I think Bertrand Russell provided a good solution for any problem caused by this concept in his famous essay, "On Denoting ". It's available online and you should read it.

The main problem was making a reference to an object that doesn't exist, how to make sense of it.

Not a skill but being good looking is one of the most useful thing in life.

Beauty will save the world

If everyone of us were as beautiful as Delon, would we be philosophizing or enjoying our finite life instead

Yeah, I agree to a certain extent. I still think religion has outlived its usefulness, and that viewing it as a collection of stories/metaphors/sources of existential assurance is the minority view, but still better than telling young children that they are bound for hell.

You should read Kierkegaard. I think you won't find him narrow minded. He was against crowd mentality first of all. According to Kierkegaard, truth is subjectivity. Scientific facts are important and without a doubt, improve our material life but they are not capable of giving us a meaning in life. I will go through his philosophy briefly, Kierkegaard laid out 3 stages of life, the preceding stage is found in the subsequent stage , except in a refined form. You have the aesthetic, moral and religious stage of existence. The first one is characterized by individual self centered pursuit of pleasure/comfort, the second stage forces a person to live up to some ethical ideal/serve the people around him selflessly. The final stage is essential and the most difficult, it is the religious stage. Here you take a leap of faith, you believe in something that you can't possibly justify. It's for that reason alone called belief. You discover your meaning in life by resigning to the paradox of faith. Those who justify faith on reason are deceiving themselves and others. Preaching is counterproductive in this age and not useful really. People should be left to make up their own mind. Btw, Wittgenstein admired Kierkegaard and was in awe of his deep faith. Perhaps, he got the mystical texture in Tractatus from Kierkegaard.


You can check this out ( pdf available )
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief by Wittgenstein.
The religious section has 19 pages only. It's a quick read

Did Wittgenstein actually talk about religion? Or are you just applying what he had to say? Did some research and you seem to just be applying Wittgenstein's theories about patterns of intentions.

He did talk about religion and religious language. He gave a lecture or more on it. He didn't talk a lot about it but it exists out there. I am only reiterating what l understood from reading his work. Btw, his work isn't easy to interpret and there is always a room for disagreement. I am not talking about intentions really, it's a feature of religious language game. The primary purpose is moral/existential assurance from a divine being. You can sort of infer the intention/tacit agreement among religious people as a necessary condition.

I'm saying that if you strip the language of its representativeness, its claim on reality, then you also deny revelation's explicitness; the commands, ethical viewpoints, etc. have no special weight; they are neither dependent upon a creator or commanded by a creator. Normatively it just isn't the same. This comes into conflict with the overwhelming majority of people's ideas of religion, something you seem to agree with.

Yes, it's hard to see why people fought wars over religion in that case , it can't be over some vacuous concepts being used as substitutes/metaphor for normative claims. However, l think Wittgenstein was trying to make a more subtle point. In order to understand religious language game, you need to consider the socio-psychological play at hand. It has got to do with psychology. The normative claims won't have the same force to them if you remove the existence of God from religious text but the faith in God according to Wittgenstein primarily serves as source of hope/salvation/peace/courage/command, it isn't a representation of reality but only used as such for its effectiveness. The religious people tacitly/subconsciously agree to that. Otherwise, you would need to explain how people seem to understand a paradoxical langauge. I don't agree with Wittgenstein still.

You can include Christians but l don't want to get in the dispute around Trinity. Christian theology isn't really monotheistic and the idea of a transcendental God is somehow lost.

But even though the word "create" is incoherent in that context, bringing into play the fact that he/she exists outside of time makes sense of it; it seems to me that god's atemporal actions can be understood as a function of his/her attributes, namely being outside time and space - in this example. Whether or not it is possible for things to exist outside time and space is open ended I think; I am agnostic with respect to such a possibility.

That doesn't really resolve the issue at hand. We don't understand such functions or attributes of God anymore than the word "create" in "God created the world". I am not interested in the physical possibility but our understanding of such a possibility ( how we use religious language to describe it) .

I think that people assign plenty of human attributes to god, such as a loving nature. And yes, omnibenevolence, for example, is unlike anything we possess, but it can still be understood and defined.

I think it would be a misunderstanding to confuse our kind of love with God's love. The origin of both love is different, the "medium" if that makes sense is different. The intention behind it is of a different category. Some attributes are very difficult to reconcile in our minds. God has absolute total knowledge and also the greatest freedom possible for a being, two opposites attributes apparently. This may sound like a theological conflict but it isn't really. We find the problems with OUR descriptions of God but that doesn't imply a paradoxical nature of God. Perhaps our language is not capable of understanding God, we fail to describe him cause our language belongs to the realm of material beings existing in spacetime.

