This discussion was merged into How to define the notion of Goodness?

I think it's a good account for a static library of terms, but I don't think it gets at novelty very much. All words come from somewhere, and the component criteria of relevance that go into their meaning probably also fall out as patterns of use. In this regard, the standards that subtend the words are probably also in flux like the words, but are relatively stable compared to them.

Once you can take the standards for granted, I think the account in the OP makes a lot of sense, but in that regard (as stated) it's quite ahistorical. — fdrake

Yeah that's fair. I tried to give myself some wiggle room here by speaking of such variables as modular, but it's true that one could go alot further here. One thing that comes to mind here is that tracking the variations of such changes (of 'dimensions') through time might correspond to the practice of conceptual genealogy, in the sense practised by Nietzsche and Foucault.

Though I can imagine a fitting response which uses the 'counts as' the other way, so that an exemplar of a 3 variable word can change the standards it embodies through the use of the word, but the overall weight of the original standard tends to damp innovation; all word use of that type carries with it the standard as a norm of use; sort of like writing in English reinforces the shape of letters and the syntax more than the specific words used to phrase things. So you can exploit the reciprocity in reverse while attending to the different rates of change (standard with respect to word change((misuse/creativity)) is low, word with respect to standard change ((new domains of application, strong analogies, technical use...)) is high). — fdrake

Yeah, they'd be something of a two-way street here, although why a certain innovation may 'take', and why another won't (or can't), would be for, again, reasons to be divined by an appropriate genealogy. I guess one of the nice things a 'meaning variable' approach can do is to bring out in stark relief how such innovations can, at least in principle occur - when we add, or remove, alter, any such variable; when we change what it is to count as that kind of thing, alter the relevant thing(s) to take into account. Here is where I think creativity also comes into play: the ability to discern the available paths of projection, and then to take those steps.

To be fair, if your Inuit says "delicious" while throwing up, you will object along the same lines as when he calls "blue" what we call "green". So you can treat (1) and (2) merely as sorting different domains (psychological responses to foods vs foods, respectively) in much the same way, which is good old classification. — bongo fury

This is true, and it reinforces what I was getting at re: variables of meaning. In the case of the Inuit who throws up or scrunches up his face while calling the food delicious, we know that those reactions are relevant to his use of the word in a way they are not when it comes to the word 'green'. On this basis, and with the mastery of langauge that we have, we would question whether he knew what the word meant.

On the other hand, the Inuit who throws up at the mention of the word Green likely doesn't have an issue with the meaning of the word green, but some kind of pathology.

Also, why any need to distinguish type (3), as though classifications of colour, psychological responses and anything else aren't all subject to social agreement, dispute and negotiation? — bongo fury

I'll quote Pitkin on this who puts it most clearly: "If a speaker considers a situation just, he must in principle be prepared to show us how it is just, what is just about it. We have no corresponding expectation about "delicious" or "green". Unlike "delicious", justice is not just a matter of cultural habit or personal taste, but implies standards of justification. Unlike "green", it allows for a kind of disagreement that is neither merely verbal (different definitions), nor merely factual (different perceptions). Though some of our quarrels about justice may result from disagreements about what the word means, and some from disagreements about the facts of a situation, many concern differences in our standards of what is just".

Yeah, the point I was making (via Pitkin) is different from Cavell's, but different by way of what I understand as an elaboration and extention of what he says. Cavell's general point is that yes, language and world are always elaborated together, and that we bring the world to our words (or vice versa). What I take Pitkin to add is that words and world are themselves plurivocal, and that exactly which bits of the world, and how it is that our words come to bear on it are essential to pay attention to. This is what I take from her idea of 'axes' or dimentions of meaning, which can be comprised of other words, bits of the world, standards of justification, or whatnot. This allows one to bring out, in a way not possible with Cavell's general point, the idea of differing kinds of words (although of course Cavell goes into this sort of thing elsewhere and at length).

