They are our ordinary criteria ... — Antony Nickles
... but the sense of wonder you are thinking of ... — Antony Nickles
It is not by such ordinary criteria that "a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved a fertile point of view". — Fooloso4
I think you do not know what the sense of wonder I am thinking of is. — Fooloso4
But this is science and empiricism (repeatability by anyone allowing for stability and certainty). — Antony Nickles
What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view. (CV 18) — Fooloso4
“Ordinary” in this sense is like a technical term — Antony Nickles
Is this to remain mysterious? — Antony Nickles
...or just to end the discussion? — Antony Nickles
if that is unwanted I apologize. — Antony Nickles
He is talking about ways of seeing things. — Fooloso4
I don't think he is using the term "ordinary" in a way that is not ordinary. — Fooloso4
To some extent [your sense of wonder] must [remain mysterious to me] ["I think you do not know what the sense of wonder I am thinking of is."]. Wittgenstein connected wonder and awe with the mysterious and unknown. But if we ask what these things are I have no answer. — Fooloso4
Both Plato and Aristotle say that philosophy begins in wonder. It is, however, the pursuit of philosophy that led to modern science: — Fooloso4
The point of view that Witt is claiming is that the method and tools of philosophy are in plain sight. — Antony Nickles
My point was only that philosophy does not achieve this through empiricism but through understanding how and why we desire and create the picture that anything is hidden. This is not "ways" of seeing things, but a singular way that is different than traditional philosophy. — Antony Nickles
Ordinary is a descriptor of our language and expressions and their senses (uses), which is only truly understood against the expressions of traditional philosophy and the senses of our words that it manufactures. — Antony Nickles
When as in this case, we disapprove of the expressions of ordinary language (which are after all performing their office), we have got a picture in our heads which conflicts with the picture of our ordinary way of speaking.
An example of the use of wonder as curiosity would be one wondering about how something came to be, the answer of its (hidden) cause. — Antony Nickles
Tractatus 6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
the "complete clarity" (#133) at the end of philosophy (each time) is not the answers of science, but making aware our lives right before us. — Antony Nickles
A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)
The point of view of Copernicus or Darwin is that the method and tools of philosophy are in plain sight? — Fooloso4
It is not that ordinary language has to be understood against the expressions of traditional philosophy, but that traditional philosophy fails to understand ordinary language. — Fooloso4
I agree with the first part of this, but complete clarity is freedom from the entanglement in language that philosophy can lead us into. As I quoted previously (PI 122) it is about having an übersichtliche Darstellung:
A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?) — Fooloso4
Ultimately, I think that is off topic unless you can explain. — Antony Nickles
We fail to understand what the ordinary is until we understand why philosophy wants more. — Antony Nickles
That philosophy claims that everything is before us does not mean it is already understood. — Antony Nickles
I've tried to piece it together myself but I'm at a loss — Antony Nickles
This seems to be Peter Hacker’s translation. — Joshs
Careful
you don’t mistake Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein for the correct reading. — Joshs
Copernicus reoriented man's place in the world. It goes to the heart of how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Darwinian evolution did much the same. We are not the pinnacle or culmination of the fixed order of life. In both cases we are freed from a picture that held us captive. A point of view given to us and protected by Christianity. A point of view that was regarded as not only ordinary but true. — Fooloso4
A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)
I did not want to get into the problem of translating übersichtliche Darstellung.At this point I think it would just muddy the waters.