If you rob religious language of its explicit, representational meanings religion is no longer religion in the commonly understood sense; it becomes less about a set of norms established by a divine creator and more about preserving a collection of backwards values by packing them into a loosely defined, metaphorical structuration.

I think you misunderstood what l meant by representational view. Wittgenstein thinks we should not see religious language as a reflection of reality (the world out there ) and for him it is perfectly okay to view religion as a collection of commands,hope, ethical viewpoints etc. You can strip away the metaphysics around it. I obviously don't agree with Wittgenstein. Religious language is actually a representation of reality ( according to religious people ).

I admire TS Elliot for realizing the importance of religion in the modern age. He didn't go with the flow around him, he was swimming against the tide. It's easy to relate with the despair he felt given the deterioration of culture and tradition around us.

We don't really understand religious language as well as it operates in the community. One of the reason it doesn't appear to be paradoxical or nonsensical is due to the transformation it undergoes after communal acceptance. You need a community in order for a language to be useful/meaningful. The religious community takes away the leap of faith ( as in Kierkegaard ) from individuals. They don't have to develop a personal relation with God in a strong sense. The realization of the fact that God is beyond our understanding or we cannot express a lot of meaningful statements regarding him cannot even be articulated by an individual. The only medium left is music/art/poetry etc. You have to corrupt what you had originally in your mind though. Otherwise, it would not be understood at all by the public.

When l talk about God, l feel like a blind man talking about something out there in the world. Except that it transcends every sense and conception familiar to me in this world. I cannot help but resort to compare religious language with music. Why do we compose and create Musical sounds , they have no meaning in of themselves. The comparison is still faulty and not correct. Religious language cannot be meaningless but how.....

I don't understand what you mean by nonsense in that case. You elaborate a little more.

The act of demarcating a line between sense and nonsense also falls under nonsense. Logical Positivism or any other offshoot is self defeating. It's also very difficult to describe what makes something sensible and a lot of efforts in that direction have failed. Take a look at verificationism and Popper's Falsification principle (If you think empirical statements have sense only ) for example. We need to speak of sense with respect to the language game/background or context in which the language is deployed. Religious language is meaningful in that sense but we are unable to see why it is so.

I think you could approach this topic from another perspective. You can use any branch of moral philosophy under moral irealism / anti-realism to question the proposed moral "fact" ; "Murder is wrong" as not being a fact at all. According to all sub branches of moral anti-realism, moral statements are not facts, so we can either suspend judgment regarding them or allow disagreement in assigning truth value to moral statement.

You will obviously have to face moral realism but you can also get around it by criticizing the coherence theory of truth if we are supposed to know which moral facts are true or false. Coherence theory of truth allows contradictory ( not necessarily moral statements ) to be valid and that's a shortcoming.

Feeling worthless is an impediment to success in any of these endeavors. The challenge then is to find another source of self-esteem, both instrumentally as it will help you to better achieve all those things, and intrinsically as a substitute for the self-esteem that comes from those things and (largely) makes them valuable to begin with.

I agree with your diagnostic but the way to get around inceldom won't be that straight. Maslow's hierarchy of needs would make it difficult for incels to reach selfhood after skipping the essential physiological needs and in general ,love/belonging needs at the lower order of pyramid.

I think you got it right in the last paragraph. I would disagree with JS Mill on that though. I think sexual craving is stronger than any other need in life because everything else depends on it. As a result it's fulfillment brings a deeper pleasure. Food, shelter preserve life but sex allows life to continue on earth through reproduction. It isn't a mere pleasure though, it sort of connects every other pleasure in a nexus.

Thanks for being shallow as fuck. Nice cherry picking you got there. No one here is making the claim that you need to be a Chad in order to get laid. For every deformed person getting laid, you have 1000/10000/? or more incels rejected by women. Evidence doesn't work in favour of your argument either.

You are the only person here lashing out at incels. I don't want to defend them or attack them. I want to understand what led them to their POV. I don't see what is wrong with seeing things from their perspective. If they consider themselves as victims, then we should try to see whether it is true or not.

Western youth is taught from an early age to have an unhealthy relationship with sex. "Incels" are one of its many outgrowths. Lets not judge them too harshly.

