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?

So solipsism is part of the human condition? Then how can philosophy free us from it? But then, if solipsism is part of the human condition, what does it mean to say that it is only an illusion of language? — Ludwig V

I don't get the sense that the condition is explained away. The "illusion of language" seems like a complete explanation in a work that questions "general explanations."

If completely general explanations work for establishing human conditions, then Wittgenstein is hoisted by his own petard.

Till next time.

:up:
The effortless grace of it is scary.

Let's replace "time" with anything, say a tree or an idea. It is not the case that "all the facts" are open to us, only those facts which we are of aware of at the given time and (crucially) those facts which we may have no access to. — Manuel

I agree that our access to facts is limited. I don't think "tree" applies in this case because "time" is being compared to other ideas with no body:

But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction. — Blue Book, page 6

I see him saying that we are not concerned with the "causal connections" here, not that they are a category error. We can discuss this if we want, rather, we are choosing not to do so now. — Manuel

I agree with this view of a choice. Separating the activities brings new interest to why "time" came to be conceived as a deity where 'negation' and 'disjunction' are just ideas.

The song has the tension of a nostalgia for a place that does not exist, at least yet. "Blossom fails to bloom."

There is a sense of shame in the negation. "Promise not to stare too long."

The chorus tells how we get by: "Sha La La La La."

There is a connection to the vibe in Kafka's Amerika: An ideal vision stuck living in a cramped cabin.

I am more personally connected the Who will Love Aladdin Sane generation: "Battle cries and champagne, just in time for sunrise."

But that is unambiguously nostalgic because it is not a "model of sustainability", shall we say.

This reminds me of the reaction to Berkeley's "removal" of matter or the entire physical world. A modern case is the outrage caused by "illusionism". I've never been quite sure whether the authors of those ideas deliberately chose a shocking formulation rather than the mundane version. What's that French phrase about upsetting the bourgeoisie? — Ludwig V

Berkeley's version of solipsism is precisely what is discussed in the latter portion of the Blue Book. Wittgenstein's effort differs from Kant who worked to counter the arbitrary quality of causality as presented by Hume. Kant put forth that all of our thinking requires the intuitions of space and time. This places the Cogito of Descartes in a particular "set of facts" that is psychological in nature. Wittgenstein, however, argues that solipsism results from misuse of language:

Now when the solipsist says that only his own experiences are real, it is no use answering him: "Why do you tell us this if you don't believe that we really hear it?" Or anyhow, if we give him this answer, we mustn't believe that we have answered his difficulty. There is no common sense answer to a philosophical problem. One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not by restating the views of common sense. A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who doesn't see what everybody sees; nor on the other hand is his disagreement with common sense that of the scientist disagreeing with the coarse views of the man in the street. That is, his disagreement is not founded on a more subtle knowledge of fact. We therefore have to look round for the source of his puzzlement. And we find that there is puzzlement and mental discomfort, not only when our curiosity about certain facts is not satisfied or when we can't find a law of nature fitting in with all our experience, but also when a notation dissatisfies us--perhaps because of various associations which it calls up. Our ordinary language, which of all possible notations is the one which pervades all our life, holds our mind rigidly in one position, as it were, and in this position sometimes it feels cramped, having a desire for other positions as well. Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does, or one which in a particular case uses more closely similar forms of expression than our ordinary language. Our mental cramp is loosened when we are shown the notations which fulfil these needs. These needs can be of the greatest variety.

Now the man whom we call a solipsist and who says that only his own experiences are real, does not thereby disagree with us about any practical question of fact, he does not say that we are simulating when we complain of pains, he pities us as much as anyone else, and at the same time he wishes to restrict the use of the epithet "real" to what we should call his experiences; and perhaps he doesn't want to call our experiences "experiences" at all (again without disagreeing with us about any question of fact). For he would say that it was inconceivable that experiences other than his own were real. He ought therefore to use a notation in which such a phrase as "A has real toothache" (where A is not he) is meaningless, a notation whose rules exclude this phrase as the rules of chess exclude a pawn's making a knight's move. The solipsist's suggestion comes to using such a phrase as "there is real toothache" instead of "Smith (the solipsist) has toothache". And why shouldn't we grant him this notation? I needn't say that in order to avoid confusion he had in this case better not use the word "real" as opposed to "simulated" at all; which just means that we shall have to provide for the distinction "real"/"simulated" in some other way. 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

This confirms the observation made by Fooloso4:

The temptation is not to treat words as objects, but to assume that there must be some object that corresponds to the word:

"But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us. — Fooloso4

The last two sentences of Blue Book:

Let's not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind makes between a word and a thing, and that this connection contains the whole usage of a word as the seed might be said to contain the tree.

The kernel of our proposition that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature is only, that the word "I" in "I have pains" does not denote a particular body, for we can't substitute for "I" a description of a body. — ibid. page 79

Sha La La La La:

It is important to consider and give a response. I need to take some time to make it more than an emotional reaction. I am presently fixing a hole where the rain gets in.

