so the big crunch causes the big bang, but not the other way round? Time is circular, but yet one-directional? Or is it bi?

Time causes itself?? It is its own cause?

so that makes the last effect into the first cause. But what then is the first cause?? What happens to it?

so what is the cause of the first cause?

From the beginning yes, always a good place to start, if you find it though! So, preface is next, but I dont have the time now, probably later today.

Nietzsche' s "Last Man" is antinatalist, right? While the "Ubermensch" is life affirming, life-wanting, despite all the pain and agony of life???

Basically, the main antinatalist argument is: we are all gonna die sometime, so why not sooner, why not being born at all? What is gained by "living"?

And what is this scientific conception of reality?

As it is now, scientists are dazed and confused, and sound like theologians!!

I dont understand what you mean, but I got the impression that you have something seriously wrong here. Anyway, this will be dealt with when treating the Tractatus. My point in making the above comments was to show that there can be different interpretations leading to completely different conclusions: one reading was that of the now dead logical atomism.


I think it mostly depends on what the "silent things" are thought and taken to be, if they are false propositions, logical propositions, directive and prescriptive, or ethical and metaphysical etc.. And secondly what are we supposed to do with/in the silence.


So much confusion because of the 7th proposition, like its a 7th seal or something. For someone that wanted to clarify and elucidate thoughts, not very succesful, is it?

But why do you think that W was praised so much and admired in the circle of Vienna?

But bipolarity has to do with propositions that have sense and can be either true or false, which is why they are called bipolar in the first place. The "That which we cannot talk about must pass over in silence", refers to non-bipolar propositions, in the realm of the nonsensical.

Depending on whether you adopt the principle of bipolarity, not so much. — Wallows

What does bipolarity have to do with this? But it's like these Viennese "philosophers" said in the comix above:

What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence. Where "speak" naturally mean "speak logically!". Your work gave us the means to expel religion, metaphysics, ethics etc from rational discourse. Since "what cannot be spoken about logically" is, quite literally, non-sense, and, obviously, beneath the dignity of serious minds!

Only to get the answer from Wittgenstein:

Just wait a minute! The meaning of the "Tractatus" has completely escaped you! Its point is the exact opposite: the things that cannot be talked about logically, are the ones which are truly important!!

Only a comic, one would say, perhaps mirroring the views of its writer. However, Wittgenstein, at a later time, in his lecture on ethics to the Heretics Society at the university of Cambridge, closes his speech thus:

"My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it".

http://sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf

Or as he says elsewhere:

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

or in PI:

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

So I think that the Tractatus gave the wrong impression, thus giving birth to trends like analytic philosophy and logical positivism, where ethics, and metaphysics in general, are either seen as meaningless or treated with contempt. This is what I meant when I wrote that "it can lead to completely different conclusions and worldviews".

But what do you think about all this?

Leading antinatalist nowdays is Les Knight, I don't think he was mentioned.

http://www.vhemt.org/les.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement

Apparently he was voluntarily vasectomised at the tender age of 25, and it seems that he campaigns a lot.



So I think we should see what he has to say, as he is an active antinatalist, not some theorist.

Yes, but this most famous proposition is a bit ambiguous, isn't it? There are a few different interpretations I mean, which can lead to completely different conclusions and worldviews, as it seems.

But what kind of "work" you mean?

Well I don't know, really, but I would like to explore that possibility, enjoy it even, I mean in logic it's all about possibilities, isn't it?

Huh, googling for the term, I came up with this:

https://ludwig.guru/s/enjoy+the+possibilities

I see it like in Logicomix, I don't know if you know about it or read it, but you might enjoy it as I did.

My point was what I said above about what I think he was trying to do: to find a way to dissolve language, so that the inexpressible, the mystical like he says, or whatever this is, could either be expressed or show itself (6.522), to shine its way through, that is my take on Wittgenstein. But you know, we can be pretty harsh sometimes, cruel even, asking for trouble, mostly in cases where our love is involved, when it cannot be shown or appreciated, when someone or something stands in our way, and this is what I think happened to him, and why he was like this.

But we can see here, between us two I mean, how language can lead to the greatest misunderstandings.

haha, I doubt that he was, but then again, people say things about him. Anyway, that was not my point.

It may, or it may not, but certainly it is a possibility that we cannot dismiss. I mean, have you read about his life? A most troubled one, for sure, which I think shaped his philosophy, so I think we should see his work in tandem with his life, so that to understand better what he was on about.

In the wiki quotes, I read a statement of the physicist Freeman Dyson, mostly famous for the Dyson sphere, if you know about that, but anyway here it is:

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.
Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible. — Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, "What Can You Really Know?", The New York Review of Books (November 8, 2012)

So this inexpressible might as well have been an expression of love and affection, something that appears easy, but apparently is not, as it has been obscured by language. And it might be that Wittgenstein's critique of language, and why he was so obsessed with it, was to expose this aspect, in order to arrive to the things that really matter the most in this world, feelings and love that is.