In any case, the quote is from Anscombe's translation — Fooloso4
But the Pi does not only morally implore us to take certain actions, but to do so in the name of our betterment, not only in thinking, understanding, teaching; in being rigorous, clear, deliberate, honest, fair; but in learning about our responses to our human condition (our separateness), our fears, our desires, our blindness. But the Pi also uncovers our ethical obligation in the groundlessness of our world and the limitations of knowledge. — Antony Nickles
The thoughts that I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. — PI, preface
PI begins with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions which “give us a particular picture of the essence of human language,” based on the idea that “the words in language name objects,” and that “sentences are combinations of such names” (PI 1). This picture of language cannot be relied on as a basis for metaphysical, epistemic or linguistic speculation. Despite its plausibility, this reduction of language to representation cannot do justice to the whole of human language; and even if it is to be considered a picture of only the representative function of human language, it is, as such, a poor picture. Furthermore, this picture of language is at the base of the whole of traditional philosophy, but, for Wittgenstein, it is to be shunned in favor of a new way of looking at both language and philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations proceeds to offer the new way of looking at language, which will yield the view of philosophy as therapy. — SEP article on Ludwig Wittgenstein
To treat someone as if they have a soul; that it is not our knowledge of another’s pain, but our response to it that matters. — Antony Nickles
Philosophical Investigations...published posthumously in 1953...comprised two parts. Part I, consisting of 693 numbered paragraphs, was ready for printing in 1946, but rescinded from the publisher by Wittgenstein. Part II was added on by the editors, trustees of his Nachlass. In 2009 a new edited translation, by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, was published; Part II of the earlier translation, now recognized as an essentially separate entity, was here labeled “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (PPF). — SEP article on Ludwig Wittgenstein
109. It was correct that our considerations must not be scientific ones. The feeling ‘that it is possible, contrary to our preconceived ideas, to think this or that’ — whatever that may mean — could be of no interest to us. (The pneumatic conception of thinking.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light — that is to say, its purpose — from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; but they are solved through an insight into the workings of our language, and that in such a way that these workings are recognized — despite an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with. Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language. — Philosophical Investigations
This is not a traditional moral philosophical theory or just a set of ethical principles because it subsumes the is and ought, the in and out, etc. What I would think is relevant here is that the discussion of explanation vs description and hidden vs plain-view shows our part in ontology, or desires for epistemology, and thus our moral part in philosophy, to be better people, do better. — Antony Nickles
A surveyable representation, an übersichtlichen Darstellung , (alternatively translated as perspicuous representation), a representative overview is said to be of fundamental importance. — Fooloso4
I did not want to get into the problem of translating übersichtliche Darstellung.At this point I think it would just muddy the waters. — Fooloso4
PPF is not about ethics or morality either, but about the philosophy of psychology. — Luke
What is it about Hacker's translation that led you to caution me? — Fooloso4
I do not know or care how Hacker reads Wittgenstein. — Fooloso4
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.
No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
"What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view. " CV 18. ...In both cases [of changes to our theoretical paradigm] we are freed from a picture that held us captive. A point of view given to us and protected by Christianity. A point of view that was regarded as not only ordinary but true. — Fooloso4
"That philosophy claims that everything is before us does not mean it is already understood." — Antony Nickles
But this is not what philosophy claims. — Fooloso4
"I've tried to piece it together myself but I'm at a loss."
— Antony Nickles — Fooloso4
Where does the PI "morally implore us" to do anything at all; any of this? Do you want to say that any advocation/teaching of the right way to do something, such as change a car tyre, is a moral imploration? That seems like a tenuous association with morality. Even if there is a sense of morality in Wittgenstein's telling us the "right" way, or a better way, to do philosophy, morality is still not the subject of his philosophy in PI, nor his focus in the text. — Luke
The main focus of the Philosophical Investigations is language... "Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language." - PI — Luke
There is no mention of ethics or morality here. — Luke
...morality is still not the subject of his philosophy in PI, nor his focus in the text. — Luke
As I also mentioned earlier, the word "ethics" appears only once in the text (at 77), in a manner that is consistent with the views on ethics he expounded in the Tractatus. Does he show it instead of say it in the PI? — Luke
Two uses of the word "see" [PI ii,xl, PPF 111]
Despite that, PPF is not about ethics or morality either, but about the philosophy of psychology. — Luke
5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.
What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’.
The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world— not a part of it.
4.112 Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries
6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the
facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.
258 ...The ‘aspect-blind’ will have an altogether different attitude to pictures from ours.
259. (Anomalies of this kind are easy for us to imagine.)
260. Aspect-blindness will be akin to the lack of a ‘musical ear’.
256. Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to the will.
254. The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination.
In other words, the concept ‘Now I see it as . . .’ is related to ‘Now I am imagining that’.
