You are keeping you alive when you eat and all that stuff. — Darkneos

And I suppose that applies to all the other desires I have.

There are different kinds of desires and pursuing their consummation is an engagement with one's life. That is why apathy and depression factor into some considerations of suicide. On the other hand, the rush of risk taking also leads to a lot of death. I find both extremes unnecessary for myself.

What I had in mind about one preserving life is the way one jumps out of the way of the truck or jumps to save a colleague. These actions are not on a drop-down menu. The person who does them is just as alive as the other agents of choice.

I have worked in a dangerous industry for most of my life. The epistemology of learning what is stupid has joined forces with this person who is always alert for the bad things. It is a beautiful partnership that I am grateful for.

Anabasis of Alexander the Great by Arrian.

Arrian's style of critical admiration with concise recounting of events is awesome.

Every day you don’t off yourself is a choice to live. It’s not really the default. — Darkneos

But that ignores your life. Whatever is keeping you alive does not care a whit about your logic.

I would be interested in the drones being captured by helicopters and studied afterwards.

Power (might=right) is someone’s goal of what is good. Is it the most worthy goal? No, but it still exists in the world, and it gets dismissed because it doesn’t meet the standard Socrates wants. — Antony Nickles

I do not read the Republic to say that the equation of Thrasymachus did not exist. The work does not solve the problem but shows how it is surrounded by other problems. Using the individual soul to measure the body politic is not done by Wittgenstein but his self-imposed limits upon the discussion of ethics suggests he was not assigning the problem of the good to being simply another case of craving generality.

To me arguments for staying alive or for meaning only work if you HAVE to live. — Darkneos

I don't understand this view of compulsion. Whatever this life thing is, it has its own life. I have survived a number of crises because something took over while I was being stupid. We are more than we can talk about. Your premise assumes the contrary.

The central problem is the ever-increasing degree of income disparity between those at the top and everyone else. Moving from the visions of free trade gurus will not address that problem if the global wealth structure is secure. Trump needs that for his grifts. Thus his popularity amongst the very wealthy.

I hear the rehashing part. I do it too.

Demarking a clear line of what is or not a history of philosophy is a problem in deciding what is talked about by itself.

Plato and Aristotle have their versions of their past that are important to their statements. It would not be helpful to exclude that stuff from the discussion.

And how to approach a work like the Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel? We cannot exclude what he did not from the discussion.

When I read through many of those threads, it strikes me that interest in the primary texts is rarely what gets discussed.

Edit to add: But I see you are trying to keep the focus upon what is written in many of them.

Hah, no treble.
Love the animal print dresses. Don't tell anybody.

I will look for more songs in the box.

Virtue is beautiful. Despair is not a good look.

Do you not think that the song came from a place of despair? — Amity

I do think that is so. His refusal to live there is the thing.

Your suggestion is interesting to me. I figure a policy about secondary sources would have to be established for such a thing to work. The usual practice is that interpretations of the primary source is within the same sphere of discussion as each source. There would have to be a rule set down that restricted that practice in the interchanges.

It is a difficult rule (or rules) to enunciate because the most dedicated readers of primary texts are influenced by many others. Maybe a footnoting practice that separated arguments from admitted influences.

At the very least, since Sam can do that song, it would be embarrassing for me to despair.

The following from the Tractatus still seems to apply in the Blue Book:

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.
And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained. — Tractatus, 6.371

The matter of what is right and wrong is not a single problem. Socrates and Witt are similar in looking for the limit to their arguments.

That if we take skepticism as a problem, it leads to the desire for an answer, and he wants to show examples of the ordinary working rationality we have, to say that: when that comes to an end (as Joshs @Ludwig V are discussing), we at least are on open, common ground to differentiate from, rather than fighting in “frames of discussion” of theoretical fantasy. — Antony Nickles

I do think Wittgenstein is looking for a way to help the solipsist find an answer to a problem:

The solipsist who says "only I feel real pain", "only I really see (or hear)" is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says. He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.
— Blue Book, 59

While I recognize that W is taking a stance against the singularity of Plato's use of essence, he is oddly just like Socrates in accepting he has to live with the arguments he makes.

I don't read the issue he has with Plato as equivalent to his complaints about the temptations of modern science. The latter are the people he lives amongst.

I do think W urgently wants to get past the 'problem of skepticism' in regard to phenomena versus reality frames of discussion. He may eschew other explanations but he keeps taking aim at that one throughout his life.

I, too, worry about 'sycophant loyalists'. The point I was making about the supporting staff is that there is a paradoxical blowback from hiring profoundly ignorant people. They have nothing to say when informed people in their organization tell them something is not real or possible. Compare that predicament with making a deal with the likes of Bill Barr. He understood the DOJ inside and out. He had developed ties over years to get particular results from particular people.

