New answers tagged wittgenstein
5
From Russel's Mysticism and Logic
Introduction
Metaphysics has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men have achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others through the other alone: in Hume, for ...
1
There is a false dichotomy, you make a jump at the end that assumes that what we cannot communicate intentionally lies 'outside time and thought'. I don't think Wittgenstein would agree.
There are plenty of things inside time and thought that cannot be conveyed by language, and for which language is not necessary because language can only provide a '...
0
The simplest way to understand this, I think, is to break it down this way:
There is the world as it is, in its holistic entirety.
There is the world as it appears to our perceptions, which is a delimited subset of #1
There is the world we can encapsulate in symbolic language, which is a delimited subset of #2
The aim of logical positivism from its ...
0
From a reading of the 'Tractatus' and 'Investigations' it is clear he had no idea what the word 'mysticism' means as represented by Plotinus, Eckhart. Lao Tsu and so forth. Had he understood this his philosophy would have been noticeably different. I
The Investigations are sometimes said to be 'mystical' but all the word seems to mean here is 'muddled'. ...
1
How does an extensive definition (or maximum possible analysis) of P differ from logical consequence of P.
Logic, as a performance of human beings, does not operate on "full definitions" or on Wittgensteinian "state of affairs". It operates on the form, or ostensive structure, of the argument.
a is F;
All y that are F are G;
Therefore, a is G.
...
0
Wittgenstein himself did say that all the results of logic are tautologies. This is probably what you are after.
But in fact, the full definition of a real thing is always more than mere logic. Were this not the case, we would not be able to discuss ambiguity or paradox -- things that logic does not adequately address, and cannot properly address because ...
1
I would take issue with several of the things you say about logic.
Logical implication does not typically involve setting propositions to be true. Logic in its most straightforward form is usually understood to be concerned with propositions that have truth values. In classical logic, such propositions are always either true or false, and this is so ...
0
So, P, in a way, means Q.... What I find possible is that logic and full definition are one and the same. How does an extensive definition (or maximum possible analysis) of P differ from logical consequence of P.
Logic is a game in which symbols are moved around and operated upon. Implication and definition are different operations in the game. Even when ...
0
I would say, it's important to have a philosophical position staked out prior to answering your question. Concepts like truth, logic, and definition mean very different things to different people. For instance, the difference between these fundamental concepts between philosophers of objectivism and embodied philosophies have very different takes. It should ...
0
Probably the most useful background is discovering the motivations which led Wittgenstein to formulate the Tractatus as he did. Philosophy, after all, is famous for asking questions, but the book itself is simply a long list of assertions. Russell, who wrote the introduction, noted that although Wittgenstein solved the questions he set out to solve, he ...
-1
. The relation reader-content is unique and it might help to accept that not all of us will "get it" and some of us might go further than what the writer envisaged.
. Maybe it would be helpful before you "approach" Tractatus (and to accept that it will take some time to reach the end which will involve with a lot of back and fourth...) to read Explanation ...
1
Wittgenstein's point is that every standard is at some level strictly conventional: we agree that it is so, explicitly or implicitly, and by agreeing make it so. We cannot talk about the measurement of the standard without falling into self-reference.
When a father answers this question, he would (obviously) say that the meter bar is one meter long. But we ...
1
Wittgenstein states, "one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long". The first condition denies something while the second permits something. Each activity needs to be considered separately to make the sense that Wittgenstein had in mind.
What was he denying? He was denying that the role of the standard metre is something ...
2
It's the same with any philosophical work. To read it and glean something worthwhile from it you don't need any background. To read it at a full depth of comprehension, you would need quite a lot of background. There are scholars who spend lifetimes reading the Tractatus and continuing to find new angles on it. So comprehension of a philosophical work is ...
0
It may be worthwhile when reading any famous work to read it from the perspective of a commentator who will act as a guide. That is because these works may be very easy to read, but difficult to understand or situate within a broader context. This commentator becomes the window through which one understands the work by providing the "background" the OP ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