Agreed, l think you understand where l am coming from.

Are you trying to imply something ?

If you are calling incels self-entitled jerks then you don't have anything useful to contribute here. I am interested in something else.

Well, as of your reading of this post, you're advised to manage your affairs so as to avoid any need to regret. Unless your regret is pathological, which I think you'd agree is a whole other problem.

If life didn't end , we wont need to do philosophy anymore in order to make sense of our failures. Since it's not the case, we are afraid of turning our life into a single big failure.

Considering the fact that life is a gamble of chance and random success. It's not far fetched to call life a joke. The contrast between every happy soul out there and every miserable bastard is mind numbing. It couldn't have turned out more ridiculous.

Keeping Innocence or losing it won't make a difference. You can't escape despair anyway. In the end, we regret everything that didn't happen and everything that did happen.

The USA has a history of replacing popular democratically elected government with puppet government through various overt and covert approaches. Long ago, it even supported capitalist dictatorships against socialist democracy. War crimes committed during invasion of Iraq are enough to disqualify US from being a global moral authority. Frankly speaking, no one is above other in terms of moral authority and every country is sovereign. How can Americans trust their government after reading the history behind foreign intervention in the interest of Democracy. Since Russia and China won't stop playing such games, the lobby and bureaucracy will force Biden to adopt an aggressive policy. I don't even think that he is in control. I wish Bernie was in charge instead of Biden.

Biden Policy on Turkey

The concern is reasonable and l expect that his administration will be very aggressive. I fear greater foreign intervention in the future. Take for example, Turkey. His policy is quite clear and he is willing to support an opposition party against the current government. In other words ,he wants to install a puppet government.

If "a" refers to "b" , doesn't this imply "b" refers also to "a".
Even if you do not explicitly state what the number "1" in the sentence 1 refers to. After you have established a connection to sentence 2, there is an implicit relation.

I read the article on Witts philosophy of mathematics some time ago, Wittgenstein rejects the set of real numbers or any sort of infinite mathematical extensions.
Extension (concatenation of symbols) will always be finite. Mathematics is all the combined knowledge of intentions and extensions and nothing beyond that. We can only understand infinity as an intention. There is an infinite possibility of natural numbers, not a set of infinite natural numbers according to Witt.

I can tell where he is wrong though, and it's here

Thus, Wittgenstein adopts the radical position that all expressions that quantify over an infinite domain, whether ‘conjectures’ (e.g., Goldbach’s Conjecture, the Twin Prime Conjecture) or “proved general theorems” (e.g., “Euclid’s Prime Number Theorem”, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra), are meaningless (i.e., ‘senseless’; ‘sinnlos’) expressions as opposed to “genuine mathematical propositions.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our philosophies,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

While l cannot predict how our understanding of ethics will be in the future. I want to understand why till this day we have not achieved any sort of consensus or agreement, so to speak. I think this problem in philosophy is universal and present in all branches of philosophy, we don't find any sort of agreement. Ethical questions are philosophical questions and we cannot dismiss them simply because we fail to agree to a single method. In history of philosophy, there have been instances when philosophers agreed to a certain method and a separate independent field emerged, but we cannot expect this to be true for all philosophical problems, even in the future.

I think philosophers have nothing to offer when it comes to physics or even mathematics. While no scientist can take the theory of relativity to be 100 percent accurate, doubting it's over all validity is akin to doubting whether my hands exist or not. We can devise clever arguments, like Hume's problem of induction and try to present science as only an interpretation of the world but it will not influence scientists in any way. I don't like scientism and science will always be silent when we to understand metaphysics, ethics etc but we shouldn't downplay how successful science has been in predicting the world/nature.

Good lord, l like your energy. I cannot be a philosopher unless l act like one. I am just a spectator. Carnap, Poincaré, Husserl were educated in physics and were philosophers too. The list goes on and on. You're not the first person to take a jab at philosophy. Feynman was famous for ridiculing philosophers and perhaps he was to some extent, right.

Yet, we can find consensus in mathematics and hard science, despite human infallibility. Are philosophical questions such that we cannot help but be biased.

Philosophical argument run in both directions.We cannot justify our premises in philosophy as we have to start somewhere. I think every philosopher starts with a general philosophical attitude, for example logical positivists were anti metaphysical. Why certain philosophical ideas appeal to us may only have to do with how well they fit with our general attitude towards philosophy. The general attitude is mostly a product of history. If Kant was born before Hume, he could have supported empiricism.