If Patel gets his job at the FBI, he will be entering a structure and a culture of which he has had negative experience. Past directors came up through decades of work and oversight of complex investigations. The only way for him to gain control in that situation is if he replaces enough of his office with MAGA zombies. But even that move will collide with the sphere of actual agents. Making something dysfunctional may serve some people's interest. But it is not an advance of power per se.

The same dynamic is in play with all the other federal agencies.

Patel won't be able to do jack shit by himself. He needs a cadre of Federal employees willing to do his bidding, particularly if investigations are initiated in the top-down fashion of William Barr.

That is where the proposal to end background checks by the Trump team kicks in. If one fills the ranks with people outside the meritocracy of working experience, then anybody can run any part of government. The last vestige of professional conduct will join the other extinct species.

My challenge is simple. I will not withdraw it.
But I will leave the discussion, upon your request.
Fare forward, as Eliot said.

The point, though, is that solipsism has a very long and well established meaning: — Clearbury

Then cite some passages from those who use it without relation to the isolation of the individual.

Solipsism is the view that only one mind exists. — Clearbury

You are applying a definition not shared by the common sense of the word as the isolation of the individual from the world beyond their senses and representations. Your definition sounds more like an argument between "panpsychism" and "monism" .

You are proposing various possible conditions for our experience. Solipsism imagines there is no way to verify other beings because they have to be produced by my activity.

Such a thought is not capable of comparison with other proposed conditions. Comparisons require standing outside of all the candidates in order to judge which is the case.

That 'standing outside' collapses the premise of solipsism.

I find the general category of "idealism vs. realism" unhelpful when reading ancient texts. It retrojects later interpretations on to authors that had their own problems and concerns.

Reading to understand the latter is always difficult and is an act of interpretation as well. But it is different from placing ideas into a model unused by previous thinkers.

That doesn't mean every utterance is some kind of use, but it means that the uses of a sign are open-ended. Whatever 'grammar' describes, it is not a fixed set of rules that must be followed when using a sign; 'language games' illustrate use, but do not exhaust the possibilities of use. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. I read the book as confirming your statement when W says:

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language. — p. 5

I think of that as asking why we are so good at doing it. The different models we come up with to explain it are no match for our ability.

The importance of "family resemblances" is not to deny any purpose to seeking general qualities. For example, the comparisons made between 'rules of chess' and what we are doing allow seeing a similarity and a difference. The objection to the 'occult' explanations is that they are too easy. We use them to make bread and frighten children.

Your link raises some interesting questions and historical comparisons.

There is still a lot of work to be done understanding what Aristotle was intending to say for me to rely too much upon the lexicon used in histories of philosophy.

If you search this topic on Google Scholar, there is a fair sample of the range of opinions of those who read Aristotle closely for the purpose of gleaning his intentions.

If you read the Sallis book, you will find people who closely read Plato that way too.

Maybe the collision of those two endeavors requires its own OP. That is above my pay grade.

I only mentioned the last move before his death. The SEP article I linked to may have the circumstances right or wrong. I was not proposing all of his movements were based upon a singular motive.

You said he could have switched camps regarding testimony of faith if he did not like where he was. The Sweden adventure is neither proof nor disproof of that idea. It does point to a fluid environment where intellectuals who are cool with the Church one day may become kindling the next.

Yes, he seemed to have enjoyed traveling around — frank

He did express pleasure in seeing new places. But the question of feeling compelled to move is the question raised above regarding opinions unpopular with those with power.

Okay. Sallis requires careful reading of Timaeus to be of any value. I suggest starting there.

Before addressing your description of place, I think we have to approach why Plato says it is so difficult to talk about.

Well, Descartes did die working for a Protestant queen of Sweden who converted to Catholicism of a Jesuit variety and then got in trouble opposing the Church upon other issues. How Descartes fits into all of that is not clear. SEP has their version of the story. It does seem clear he did not have an established home to work from.

But "Kristina Wasa" was an intellectual in her own right. The IEP gives a helpful view of her life and circumstances.

Therefore could it be the case the open space into the sky and to the whole universe could be contained in some gigantic matter? — Corvus

That is how some have interpreted the 'nesting' quality of Aristotle's description of 'places within places.' That interpretation, however, runs afoul of Aristotle saying 'place' is not a material or formal limit:

But in truth it is easy enough to see that its place cannot possibly be either the matter or the form of a thing; for neither of these is separable from the thing itself, as its place undoubtedly is. — ibid

It is difficult for us Moderns to approach the idea because we tend to accept the idea of space as infinite extension in the manner of Descartes and Pascal. It may help to look at how the words involved were used before approaching Aristotle and Sallis' objections to his interpretation of Timaeus.

