If you think Goodness is a mirage, or else a standard you develop pragmatically, then obviously this has implications for discourse. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That was excellent. Wittgenstein answers the question. The rest of us are too busy embarassed by or ignoring the answer. — ENOAH
Would you be willing to recognize that you are offering me a "tails you lose, heads I win" set of alternatives?
What can either of us be talking about in this context? — Paine
I would not call it 'gatekeeping' but you have often offered an undialectical version of the works.
In many cases, you seem to ride two horses at the same time:
The work intends to establish a thesis and fails at it.
The work does not intend to establish a thesis, so it is mental floss. — Paine
The "mental floss" made me chuckle :smile:.
Indeed I tend to think the first about Tractatus and the second about PI. I think this gets into tricky territory, and adds to the dbaggery here..
People will often say that Witt has to be "elusive" in a way, because he is "showing" and cannot just "say", thus giving him exempt status from explanation.
But other times, I see that he has an actual argument which I then go to refute, but then am gatekept from thus refuting without the special pass of using Wittgenstein to unrefute myself. — schopenhauer1
Have you tried to make a poll on how many here actually understands the writings of Wittgenstein? — L'éléphant
He says very little about the history of philosophy. Some claim he had little knowledge of it. Plato is an interesting exception. — Fooloso4
The work intends to establish a thesis and fails at it.
The work does not intend to establish a thesis, so it is mental floss. — Paine
If you're not into analytics, and find it unimportant in making a view in philosophy, then Wittgenstein's is not the proper philosophy for your purpose. I have not used Wittgenstein in any of my ideas in a long time. I have increasingly sympathized with Aristotle -- back to basics. Back to our origin. It's okay to use ordinary language (here it is Wittgenstein) in explaining the world. — L'éléphant
Heidegger tells a long story about how the concerns of philosophy were corrupted by some elements of its practice. — Paine
That sounds deep, and there is wisdom in it - words really do get in the way of what they are trying to do, sometimes - but I sum up Wittgenstein as saying "Let me explain to you how there is no such thing as an explanation." — Fire Ologist
You can lead a horse to water. No need to beat it to the death if it's not particularly thirsty. — Outlander
What are your main disagreeances or suggestions for alternate interpretation you think could lead to greater understanding or utility of his works in the simplest most direct way and why?
eg. Debater A believes when Wittgenstein claims/makes reference to X it alludes to Y, while I believe X is actually a case against Y in favor of Z... etc, etc. — Outlander
Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein. — Paine
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Second, clearly Nietzsche is the king when it comes to devotees citing his words as Scripture. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Certainly, there is a tendency for hardcore Wittgensteinans to denigrate the value of many areas of philosophy. This stems from the idea that they can't meaningfully be spoken about. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You might find Rorty's typology of Wittgenstein's descendents interesting here. In general, it's going to be the "therapeutic Wittgensteinians," who see a good deal of philosophy as simply time wasting incoherence, which he sort of gets at. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But because of his early work Wittgenstein also attracts people who find a natural home in analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy has its own problems with labeling whole huge swaths of philosophy as "incoherent," and thus not worthy of discussion. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Also, you get the problem of people mistaking complexity for good argument—pointing to the characteristics of formal systems when the question at hand has to do with metaphysics, epistemology, etc. I have attorneys in my family and they do this all the time in political conversations , pointing to what the current law is, special legal terminology, etc., when the issue being discussed is really "what is just in this case" (i.e., what the law ought to be). — Count Timothy von Icarus
This is hardly unique though. Eliminitivists very often seem to confuse presenting an avalanche of facts and the complexity of neuroscience with good argumentation, and this can lead to the tendency to fall into a pernicious habit of equating mastery of complex terminology with sound reasoning or even intelligence (you can see this with Continental philosophy at times too). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Since I find Russell to be particularly uncharitable, I don't mind calling him out as an exemplar of someone who used to point to cutting edge mathematics that few people understood in his day to try to put his arguments over the top by simply making them impossible to understand and then only time and the dispersion of knowledge in these areas has allowed people to point out that some of his appeals to mathematics are simply not very good arguments. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it might be fair to say that a bit of hubris overflows into the audience too. I mean, this is a guy who claimed to have "solved philosophy," and IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime. — Count Timothy von Icarus
War is another name for conflict and there are many kinds of those, have you never seen people fighting — Sir2u
Tariffs is another word for charging, I do that to my boss every month for my services to him. Treaties is just another way of saying agreement, I have an agreement with my neighbor not to call the police again if he keeps the volume of his music down to a reasonable level. All of these are done daily at the individual level. — Sir2u
The only thing that change between state and individual ethics is the size, fist fight 2 or more people - war hundreds. — Sir2u
But what makes something ethical will always be the same, the ethics system that is used in the place were the action is to be judged. In some places you get a telling off, in others you might go to jail for street fighting, in others places you might get whipped. — Sir2u
Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru). — Leontiskos
Are you suggesting that I am 'gatekeeping' that thread? I didn't have much to say about Wittgenstein anyway.
