! I'm better read and more imaginative than my friend! -- but I'm not. He's just managed to sublimate his interests better than I have. Again, the house metaphor: he accepts a strong core of belief which opens him up to brilliant mentors and friends, then he uses this to give him the intellectual and material support that let's him read/think widely from there.

I have also noticed this in the classroom. All of the analytic political philosophers have ready-made answers to every question, because they pick a side in the ongoing debates and memorize all of the normative arguments and counter-arguments the way a chess grandmaster does. So they tend to have full-proof 'positions' from within a school. I hate it -- I think it's dead thought -- but there's no doubt it feeds their feeling that they have key insights into the world.

And in some way they may be right! Because it is very clear why someone applying to write a book, give a talk, etc. will be interesting if their biography reads something like: (Person A's interests are Immigration, environmental ethics and Kantian ethics) and the planned talk is: Person A will make the case for unlimited immigration from a strong perspective.

Now, a really interesting talk will of course be the type someone like (e.g.) Zizek gives -- drawing on Hegel, Japanese Buddhism, 70s grindhouse films, and Lenin -- to talk about immigration, or whatever. But the question is: How does (e.g. Zizek) get to a place, both personally and intellectually, to think and talk like that? And my personal answer would be: Studying with the Hegelians and the Lacanians until he was in his mid-thirties. There is no other way.

Just want to chime in with something lightly off topic that might as well (properly) go ignored.

My first thought when I casually glanced at the title of this thread was that it was going to discuss mainstream moral philosophy. In most (analytic) moral phil journal articles, the term "getting it right" is used constantly as though that casual phrasing is itself unobjectionable; I guess the underlying idea being something like: despite our theoretical differences, obviously we all agree that moral agents aim to "get it right"!

So to those who question the purpose of the thread, I mean, it's out of context, but it's definitely given me a new perspective to chew on. Just as rewords the OP in terms of aesthetics, I guess I purposefully misread it in terms of ethics. And I wonder if it points to some sort of interesting meta-ethical complaint I might bring up next time I'm set to review a relevant article.

The problem with research into IQ is that people are mostly interested in using it as justification for drawing conclusions about differences in intelligence between races. — T Clark

I mean, surely sensible people understand that those are all cases in which the purported evidence of IQ is being used to justify existing racist sentiments. None of these guys is led to racism by merely following the science or some other such stupid nonsense.

But I would suggest that's just a species of a genus of stupidity. The wider problem, which you're alluding to, is that people use IQ in general as a justification for drawing conclusions about differences in general. This stupidity no doubt feeds on a sort of 'scientism' mindset, and it's absolute philosophical malpractice. The concept of intelligence -- a multi-layered concept with a variety of uses and applications within a variety of contexts -- is quantified, and then essentialized (to individuals or groups), and then re-deployed in predictive or explanatory theorizing. It's plain dumb.

It's then this same pseudo-science impulse that led to the truly foolish notion (properly crushed by MacIntyre in After Virtue) that social sciences hadn't caught up to the natural sciences because the average IQ of social scientists was less than those of natural scientists.

Not to mention -- I can't be the only one -- all those people one meets who discuss their purported IQ scores as a justification of superiority and entitlement across, like, every spectrum of life.

Each one of us senses the world to revolve around us. The world and what we do in it is significant and has cosmic importance. My argument is that this significance is an illusion. — darthbarracuda

In some sense, I am not sure how these sentences hang together. You are - and I am - what you/I make of ourselves in the world. Your dealings with the world are significant to you while alive, insignificant after death, and of ongoing significance to the world variably, depending on how you live your life.

Anything we see as allegedly important and justifying of existence, anything that gives existence a "point" or "purpose", is illusory. Someone can say, "I want to live because I want to do XYZ" but if they die before then, nothing will have been lost. When you die, you don't so much lose something important so much as you lose the sense of something being important. — darthbarracuda

I don't know. Death is not meaningless or purposeless in the same way that the universe is not meaningless or purposeless; the concept of meaning or purpose is not lacking or absent in either, because the concept properly belongs to human life -- it has no friction when applied to death.

Something important is not ripped away from you - rather, you lose the sense of importance so that nothing is important anymore. — darthbarracuda

Yes, something is ripped away from you -- your life, all meaning and purpose. Since the concepts (meaning, purpose) have no 'friction' in death, it cannot seem to apply to you after death, but that doesn't mean that from within the perspective of life nothing is lost. Yes, there is of course a so-to-speak transition in perspectives -- from the perspective of life to the perspective of death -- but that transition is itself a loss. I lose not just everything meaningful, significant, but my meaningful worldliness. Even if I would not have time to comprehend the loss, it is still a loss.

By “clearly written” I mean things like that the text should not casually use undefined terms or phrases, — tinman917

Well, I think that this is a readily fixable philosophical mistake. You are using "clearly written" as a universal standard. What is "clear writing" to an audience of nineteenth-century German academics, where everyone has read Greek by age 8 and has read Hegel's Phenomenology like it's the bible (and thus adopt its terms), is not going to be "clearly written" by your standards. The same goes for someone sitting in Athens 2,500 years ago, Florence 600 years ago, London 400 years ago, Copenhagen 150 years ago, etc. etc.

The example you use (Levinas) is working within a rather insular French intellectual context in which that's simply how people write philosophy.

If not then what am I doing wrong? — tinman917

You're expecting to study philosophy on your terms. You want philosophical texts written across the whole spectrum of possible human contexts, modes of thoughts, areas of interests, etc. to conform to your way of thinking and reading. You need to adopt philosophy as a journey which expands the horizon of your ways of thinking, reading, writing, etc. etc. or instead stick to contemporary academic articles and secondary-sources. (And I can say for certain that some professor in the US or UK has packaged Levinas's thought into precisely the sort of prose you seem to seek.)

Do others find this as much of a problem as I do? If so how do they get round it. — tinman917

Well, I can tell you it does get easier. I have noticed especially recently that, after 10 years of serious study, my reading comprehension has gotten much faster and I struggle a lot less with texts now that I know the terrain fairly well. For example, if I read a phrase like "inferentially articulable doxastic commitments" I'm familiar with the words, the concepts, how they have been used by a variety of philosophers to make a variety of points, etc. But it takes a long time, at first, to truly understand why people are using the language they do, the concepts they do, and what it all means -- how one ought to interpret that use for oneself.

Whatever our experiences, we can make up a word for them, so there is nothing we cannot talk about. And yet no amount of talk can capture the experience, so there is always a chasm between talk and world. We can talk about anything, but it will only ever be talk. — unenlightened

I think that the spirit of this is correct way to go about reading the seventh proposition, although I would perhaps quibble with the substance.

In any case, I take it that what's key is Wittgenstein's use of the preposition "of" (von). If we take the proposition within the larger corpus, I think that what he's gesturing towards is something like this: one cannot speak of ethics, one can only speak ethically.

He recognizes early on in his life that the aim of the Tractatus -- to understand the stuff of human life from the outside-in, starting with the logical form of language/thought/world -- only gets you so far. The stuff of human life, tradition, practices, must then be lived and understood from inside-out.

So I guess, on this reading, an imperfect analogy might be something like this. It would be as if Rawls, in some uncharacteristically self-aware moment, ended A Theory of Justice by saying: "Aha, I've 'solved' political philosophy according to the rules of our game. Only now can we see how little use it is to actual politics. Perhaps we can integrate into our lives and into our practices, but probably not. We can no longer speak "of" politics, but perhaps only politically."