The first meaning given in the Lexicon for χώρα is:

Aeschylus = χῶρος, space or room in which a thing is, defined as partly occupied space, distd. fr. κενόν and τόπος.

As you look down the list of entries, you will find many combinations of τόπος and χώρα used together, one sense of "location" qualifying the other as needed. Here is a sentence in Plato that has all of the three words used by Aristotle in the Physics passage in one place:

ΑΘ. Τί δὲ δή; ναυπηγησίμης ὕλης ὁ τόπος ἡμῖν τῆς χώρας πῶς ἔχει; translated as:
Well, then, how is our district off for timber for ship-building? — Plato, Laws, 705c

ὕλης is just wood, χώρας is district or region, and τόπος means 'status' or 'condition.'

This comparison validates Sallis' criticism of Aristotle's statement but leaves us a long distance to go toward understanding what is meant in the Timaeus or the Physics. The reference to "unwritten teachings" is more than a little maddening.

You stand outside the problems of solipsism when you compare them to other conditions.

Since the topic of Aristotle has come up, I will quote selectively from a post of mine in another thread.

First, there is the passage from Timaeus that is being considered:

Clearly we should now begin again, once we have called upon the god, our saviour, at the very outset of our deliberations to see us safely out of an unusual and unaccustomed exposition, to the doctrine of things probable. In any case, our fresh start concerning the universe should be more elaborate than before, for we distinguished two entities then, but now we must present a third factor. Two were sufficient for our previous descriptions, one designated as a sort of a model discernible by Nous and ever the same, while the second was a copy of the model involved in becoming and visible. We did not distinguish a third entity at the time as we thought it enough to have these two, but now the argument seems to compel us to try to manifest a difficult and obscure form in words. What should we understand its capacity and nature to be? This in particular: it is the receptacle of all coming into being, like its nurse. Now although the truth has been spoken, a clearer statement about it is still required but it is difficult to do so, particularly because it is necessary for the sake of this to raise a preliminary problem about fire and its accompaniments. It is difficult in the case of each of these to state what sort should actually be called water rather than fire, and what sort should be referred to as anything in particular rather than as everything individually, in such a manner as to employ language which is trustworthy and certain. How then, may we speak about them in a likely manner and in what way, and what can we say about them when faced with this problem? — Plato, Timaeus, 48e, translated by Horan

The difficulty described by Timaeus is that the language of correspondence does not serve us as readily as it did in the other two models. The other difficulty is that third entity is prior to the other entities as a fundamental ground of natural being. The new beginning is in that sense a second sailing as taken in the Phaedo (to which Fooloso4 often refers to).

A scholar who takes that perspective seriously is John Sallis. He takes issue with Aristotle's interpretation of Plato's passage:

For, according to Aristotle, this is what Plato declared the receptacle to be: “a substratum [ύποκείμενον] prior to the so-called elements, just as gold is the substratum of works made of gold.” Though in this context Aristotle refers to one other image of the χώρα, that of nurse (τιθήνη), he forgoes drawing on the content of that image and, instead, moves immediately to identify the receptacle with “primary matter” (329a). Yet the passage that is, at once, both most decisive and most puzzling occurs in Book 4 of the Physics: “This is why Plato says in the Timaeus that matter and the χώρα are the same; for the receptive and the χώρα are one and the same. Although the manner in which he speaks about the receptive in the Timaeus differs from that in the so-called unwritten teachings, nevertheless he declares that place [τόπος] and the χώρα are the same” (209b).

One cannot but be struck by the lack of correspondence between this passage and the text of the Timaeus. The passage declares three identifications: that of the receptive (μεταληπτικόν) with the χώρα, that of matter (ύλη) with the χώρα, and that of place (τόπος) with the χώρα. Only the first of these identifications has any basis in the text of the Timaeus, and then only if one disregards any difference that might distinguish μεταληπτικόν from the Platonic words δεχόμενον and ύποδοχή.

For the identification of ύλη with the χώρα, there is no basis in the Timaeus. Plato never uses the word ύλη in Aristotle’s sense, a sense that, one suspects, comes to be constituted and delimited only in and through the work of Aristotle. When Plato does, on a few occasions, use the word, it has the common, everyday sense of building material such as wood, earth, or stone. Following Aristotle’s own strategy in On Generation and Corruption, one could refer to the image of the constantly remodeled gold as providing support for the identification. But reference to this image could be decisive only if one privileged it over most of the others, disregarding, for instance, the image of the nurse, which represents the relation between the χώρα and the sensible in a way quite irreducible to that between matter and the things formed from it. What is perhaps even more decisive is that all these are images of the χώρα, images declared in an είκώς λόγος (likely account}, which is to be distinguished from the bastardly discourse in which one would venture to say the χώρα. — John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus

What makes the passage from Physics even more convoluted is that Aristotle is not actually agreeing with the view he ascribes to Plato regarding whether 'place' belongs to a being as its form and matter do:

We have seen that attributions are made directly, in virtue of their immediate applicability, or mediately, because, though not immediately applicable themselves, they include, involve, or imply something that is immediately applicable. And so, too, a ‘place’ may be assigned to an object either primarily because it is its special and exclusive place, or mediately because it is ‘common’ to it and other things, or is the universal place that includes the proper places of all things.