Another way to think about the 'puzzle': why it is that in some circumstances, we say: 'oh, that's just what she calls it, don't mind her', and in others 'No, you are wrong to call it that'; and in yet others, "I don't think you know what that word means'?; in others still: "that's not what it is".

Appendix: The White Knight's discussion of Haddocks' Eyes, from Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass:

“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “Let me sing you a song to comfort you.”

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

“It's long,” said the Knight, “but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it - either it brings the tears to their eyes, or else -”

“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks' Eyes.’”

“Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don't understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That's what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That's what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways And Means’: but that's only what it's called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On A Gate’: and the tune's my own invention.” — Through The Looking Glass

Now look whose being humourless :rage:

What specifically puts a smile on your face when reading him ? — Amity

He's funny! He makes fun of everyone and everything, and does it with gusto. He wields sarcasm like a rapier, and it's just deliciously clever humor.

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers who really does put a smile on my face while reading him. His writing glows with wit. Kierkegaard can be pretty funny too. That said, philosophers have had alot to say about humor! A reading list:

Henri Bergson - Laughter
Alenka Zupancic - The Odd One In
Simon Critchley - On Humor
Terry Eagleton - Humor
Yves Cusset - Laughter: Tractatus Philo-Comicus
The work of Georges Bataille in general.

This discussion was merged into If Post Modernism was correct

No no, the other way around. 'Information transfer' is one way we do things with words.

Surely the former is a subset of the latter.

This discussion was merged into What is the Purpose of Your Existence?

I'll be away with reduced access to internet over the next week. Will hopefully catch-up when I'm back. Keep up the good stuff!

Hanna Pitkin - Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstwin for Social and Political Thought

Oops. One more Witty related thing.

The two sides changed roles: During the Middle Ages Man was the object of God the Almighty, then Man discovered his power and became the subject whereas God was more and more the object of human conception and action ? — Matias

This is a bit obscure to me. It's not clear that the subject-object distinction fits here (more appropriate seems to me to be something like principal-agent), nor its role in characterising modernity.

So, for any given case, you can't tell whether he's 'just skipped it' or he's skipped it due to one of the systematic patterns. — fdrake

Ah, this is super useful. I was thinking - and Wittgenstein's phrasing encourages this - of two different mistakes, one which might be called systemic and one random; but thinking of the 'same' mistakes as being indiscernible between the one and the other helps make sense of the passage alot.

"The advent of modernity brought with it a transformed conception of God, a distinctively ‘modern’ theism. When God is understood to be an object of thought, then God is created in the image of humanity. God comes to be conceived in human terms, his transcendence is domesticated and, in some instances at least, God increasingly takes on the characteristics of a ‘big person’. In effect, God becomes a projection of the human subject. — Matias

Hmm, this genealogy seems off to me. Gods were always conceived of as human-like (see the Greek and Roman Gods), only with powers and long lives and whathave you (the occasional extra arms or animal visage too). I always understood the 'inhumanization' of God to take place precisely with the advent of the religions of the Book, which made God either so inhuman as to be accessed only in mystical ecstasy (negative theology), or else by way of analogy (Aquinas) where God (singular) was at best analogous to man (always man), without being univocal with him.

The main thing I'd emphasise throughout all the things mentioned is a changed relationship with time, in which the human relationship with time gets put into question in a way which it never was before. Or, as one of my favourite ways of characterising modernity has it: to be modern is to be able to speak about the modern.

Also, while it's a common story that it was the eschatological religions that helped linearize time, there's some interesting historical work showing that religious time arose as a reaction to the already linearized time of the Selecuids, for whom time was a line without any redemption at the end of it: that eschatological time was meant to humanize time again in the face of it's inhuman march, make it manageable and comprehendible:

"The theological and political roots of ‘apocalyptic eschatology’, as this end-times literature is known, are complex and multiple. An entire subfield of Second Temple and early Christian scholarship is devoted to this problem of emergence. But the Seleucid Era has played no role in existing research within either classical ancient history or biblical studies. I suggest that the ubiquitous visibility and bureaucratic institutionalisation of an irreversible, interminable and transcendent time system provoked, as a kind of reaction-formation, fantasies of finitude among those who wished to resist the Seleucid empire. The only way to arrest the open-futurity and endlessness of Seleucid imperial time was to bring time itself to a close." (source)

Religions unsurprisingly here playing the role of reacting against modernity, or of turning it against itself for its own ends.

