Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Wittgenstein

  • On the Expressibility of ‘Something Exists’

    Surely this is a valid and sound argument: 1. Stromboli exists.Ergo2. Something exists. Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as 1*.  For…

  • What I Like About Wittgenstein

    He was one serious man.  I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé  whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality.  I have always had the sense that something is stake in life,…

  • Wittgenstein on Religious Faith and Superstition

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72: Religious faith and superstition are quite different.  One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting. Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.'  For in American English…

  • Why Wittgenstein was a Better Man than Russell

    Russell worried about logic.  Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

  • Wittgenstein and Dreaming: *On Certainty* #383

    On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well  and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning. What is senseless (sinnlos) here is not the dream argument, but what Wittgenstein says about it. It…

  • Heidegger and Wittgenstein: 17 Syllables

    One went off the deep endThe other off the shallowStrange century.

  • Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse

    John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52:      . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound     sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to     be . . . . This is not quite right, as it seems to…

  • A Kierkegaardian Passage in Wittgenstein

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), ed  von Wright, tr. Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 53e:      I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound     doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or     the direction of your life.)      It says that all wisdom…

  • The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell

    Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red — and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue…

  • Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

    The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site. Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve…

  • Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips

    In the fourth of a series posts on the evolution of his views on the Trinity, Dale Tuggy reports on his time at the Claremont Graduate School.  About D. Z. Phillips, he says the following: D.Z. Phillips I avoided. I’d read real epistemology (Chisholm, Plantinga, etc.) and was always unimpressed with the later-Wittgenstein approach, especially…

  • The Fly and the Fly Bottle

    Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone. Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should…

  • Wittgenstein on Time and Flux

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trs. Hargreaves and White, Chicago 1975, p. 83: 52. It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here…

  • The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

    Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn.   Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey…

  • Another Example of a Vicious Infinite Regress: Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 239

    I am collecting examples of infinite regress arguments in philosophy. See the category Infinite Regress Arguments.  Here is one that is suggested by section 239 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. When I hear the word 'red,' how do I know which color is being referred to?  The following answer might be given:  'Red' refers to the…