Yes, but he doesn't make a matter of love only between him and Pinsent, but rather, in the motto above, includes everyone else, and whatever a man knows, with everything else being just rumbling. And if this is so, this makes the Tractatus, which is seen as an essay on logic and language, an essay on love, which carries the ethical weight that W mentioned to Ludwig von Ficker, that the point of the Tractatus was ethical.

But who was David Pinsent? Not much information on him, but the wiki page states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pinsent

David Hume Pinsent (24 May 1891 – 8 May 1918) was a friend, collaborator and platonic lover of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is dedicated to Pinsent's memory.

So could it be that these three words were "Ich liebe dich", "I love you"?

Ok, first of all with the pre-preface:

Ludwig Wittgenstein
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
DAVID H. PINSENT

Mo t t o: . . . und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen
und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen.
Kürnberger.

“… and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” Kürnberger

Who was this Kürnberger guy, and what are these three words Ludwig is referring to?

Whenever you are ready, I guess. Although i am pretty tired now to start a proper conversation.

But I think you missed the preface, and even before the preface, not Russells comments but W's. Well, what do you have to say about that?

For sure? You are not just saying that to get me off your back, right?

I tried to read N&N several times, but I always came to a stop, because of lack of meaning. I mean, what is the whole point of the book? Why is it important? Will I better myself reading and understanding it, or is it just a complete waste of time? I was unable to answer these questions, but then again people say it is important, yet I fail to see it. So, would anyone here care to explain its importance?

I could accompany you but as I am new, we would have to take it from the beginning. I studied and analysed the Tractatus, sentence by sentence, up to the start of chapter 3, so I could post all this here, but I have to translate it first since they are in greek! :)

hey, it says in the rules that bumps are not allowed!!

It's been a while since I studied Aristotle, and I don't have the time nor energy to go through it again, so I will answer by memory, whatever I remember, like I were on a desert island with no access to resources.

So he says that there are four causes, if I remember him correctly, efficient, formal, final and one more I think, which eludes me. When he discuses unmoved movers, he says that they are final causes, not efficient nor formal or whatsoever, probably owing to the fact that they are immaterial. But objects in the physical world that consist of matter, they ... are all four causes, I think he uses the example of a sculptor that makes a statue to explain better what he means. So I don't see a contradiction there, but one can say that he makes arbitrary and unsolicited distinctions, which is a different thing.

1. It is not our fault that Aristotle makes a distinction between the two, the immaterial/material I mean, but I don't see it as trickery. Apart from that, I agree with Πετροκότσυφας. And I think that A introduces the concept of unmoved movers out of necessity, logical necessity that is, that there has to be such entities, if motion in the world can be explained at all. He arrived there to avoid circular argumentation, as has already been said, but then again objects affected by the unmoved movers move in circular motion, so it seems that the circle has been transferred from the logical and the metaphysical to the physical.

2. Duly noted.

Yeah, you are probably right that they are not self caused.
Huh, the unmoved movers always troubled me!

Well first of all, to say that I dont really know how or what creates motion, we are just discussing here Aristotle's philosophy on the matter, to see what he was blabbering about.

Now, I think unmoved movers would have to be full actuality, having capitalized on and exploited their potential in full, so that to become or rather be actual. Like someone who aspires to become a pilot, but isn't yet, well when he becomes, we can say that he actualized his potential, so that he is now an actual pilot instead of a potential one, with potentiality having been stripped away from him and turned into actuality. The idea that moved him in the first place was that of a pilot, so this was his unmoved mover, forever immovable, static and speechless, but nevertheless inspired him to move accordingly. So this is how motion in the physical world is created.

I think that Aristotle takes unmoved movers to be immaterial by definition. So they are not affected by motion in the material plane, and are thus immovable in that sense. They do however cause motion by thought, intellect, love and inspiration, beings in the material world doing that towards them, so they are movers. As for their causes, i think we can say they are their own cause, causa sui, how is it called. All this might be wrong and totally unfounded, but i dont see how it is contradictory.

It matters because motion, according to Aristotle, happens only in, say, the material universe, not the immaterial one.

Hold on, aren't unmoved movers supposed to be immaterial in nature?

If mathematicians were like philosophers, trying to fully resolve an issue before advancing, then there would be no progress in mathematics. So, wherever there is doubt, they create an axiom and tell their colleagues to invoke it in their work, if and when they like. In this way, they avoid the search for truth, so that to focus solely on mathematical work, numbers and proof: they just need to say which axioms were used, and leave the 'what really is the case' to philosophers. Mathematical axioms, in the way they are used by mathematicians, do not have anything to do with 'truth' in the real sense, they are just there to help them in their games. After all, if something was obviously true and accepted by everyone, we wouldn't have an axiom for it, would we? :)

I think that for the unmoved movers, he meant them as a final cause.

It is the constructivist/finitistic approach to maths MO is supporting. But because there is not universal concensus in mathematical and philosophical communities alike, in maths we have axioms for this stuff, like the axiom of infinity or the axiom of choice.

It causes motion to others by being a final cause, to add.

Is this in contrast to Ancient Science, where belief in deities was common? Or else, when was science, modern or otherwise, ever concerned with deities?