§143

§143 begins the section on learning and understanding. For a great deal of what is to come, Witty's overarching question is something like: how does, or how can, someone ‘continue on’ after being shown only a few limited examples? A useful distinction to keep in mind is that between what Witty considers learning proper, and what we might call rote learning. Learning by rote simply is a kind of mere learning by imitation, as it were, following the letter of what has been shown; for Witty, genuine learning must go beyond this: to have properly learnt something is to be able to go on in new ways, to encounter something never yet encountered yet still know what to do with it.

Unsurprisingly then, §143 sets the scene for the questions to come: having written down a series from 0 to 9, how does a pupil go on? How do we, or ought we, characterise deviancies and conformities? In fact, Witty takes a step back and considers the mere effort of copying - what happens when a pupil can’t even do that? Witty here speaks of the point at which ‘communication stops’, and at which ‘our pupil’s ability to learn comes to an end’. My feeling here is that Witty is here drawing on his notion of ‘explanations com[ing] to an end somewhere’ (§1), such that were even the mere act of copying too hard to follow, more than teaching is at stake here (I’m tempted to say: the student does not share our form-of-life - maybe our student isn’t even quite human? A lion?).

The line about there not being a clear-cut diction between a random and systemic mistake had me puzzled, but this reading from Oskari Kuusela helped: “The distinction between not following a rule (making frequent random mistakes as opposed to merely occasional mistakes) and following a variant rule (making a systematic mistakes) is not sharp. Thus, while we may readily say of a pupil who makes constant random mistakes that she is not following a rule, the verdict is less straightforward in the case of a systemic mistake”.

A picture (either mental or material) is essentially "lifeless" and does not force or contain its own application or meaning. — Luke

A lot rides on this and I think there may be a genuine question of how to understand this. One part of me wants to agree that a picture doesn't contain its own application - this is after all the thrust of the current sections. But on the other hand, I also want to say that in all instances of what Witty would call 'everyday use', a picture, by virtue of it always being used in some manner or another (read: applied in some manner or another), is always-already a 'living' one, and that 'lifelessness' is always a derivative phenomenon, which happens when words are taken out of their everyday use. In other words, picture and application 'come apart' only in instances of breakdown; in 'normal' cases, there is no separation. A single phenomenon breaks into two, and not - two phenomena are brought together in this case or that case (this would be a case of 'fitting', which is exactly what Witty is arguing against).

There's definitely something to the author's conception of modernity, but the story told in the quotes is only the half of it, as I understand it. Progress for the sake of heightened mastery over the world is definitely one of the hallmarks of modernity, but that in turn cannot be understood without the motivation that drove it, which was a profound anxiety and distress over where humans ultimately stood in the order of things, and especially the temporal order of things.

If, in pre-modernity, time was governed by stable cycles and repetition (of monarchic succession, of seasonal change, of flooding rivers), modernity changed the shape of time from a circle to an arrow - a past back there, a present now, a future, way out that way (the eschatological religions helped alot to bring this change about). The future no longer guaranteed by the cycles to which it had always been tethered, it is humans who become responsible for time: it is only what they do that determines the success of failure of what happens next. And this is as liberatory and it is terrifying. So to your author's focus on progress, I would add and supplement Stanley Cavell's focus on existence itself becoming problematic:

"The modern [is] ... a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; the time in which music and painting and poetry (like nations) have to define themselves against their pasts; the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. The modernist difficulty... is the difficulty of making one’s present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one’s mind, such as it is". (Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say)

