The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

This, combined with our ironically deteriorating ability to communicate in a digital age is leading down not such a bright road.

>But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree

I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree.

That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement.

In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate partner: “would you like to be owned by me?” Employing Kant’s categorical imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved.

Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt as language to describe anything close to resembling reality.

At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely resembling a “universal truth”, truism, true objective fact, etc.

After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does, true doesn’t mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn’t necessarily make it less useful, it’s just something we need to keep in mind.

On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it’s been a fascinating listen thus far.

http://a.co/49lwAZNb

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the reader to watch recordings.

These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought.

I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb.

One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener.

I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it.

[edits for typos]