I hear you, friend of mine.

Women. losing rights by changes in law. The U.S. is suddenly the new Tehran.

If you look back on the comments, there is much litigation of the past but very little hope for a future. He could be making fun of trump or serving him.

That is why he is still around.

Edit to add: Too speculative and ad hominem.

Nice. I resemble that remark.

From here he makes a radical statement that only plays out through the rest of the book. “I can give you no agent who thinks.” (p.6) This seems speculative at this point (and needlessly provocative), and I take it to mean so far that if there is no casual scientific mechanism, then it is the (“external”) judgment of thought that matters, not its agent (though this belies responsibility). — Antony Nickles

I think the key point is that giving to us an 'agent who thinks' is standing on the outside trying to look in:

We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. — Blue Book, page 6

Science does try to uncover what is hidden but Wittgenstein sees his enterprise differently. The problem of describing the agent while being that agent is prominent in the Tractatus:

The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?
You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye.
And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. — Tractatus, 5.633

In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein abandons the explanatory éclat of Tractatus but there is a bridge between the two. He goes from saying this:

There is no a priori order of things.
Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.
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. — Tractatus, 5.64

to talking about the "craving for generality" The fifth example he gives is:

Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization.
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive'. (Think of such questions as "Are there sense data?" and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?) — Blue Book, page 18

This is all in aid of my saying Wittgenstein is inverting the perspective of Kant and Hume in how he talks about what is immediately given as 'internal' versus 'external'. Their versions of solipsism do not lead to sentences like: "The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it."

What I liked about Selzer is that she refused to speculate how her method would work in other States. Her groove was "try it and see what you find."

Quite nerve racking honestly... — Manuel

It reminds me of that time in High School when I was an unwarned participant of a game of chicken on a street out West as a passenger in a rusty Impala...

He then flat out claims that what gives life to a sign is not us, but a system of signs. — Antony Nickles

People using signs are alive. They give life to the signs through their use. Wittgenstein recognizes that a process must be happening organically that makes thinking, speaking, and listening possible but sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that:

We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this aspect of the mind does not interest us. The problems which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of their solution is that of natural science.

Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. And when we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction — Blue Book, page 6

That is a bold statement that separates his interests from the skepticism of Hume considered by Kant. Perhaps those different agendas cannot be completely separated as Wittgenstein put forth. It would be a mistake, however, to ignore his efforts to do just that.

So, a guy asks you to imagine having sex with a porn star. But he becomes appalled that you thought he was thinking of ejaculating upon her.

But wait!

He meant to say that the porn star would not be so saucy if she had gone to Vietnam.

It is odd that the Trump campaign went to New Mexico. They have many ethnic divides but nothing a flyby gringo could capitalize upon. The place is nothing like Arizona or Texas.

And there is the gnashing of their teeth and the lamentations of their women to hope for.

A thread of humiliation weaves the bromance into a single hair shirt.

The support for Trump extends far beyond the man himself—it's that people want to see a peevish, arrogant, and nakedly contemptuous pseudo-aristocracy punished for its abuses, and re-electing the Orange Man is clearly THE most effective way to do it. — Chisholm

That's the Bannon message in a nutshell. The joke will be on those people when their fortunes decline further through the expansion of monied interests at their expense. I wonder if the pain inflicted upon some of their neighbors will be a sufficient return on their investment.

The Libertarians of past generations have given way to billionaires swapping spit with a group who promises authoritative solutions to political problems. As Carlson said at a recent rally, Daddy is coming home to spank the bad little girl.

Just wanted to acknowledge the congressional element of your observation. A group who has voted reliably is suddenly in play.

The Tiki torch crowd will shake their burning sticks no matter what is said. The thing about saying this in NYC is the long history of the people from Puerta Rico in the city. What I have learned from working with many of them is that they are closely networked with their relatives here in the States and back on the Island. I also learned that many are conservative in their views. Here is a guy who puts those elements into focus:

Agreed. There is a strong conservative interest in those groups who vote for their perceived interests even if it aligns them with people they otherwise do not like. They can tear down a tent as quickly make one.

Having one of the speakers of the MSG rally held last night joke that Puerto Rico is garbage is going to piss off people on both sides of the political divide. The campaign seems to have forgotten where the hell they were.

I don't want to make light of the peril of another Trump administration. I am only saying that the most dangerous parts go well beyond a particular person and their intentions.

I take a less apocalyptic view. I survived Covid when Trump was talking about quack cures and the power of bleach. One has to only listen to him speak for ten minutes now to learn that he is less than the ignorant person he was back then.

So, it would really suck if he were elected. It is the people around him who would use that for their advantage that is the more present danger. He is the El Cid riding the horse into battle after passing away.