All this is to say that the flip-side of mastery is a deep worry about non-mastery, of being swallowed up by an inexorable march of forward-facing time that threatens at every point to render any achievement meaningless (lost to time). Consider some famous modernist figures: Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Mondrian, Dickinson, Rimbaud - these are authors and artists whose works are filled with a kind of frazzled disorientation, and rather than reflect any triumphalism over the world, express a deep unease with it. So progress and mastery, yes. But also (and underlying the need for progress) - deep and yawning anxiety. Or to quote Shoshana Felman: "Modernity inheres in its own problematic status. The energy
that destabilizes it is the energy of a relentless, never-ending question" ("You Were Right To Leave, Arthur Rimbaud: Poetry and Modernity" - my favourite essay on this subject).

Lol Kant never said the senses are 'imprecise'; whole thread is invalid.

§142, Boxed Note

Forgot about this one. Anyway, recalling that §142 remarks that language-games only work if certain constants or invariants are in place, the boxed note here can be read as qualifying the scope of these invariants, which are "often extremely general facts of nature ... hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality". Witty doesn't give any specific examples of such facts, but some of the things mentioned in §142 proper hint at what he's getting at:

"And if things were quite different from what they actually are —– if there were, for instance, no characteristic expression of pain, of fear, of joy .... our normal language-games would thereby lose their point ... The procedure of putting a lump of cheese on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its point if it frequently happened that such lumps suddenly grew or shrank with no obvious cause."

So: we measure things; we express emotions and affects - 'general facts', too obvious to mention most of the time. To anticipate a little, Witty will largely go on to imply that these 'general facts' have to do with our being human. §142 mentions that "This remark will become clearer when we discuss such things as the relation of expression to feeling, and similar topics."; Licensed by this, I just wanna quote a pair of characteristic remarks on this from way further down:

§281: "Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious".

§415: "What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; not curiosities, however, but facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes."

I think it's useful to keep these remarks (and others like it, scattered throughout the PI later) in mind as we read this.

Interesting discussion. Andrew Inkpin has written some nice stuff on how to understand rede - which he perspicaciously translates as 'articulacy' rather than 'discourse' - that helps make sense of its relation to both the linguistic and non-linguistic:

"The close connection between Articulacy and Language ... is such that the full range of functions Heidegger attributes to Articulacy can be realized in language use but not in intelligent nonlinguistic behaviors, so that the former but not the latter provides an adequate model for defining Articulacy. ... Language serves as a model for the various functions of Articulacy, defining a field of possibilities for Articulate activity, some—but not all—of which can also be realized in intelligent nonlinguistic behaviors.

In this light, the relation of intelligent nonlinguistic behaviors to the notion of Articulacy modeled on language use is like that of inauthentic to authentic Dasein: the former is in both cases a limited realization—albeit an indispensable, foundational one—of the available possibilities. There is also no problem in explaining Heidegger’s emphasis on intelligent nonlinguistic behaviors. He does this not because he wants to suggest it is more properly human to wield hammers than to wield propositions, but because focusing on purposive understanding serves as a corrective to traditional misrepresentations of the human-world relation" (Inkpin, Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language).

I remember being annoyed, a long time ago, about Run DMC t-shirts being something of a fad among hipsters who, as far as I could tell, had never listened to a Run DMC track in their life, and were wearing the t-shirts 'cause they simply were the in thing. I'd probably not care so much today, but I think any fan of Run could probably relate. Cultural appropriation is like that, only, the guy wearing the t-shirt probably also had relatives who said that Run would never make it big, and then he wore the t-shirt anyway.