What I was referring to was not Wittgenstein's work, but that I could not figure out what you are getting at. — Antony Nickles
The resolute reading seems to be trying to find something mystical and hidden "behind" or "between the lines" of Wittgenstein's words, when Wittgenstein explicitly urges us in the opposite direction in the PI; telling us that the real philosophical insights are to be found on the surface, in the mundane and obvious uses of language. His own should not be any exception. — Luke
The danger in a long foreword is that the spirit of a book has to be evident in the book itself and cannot be described. For if a book has been written for just a few readers that will be clear just from the fact that only a few people understand it. The book must automatically separate those who understand it from those who do not. Even the foreword is written just for those who understand the book.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it. (That so often happens with someone you love.)
If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside!
The honorable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only
by those who can open it, not by the rest. [Culture and Value 7-8]
Understood, but much of what I have been doing is trying to draw some of the connections in his work. — Fooloso4
PI 144 I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things. (Indian mathematicians: “Look at this!”)
461. ... (I once read somewhere that a geometrical figure, with the words "Look at this", serves as a proof for certain Indian mathematicians. This looking too effects an alteration in one's way of seeing.)
PI 66 To repeat: don’t think, but look!
You're assuming what ethics and moral philosophy looks like. — Antony Nickles
Aren't the subjects of thoughtfulness, understanding, teaching, treating people as more than objects of knowledge, etc. what ethics is about? — Antony Nickles
And what Witt would call "morality" is when we enter an unknown situation--not the everyday stuff like changing a tire, but when we come to the end of our justifications, we're at a loss as to what to say to each other (say, a student), our regular courses of action amount to contradiction (stunning us he and Plato say), etc. — Antony Nickles
Th subject is language because it is the means by which we struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding--it is the "resource", not the cause. — Antony Nickles
The interlocutor is given to say things, but they are things which we could agree could be said in such a situation. They are our expressions. — Antony Nickles
Examining those expressions ("our 'ordinary' language") shows us the grammar (criteria) of the practices like chess, rule-following, thinking to ourselves, being in pain, see a thing as a thing (or in another way), etc. — Antony Nickles
And these examples of practices show that we have a multitude of criteria rather than just crystalline purity, — Antony Nickles
107. The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not something I had discovered: it was a requirement.)
97. Thinking is surrounded by a nimbus. — Its essence, logic, presents an order: namely, the a priori order of the world; that is, the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty may attach to it. —– It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction, but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.5563).
We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound and essential to us in our investigation resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, inference, truth, experience, and so forth. This order is a super-order between — so to speak — super-concepts. Whereas, in fact, if the words “language”, “experience”, “world” have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”.
108. We see that what we call “proposition”, “language”, has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is a family of structures more or less akin to one another. —– But what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here. — But in that case doesn’t logic altogether disappear? — For how can logic lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining any of its rigour out of it. — The preconception of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole inquiry around. (One might say: the inquiry must be turned around, but on the pivot of our real need. — Philosophical Investigations
but also that this is not an alternative or rejection, but the opportunity to ask: why do we do that? Is it right, good? — Antony Nickles
Witt comes in second after Nietschze for cryptic, half-finished thoughts and just flat-out question marks. If it were easy to change, he could just tell you how. — Antony Nickles
I have not looked into the question of ethics in the PI, but suggest, in a tentative way, that although ethics is not explicitly discussed in the PI, this does not represent a break from his earlier concerns with ethics and aesthetics. It is, rather, consistent with it.
— Fooloso4
As I also mentioned earlier, the word "ethics" appears only once in the text (at 77), in a manner that is consistent with the views on ethics he expounded in the Tractatus. Does he show it instead of say it in the PI?
— Luke — Fooloso4
The "saying/showing" distinction is not limited to what can be shown as opposed to what can be said, but, rather, includes what can seen or experienced as opposed to being said. — Fooloso4
...consistent with the Tractatus, this is because the ethical/aesthetic is not something that philosophy deals with. — Fooloso4
:up:
I also don't see it, not in the text. I don't object to texts being wove in to new projects, but it's more agreeable when this is done boldly. Claim it. — Pie
What does our ordinary means of judgment mean? — Fooloso4
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