I mean, for instance, that you, at this moment, are in the universe because you are in the air, which air is in the universe; and in the air because on the earth; and in like manner on the earth because on the special place which ‘contains and circumscribes you, and no other body.

But if what we mean by the ‘place’ of a body is its immediate envelope, then ‘place’ is a limiting determinant, which suggests that it is the specifying or moulding ‘form’ by which the concrete quantum, together with its component matter, is ‘determined.’ For it is just the office of a limit so to determine or mould something. From this point of view, then, we should identify ‘place’ with ‘form.

But if we think of a thing’s place as its ‘dimensionality’ or ‘room-occupancy’ (to be distinguished from the thing itself, as a concrete quantum) we must then regard it as ‘matter’ rather than as ‘form,’ for matter is the factor that is bounded and determined by the form, as a surface, or other limit, moulds and determines; for it is just that which is in itself undetermined, but capable of being determined, that we mean by matter. Thus, if a concrete sphere, e.g., be stripped of its limit, as well as of its other determining characteristics, nothing but its matter is left.

This is why Plato, in the Timaeus, identifies, a ‘matter’ and ‘room,’ because ‘room’ and ‘the receptive-of-determination’ are one and the same thing. His account of the ‘receptive’ differs in the Timaeus and in what are known as his Unwritten Teachings, but he is consistent in asserting the identity of ‘place’ (τόπον) and ‘room.’(χώραν) Thus, whereas everyone asserts the reality of ‘place,’ only Plato has so much as attempted to tell us what it is.

It is no wonder that, when thus regarded,—either as matter or as form, I mean,—‘place’ should seem hard to grasp, especially as matter and form themselves stand at the very apex of speculative thought, and cannot well, either of them, be cognized as existing apart from the other.

But in truth it is easy enough to see that its place cannot possibly be either the matter or the form of a thing; for neither of these is separable from the thing itself, as its place undoubtedly is. For we have already explained that ‘where’ the air was ‘there’, again the water is, when the water and air succeed each other, and so too with any other substance; and therefore its ‘place’ can be neither a factor nor an intrinsic possession of the thing, but is something separable from it. — Aristotle, Physics, 209a, translated by Wicksteed and Cornford

This book lays the groundwork, not to ‘answer’ the confusion, but to ask what that says about us. — Antony Nickles

Where, in that description, is an activity outside of psychology? Wittgenstein was the one who insisted upon an activity beyond that.

A helpful starting point is how Plotinus talked about memory.

But surely, too, the soul must have memory of its own movements, of what it desired, for instance, and of what it did not enjoy and the desired object did not enter the body. For how could the body speak of what did not come into it? Or how will it remember with the help of the body something which the body has been in no condition to know at all? But we must say that some things, all that come through the body, reach as far as the soul, and others belong to the soul alone, if the soul must be something, and a distinct nature, and have a work of its own. If this is so, it will have aspiration, and memory of its aspiration, and of attaining or not attaining it, since its nature is not one of those which are in a state of flux. For if this is not so, we shall not grant it self-awareness or consciousness of its own activities or any sort of power of combination and understanding. — Plotinus, Ennead, translated by Armstrong, IV. 3.1. 26

Free version.

Saying all generalizations are wrong would be another generalization. I don't read that as what is going on.

But I understand why that is a question that persists through a close reading of the work. If the intention is truly the end of perplexity, Deleuze was right in declaring the "Wittgenstenians" as the assassinators of philosophy.

Who are the "Others"? Any verification details on their beliefs of the existence via their direct knowledge? — Corvus

Plotinus spoke of having the experience of being present to the source from which our souls descended. The move is accompanied by a cosmogony where the veil between our lives and the "eternal" is very thin.

Plato did not describe the limits of knowledge that way. Neither did Aristotle.

I think the appeal to the Augustinian exploration of self was done as a safe place as leverage against the
Scholastic schools who dominated the discussion of nature at the time. So, not about skepticism at all.

I guess that the "craving for generality" is a condition that we cannot escape. That is a psychological observation along with whatever it is that Wittgenstein sees as going beyond that.

The question I have is to what degree does the Blue Book discussion of solipsism argue with what the Tractatus says. In the latter, the condition is "manifest" but not "said". In the former, it is a problem that is not necessary after considering other means of expression. Is that another way to point to what cannot be said or is it a change of opinion about the grounds of talking about conditions?