And with the above, we're at the start of (what I think is) another new section! If I may recap, here's my idiosyncratic breakdown of what's been covered so far (bold for where we're going next):

§1-§27: Imperatives (block! slab!)
§28-§36: Demonstratives (this, that)
§37-§45: Names (Nothung, Mr. N.N.)
§46-§64: Linguistic Roles (Simples, Composites, and Iterations thereof)
§65-§80: Definitions and Boundaries
§81-88(?): Idealizations of/in Language
§88-133: Philosophy and Explanation (Or, Theses and Descriptions)
§134-142: Use: Belonging and Fitting
§143-§198: Understanding, Reading, and Learning (groundwork for rule-following discussions)

The 'little' section we just went over acts as something like a 'bridge' between Witty's discussion of philosophy and the subsequent discussion of understanding, etc. The 'bridge' can be said to span questions regarding being 'captured by a picture' (from the previous section), and introduces questions of how 'application' occurs. The next section (another long one) takes off from the question of application. I quite like what's coming up, and it's very useful - IMO - to read it as also laying down the groundwork for what comes after it - the famous discussions on rule-following. As we read through the next bit, it might be useful to keep that in mind, even as 'rules' will not come up all that often.

§142

This one's quite straight-forward, so I want to try and maybe couch it in different terms: language-game require certain things to stay constant. Speaking in terms of a meter-rule only make sense if what counts as a meter stays roughly constant through our uses; similarly, it only makes sense if the things we do with the meter-rule stay the same - one can't speak of 'measuring' while using the rule to both measure and to hit something. 'Measuring' would 'lose it's point'.

It'd be like trying to do math when the values and operators fluctuate constantly, with pluses replacing minuses, and powers appearing and disappearing at will. One would be unable to use the equations for anything. It wouldn't even be math.

§141

I mentioned above that what is being said here of pictures also applies to rules. This section in particular brings that similarity out, especially when placed side-by-side with §86. To recap, §86 was about how to read charts, how rules related to the reading of charts. There, Witty produced what he called a 'schema' - a literal picture of arrows - that counted as a rule for the use of the chart. At the end of it, he goes on to ask, rhetorically: "Can we not now imagine further rules to explain this one?" - the implication being that how one applies rules is not to be found in rules themselves.

Bringing this back to §141, a similar argumentative strategy is at work here, with Witty even reusing the vocabulary of 'schemas'. Speaking here of a "schema showing the method of projection [for a picture]", Witty effectively asks whether this schema is enough to guarantee that a picture is applied in any particular way. And just as in §86, Witty's answer is no: one can well "imagine different applications of this schema".

Once again though, Witty looks to 'test' his account to check if there is, in fact, a two-stage process at work, which he ultimately wants to deny. As he puts it, it looks as though there were first the picture, then its application ("On the one hand, the picture ... on the other, the application which ... he makes of this image"). And moreover, it looks like the picture and the application can 'clash'. Doesn't this attest to a 'fit' and not a 'belonging' (to use the vocabulary of §136)? Witty's answer is no: what 'clashes' is a picture and one application of it, with a picture and another application of it: "they can clash in so far as the picture makes us expect a different use; because people in general apply this picture like this."

Finally, though I won't elaborate on it too much, one ought to also hear resonances with Witty's discussion of the meter rule here. Just as the meter rule plays (or does not play) a role in a language-game, so too does the application of a picture play - or not - a role in a language-game. More to be said, but I leave it to one to consider the connections.

§139, Boxed Note, (a)

This note brings out the stakes of §139 quite nicely I think, and I want to try and consider both together. What seems to be at issue is the idea that 'before' use, there are meanings (of words), and the point is to try and find a use that fits the meaning we have in mind. Hence the idea of trying to pick an 'apt word', a word that would 'fit' the idea that we had in mind. But Witty argues that this gets things exactly the wrong way around; it's not that first we have an idea of what we want to mean, and then we find a word that fits it; rather, it's because certain words are more apt than others, do we get an idea of what we want to say: "the fact that one speaks of the apt word does not show the existence of a Something that . . . One is inclined, rather, to speak of this picture-like Something because one can find a word apt".