Sorry if it seemed like it. — Shawn
For what its worth, Wittgenstein was a complex philosopher. His methodology was methodological nominalism, and when you apply methodological nominalism towards philosophy as therapy, you get a complex relationship between examples elucidating a way out of the bottle for the fly, which is the whole of the Philosophical Investigations. Compound the fact that the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus was meant as a preface to the Philosophical Investigations, then you might have a lot of questions about what the TLP and then the PI meant. In my opinion, if people started with the blue and brown books, which were presented in a university setting where Wittgenstein taught for a brief while, you might find it easier to understand Wittgenstein. — Shawn
It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. Thoughts? — Leontiskos
That is painting with a broad brush. Are you assigning all who evince interest in the writings as gatekeepers?
For my part, the work is an interesting kind of argument and not a Prolegomena for any future Metaphysics. If I resist that latter conclusion, am I, too, a gatekeeper? — Paine
Let's hear your summary, write something instead of making silly statements. — Sam26
Just write a summary of the Tractatus, maybe I'm wrong. — Sam26
My opinion is that you don't understand the Tractatus, so no, I'm not going to discuss it with you. — Sam26
You can do whatever you want. I'm just saying if you have a better interpretation of his work, explain it, but I'm moving forward. — Sam26
If you have a better understanding of Wittgenstein's Tractatus explain it in a thread. I'm just giving my interpretation of what he said. — Sam26
Given Wittgenstein's logic about what can be said within the limits of the world of facts, anything that goes beyond the world of facts (beyond the propositions of natural science) is metaphysical and outside the limit of what can be said. — Sam26
His statement doesn't violate his logic, i.e., it's not a metaphysical statement. — Sam26
Wittgenstein does make metaphysical statements in the Tractatus, but they're meant to show us the way, i.e., they're not meant to be factual in Wittgenstein's sense. They show the way up the ladder, and once the ladder is traversed it can be discarded. What we're left with after the ladder is discarded is all the propositions that connect with the world of facts. — Sam26
Ok. Thank you. You have put me on track re Noumena.
Is there a "direct reality" for Kant? Does he even get into that? — ENOAH
It seems clear to me that metaphysics is beyond the world of facts, and that metaphysics for Wittgenstein is beyond what can be said. This is the distinction between saying and showing. — Sam26
...although Schop himself used Greek terms some of the time, e.g. (I hope relevantly, I mainly know about Schop in relation to music not metaphysics):
the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia].
— Schopenahuer, vol 1 p.88 — mcdoodle
You're doing what Witt warned against: you're giving in to the desire to see the world from a vantage point you can't have. But there wouldn't be much philosophizing going on if everyone took Witt's point. :razz: — frank
What other actors are there besides individuals? — Tzeentch
You were talking about a different form of ethics that applies to states. For transparency's sake, I don't think such a form of ethics exists, because the state is an abstraction and personifying the state has no basis in reality. It's just a handy tool we use for communicating broad ideas. — Tzeentch
I too necessarily employ the structure difference. I say there is only will, like you, but the second aspect is does not beling tobthe will. The second is Fictional (illusion) because it is projected, and it isn't what anything else is or has ever been. It is truly new and other. But has no enduring structure, just empty signs in motion triggering feeling, action, sky scrapers, nuclear bombs, and this very dialogue. — ENOAH
One thing for sure, it can't be accomplished using the tools of the "illusion" no matter how entangled with the will. Right? — ENOAH
This is a far more serious problem. What resolves it for me, is undoubtedly not Schopenhauerian. A simple answer is best for now. The question may be posed as what makes the projections not just an extension of what is real? The answer is in their structure/nature(?). While the Universe is formed of matter and energy, as are all of the organisms including their brain functions, Mind emerged as something other; it is structured by Representations that now move in accordance with their own laws and mechanics (as opposed to the rest of "us" bound by the laws of nature).
I won't get into the how and wherefore of it. But for me, this epiphenomenom has an affect on our will, our natural selves, to the point of superimposing an "I" upon it. And yet, it is not Real. — ENOAH