Perhaps it may be unfair to compare philosophy with hard sciences and a comparison with economics, social science and psychology is more useful. Philosophy should be understood as some sort of art, arguments don't matter as much as analytic philosophers think they do. Philosophical truths, if they exist are a product of careerism, intellectual atmosphere. Every philosophy theory had its place in time and broadened over perspective in this regard. If you reject this idea, we will need to dig deeper, as to why philosophers disagree.

A theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true ~ Quine
I wonder how Wittgenstein would refute Quine as he was against platonism of all forms. Quine wasn't a full blown platonist as he didn't think hyper real sets existed. His more controversial ideas would be modifying math based on how effectively it describes the world when used in science/empirical endeavors. He emphasized a minimum modification.

Quine famously argued for the existence of abstract objects like sets,numbers etc along with physical objects we find in the universe. It is argued that they both have equivalent ontological commitments.

I think the main problem with Tractatus is self contradiction. The main thesis of Tractatus is the idea that only logical propositions and empirical propositions are truth apt. In other words, all the rest of statements which includes moral commands, metaphysics, aesthetic etc, are senseless and not truth apt. The thesis itself also falls under the category of senseless statements as it isn't a logical statement nor an empirical one , it is a meta ontological statement, bordering on metaphysics, so we do not know what to conclude. Throw away the ladder or everything ?

The picture theory also doesn't help us at all and Wittgenstein gave us his famous rabbit/duck picture to highlight how weak picture theory is. The reduction of statements into their individual components doesn't help at all as even the elementary propositions which we supposedly cannot further separate are not simple but complex, so the very idea that we can analyze the whole by studying the components still causes problems.

An interesting question which Wittgenstein posed in Investigation is what does a picture of the general prototype of a tree look like. We cannot help but only picture a specific example. The picture theory cannot give us a general meaning ( it should ) and perhaps there isn't a general meaning or a definition which covers all examples. There is only a resemblance between different uses of a word.

I got a notification.

It would be ridiculous to ban the usage of the phrase or throw them in the memory holes. On a side note, we need to bring back Orwellian terms in politics now more than ever. Julian Assange is an another victim of the Big Brother . So F*** censorship.

I believe perfection is attainable and there is nothing wrong with striving for it. This discussion shouldn't be really important cause we should not rely on other people's feedback and neither should they rely on ours. We know ourselves quite well. If someone wants to get the noble prize in physics then he better be at the top of his game, otherwise it would be a ridiculous goal. Perfection is actually quite visible in our world, the bridge that won't fall and the building which stands despite the earthquake are perfectly made. Moral perfection on the other hand is a different story...

Ofcourse you can acknowledge your mistakes while accepting the fact that no one is perfect but the motivation to improve it comes from the desire to be perfect. Unless an artist is considering sucide or contemplating destroying his art work, we shouldn't tell him that no one is perfect. I was told this only once in my life when l was complaining about being slow and stupid but l didn't even need it then. I believe that perfection is possible, especially in mathematics and science.

On the basis of no one being perfect. Whether we should forgive others or advise them to forgive themselves is difficult to decide simply because of the various different situations there are and each case being unique.

I think the usage in an artistic/academic sense is easier to decide on. We should strive for perfection and never tell ourselves or others that no one is perfect. It would be even better if we incorporate it into our moral fabrics but it would be too burdensome for mortals like us. I haven't seen people being disappointed in themselves for moral reasons. The sense of being guilty for all the good deeds that we didn't carry out is lost. As for great artists making a lot of mistakes, great artists and great intellectuals do not benefit from the standards we impose on ourselves. There is a saying that artists never finish their work, only abandon it. Once an artist accepts his work as being good enough, he fails to improve it.There is always room for improvement. We will benefit more by striving for perfection.

It is an excuse for mediocrity. Most of us want to feel that everyone is like us. In reality, there are countless people in every field that are light years ahead of us and no matter how much we strive, we cannot reach their level. I don't even know if it is worth doing something unless you aim for perfection.

Even if we apply reasoning to everything, we will still face problems that will take perhaps a few hundred more years to be resolved. In those matters, we can resort to belief. In matters that don't even regard sense data as a basis for knowledge. It will be reasonable to have faith in that case. Empiricism and reasoning aren't the same in my opinion.

(By sense data as a basis , l mean verification of knowledge via experience of the content of our knowledge. )