This reads nicely with Witty's setting up of the 'two-stages' of meaning in §139, only to then subsequently undo it. Note that he speaks, in §139, of multiple (two) ways of determining meaning: "On the other hand, isn’t the meaning of the word also determined by this use? And can these ways of determining meaning conflict?" (my emphasis). In this light, §139 is an attempt to show that there is no two-stage process, but only the one. To conjure up a 'picture of a cube' is to already have an application of it in mind. It may not be the only application there is ("it was also possible for me to use it differently"), but this doesn't imply that there are two stages from meaning to application. Rather, the application is always-already inherent to the meaning.

This was nice:

"The picture, don't forget, is not being cast as an aid to understanding; it is supposed to be the thing itself. But it's hard to see how it can play that role when it provides no standard of correctness. If this observation seems familiar, that's because it is closely analogous to the point made about ostensive definition in relation to meaning. There, it was supposed that the sample by itself could establish a link between word and object, that it was completely unambiguous and therefore unmistakable. But it turned out that it only functioned as part of an established practice of describing the rule for the use of a word. And it's a very similar story in the case of the picture (which is, after all, a kind of mental sample). We have the sample, but what we lack is the application. (I should also mention that as well as looking back to ostensive definition this point also anticipates aspects of the discussion of rule-following."

I briefly noted the link between Witty's discussion of ostenstive definition and pictures, but it's true that the discussion applies to rules as well. In all three cases - rules, pictures, and ostensive definition - the point is the same: nothing 'in' the rules, or the pictures, or the ostensive gesture, tells us how to apply them. To anticipate a semi-technical term that Witty uses later, what does tell us how to apply these things is a technique, or rather, a mastery of a technique, which is informed by our forms-of-life. Incidentally, this is brought out in the second part of the boxed note in §139 (b.), where Witty speaks of the Martain looking at the picture of the old man on the hill. Whether the man is going up or down - this is not 'given' by the picture. What the man is doing, what the picture represents, is 'given' only by how we engage with it.

Actually, reading a bit closer and prompted by @Luke's quote, I want to make an amendment to what I wrote above. I think I was wrong to speak of pictures in the multiple. What's at stake is not 'one picture as opposed to a different picture', but different ways to understand the application of a picture. This lines up better with: "there are other processes, besides the one we originally thought of, which we should sometimes be prepared to call “applying the picture of a cube”." In this light, to be held 'captive by a picture' is a shorthand for being captive by one way of applying a picture, and to not recognize the multiplicity of applications of a picture. The application of a picture, in this sense, is differential. Much like, it's worth noting, ostensive definitions, the discussion of which opens the PI, and which are also marked as essentially differential.

§139, §140

I want to suggest that these sections are an elaboration of §115, in which Witty spoke of being held 'captive by a picture': "And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably". §139 and §140 suggest the alternative to this 'capture': not, as it were, getting 'beyond' pictures, but recognizing that there are always other pictures which correspond to the use we make of words. Hence the conclusion to §140:

"There are other processes, besides the one we originally thought of, which we should sometimes be prepared to call “applying the picture of a cube”. So our ‘belief that the picture forced a particular application upon us’ consisted in the fact that only the one case and no other occurred to us. “There is another solution as well” means: there is something else that I’m also prepared to call a “solution”, to which I’m prepared to apply such-and-such a picture, such-and-such an analogy, and so on."

It is important to note here that this insight comes right after Witty's extended discussion of comparing langauge-games, of putting them side-by-side to bring out the specificity of each one. (Recall §130: "Rather, the language-games stand there as objects of comparison which, through similarities and dissimilarities, are meant to throw light on features of our language"). It is this method of comparison, recommended by Witty, that allows one to break the 'capture' of a single picture, and recognise the multitude of possible 'pictures' that correspond to various uses.

Working backwards a bit, the discussion in §139 is meant to bring out that there are no meanings 'before' uses which uses then somehow simply modify or alter (another way to say that meaning is use, they are identified with each other). It's not that there is a meaning of a word, which then subsequently fits (or not) its use. There is only use, and the meaning which issues from that use. All of this also further accounts for the various ways in which we are 'mislead by grammar'; skipping forward again to §140: "What is essential now is to see that the same thing may be in our minds when we hear the word and yet the application still be different" - just because we hear the same word doesn't mean that its application is the same. When we miss this, we are led into linguistic malaise.

Agnes Callard made a really nice case recently about how progress in philosophy consists of 'raising the costs' of asserting anything, which I quite like. In her own words;

"[The contemporary philosopher] has better interlocutors to think with than people did 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago: later philosophers always have the advantage. The more we respond to one another, the better materials we hand down to our descendants for thinking with. For example, nowadays if you want to go ahead and assert, in a philosophical context, that there aren’t any true contradictions or that what didn’t but could’ve happened is unreal, or that you are sometimes morally responsible for some of the things you do, there are philosophers who have made it hard for you to do that. Graham Priest and David Lewis and Galen Strawson have, respectively, raised the cost of saying what you’re reflexively inclined to say. They’ve made you work for it—made you think for it.

Priest, Lewis and Strawson offer the person who is willing to do this work a decrease in the entropy in their original claim, which now has to be more specific and determinate. What one had before encountering them was, one now sees, nothing more than a way of vaguely gesturing at the idea in question. Engaging with them introduces order into one’s thinking as to what exactly is meant by claiming, e.g. that one is morally responsible. If someone is willing to do the work, she can have thoughts about these common sense, intuitive claims that are better than anyone could’ve had 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago".

This doesn't necessarily exhaust what constitutes 'progress' in philosophy, but it's a very nice start I think. For myself I definitely think there are what might be considered 'milestones' in philosophy, without which we would be set back disastrously. My list is perhaps idiosyncratic, but the cleave between pre-Kant and post-Kant would mark one hopefully not too controversial step.

That's the thing, is there a little free man along with the brain, or is there only a brain enslaved to laws? It's a matter of belief. — leo

My point is that this is a dumb dichotomy. Say there was a 'little free man'. What accounts for 'his' freedom? Another little free man? And so on ad infinitum? As if 'brains' were free or not free. Meaningless claptrap.

The locus of freedom is not to be found centripetally, at some fine, singular point in the brain; it is to be found centrifugally, in the way in which one engages with the world and is so engaged by it in turn. The idea that freedom is a mental issue is philosophically damaging beyond all redemption.

Anyway, I'll say nothing further. No one here knows how to talk about feedom with any coherency. I came to register a grumble is all.

G. E. M. Anscombe - Intention

Maybe the last of my Wittgenstein adjacent books for a while, depending.

I quite like Giorgio Agamben's approach to the etymology of religion, of which he writes in relation to the profane:

"The term religio does not derive, as an insipid and incorrect etymology would have it, from religare (that which binds and unites the human and the divine). It comes instead from relegere, which indicates the stance of scrupulousness and attention that must be adopted in relations with the gods, the uneasy hesitation (the “rereading (rileggere)") before forms — and formulae — that must be observed in order to respect the separation between the sacred and the profane. Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but “negligence," that is, a behavior that is free and “distracted” (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use". (Agamben, In Praise of Profanation).

"Mind controls body": what a strange phrase, as if 'mind' were a little man in the head with a bunch of control levers pushing the body about.

But the mind is a tool in the body's arsenal for controlling - itself. Not minds but bodies are the bearers of freedom, freedoms to act and freedoms to do, both limited and enabled by circumstance. Forget 'will'. 'Will' is a bunch of Christian bullshit.

Alot of two-bit philosophy of science would be cleared up were people to call 'observation' in science by its proper name, measurement. That a convenience of grammar is elevated to a proposition of metaphysics is an indictment on the stupidity of a great deal of humanity.

Good luck getting that through to a skull thickened by years of woo mongering about this rather elementary point.