Public domain? I thought it was private language
All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#32No book influenced my attitude toward philosophy more than Wittgenstein's Blue Book. Here are a couple gems: > The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substan…
This is just like non-euclidean geometry. There are some fundamental postulates that you choose, in any kind of descriptive language, which is just convenient and doesn't really come from an empirical observation or is subject to constant improvement or change. They just are.
I really love how this subject is approached in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#33I've heard that Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers to actually make people optimistic. Does anyone here feel that way?
My main take from reading Wittgenstein was that no one agrees on the meaning of words so there's barely any point arguing about things. I suppose that's sort of positive.
My main take from arguing about things is that it being founded on a mutually disagreed word meaning doesn't end the argument!
A somewhat related experience I had recently and found very strange was having two parties who each knew me meet, and relate stories about me or things that I'd supposedly said, in a way which made clear that at best my meaning was misunderstood even if the words were correct. What of all the other dialogue that didn't happen to come up? What percentage of what we say is understood as we intend, even if it seems so at the time?
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#34So now we can expect Wittgenstein fan-fic?
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Zombies
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#35No book influenced my attitude toward philosophy more than Wittgenstein's Blue Book. Here are a couple gems: > The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substan…
I love his attitude that people talk in the same kind of compulsive way that a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. Not to say it is mindless but that it isn’t rooted in philosophical consistency. Asking again and again “why” like Socrates doesn’t get to the truth it just gets us caught in circles. Another unrelated Wittgenstein-ian point that I found enlightening in college is that in PL design you can’t design a la…
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Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is one hand, And here is another. There are at least two external objects in the world. Therefore, an external world exists. As if there would not be hands in a simulated world!
My thought on this, what's the difference to an agent between a real world an a simulated one? Why aren't all worlds effectively simulated?
You are basically asking if it's possible to know whether we live in a simulated world or not.
That is a good question. One possible answer would be "It depends on the quality of the simulation". If we are living in a simulated world there could be a simulated drug the so-called red pill which allows you to see the execution of the simulation.
If we started seeing Fortran source-code in the sky and the code would seem to be about running a world-simulation, and we would also see data-expressions in the sky that curiously described the world we experience outside of us then I think we would be pre-disposed to think it looks like we are simulated beings in a simulated world.
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#37No book influenced my attitude toward philosophy more than Wittgenstein's Blue Book. Here are a couple gems: > The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substan…
I love his attitude that people talk in the same kind of compulsive way that a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. Not to say it is mindless but that it isn’t rooted in philosophical consistency. Asking again and again “why” like Socrates doesn’t get to the truth it just gets us caught in circles. Another unrelated Wittgenstein-ian point that I found enlightening in college is that in PL design you can’t design a la…
That was Socrates' point. He was asking questions to expose how brittle the claims of knowledge and certainty were. I do find it strange that Wittgenstein—a man who considered Kierkegaard (who wrote an entire book on irony and Socrates) as one of his favorite thinkers—seems not to have realized that Socrates' quest for a certain, clear meaning of a team was ironically intended to always finish unresolved. It makes me a bit curious what he took from Kierkegaard, who was every bit as much of an ironist, if Plato's rather blunt representations of Socratic irony alluded him.
Of course the irony is that Wittgenstein asks "why?" again and again like Socrates and for very much the same purpose (to show that it gets us caught in circles), thus representing even more ironic loops than the previous circles. Wittgenstein turns to philosophy to repudiate it and show as much to his students (show the fly out of the bottle), but in so doing he affirms a central Socratic lesson, but with far less irony. And I would say irony wins out: rather than quiet philosophy into therapy, Wittgenstein became the most influential 20th century philosopher who attracts by far the most published academic and popular commentary.
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#38So now we can expect Wittgenstein fan-fic?
Pretty sure Borges wrote some.
Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love his attitude that people talk in the same kind of compulsive way that a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. Not to say it is mindless but that it isn’t rooted in philosophical consistency. Asking again and again “why” like Socrates doesn’t get to the truth it just gets us caught in circles. Another unrelated Wittgenstein-ian point that I found enlightening in college is that in PL design you can’t design a la…
That was Socrates' point. He was asking questions to expose how brittle the claims of knowledge and certainty were. I do find it strange that Wittgenstein—a man who considered Kierkegaard (who wrote an entire book on irony and Socrates) as one of his favorite thinkers—seems not to have realized that Socrates' quest for a certain, clear meaning of a team was ironically intended to always finish unresolved. It makes me…
Ah, but perhaps Wittgenstein was being ironic in pretending not to understand Socratic irony; Wittegensteinian irony. And perhaps zwkrt was being ironic in pretending not to realize Witgensteinian irony; zwkrtatic irony. And perhaps you are being ironic in pretending to misinterpret zwkrtatic irony; bangkoksbestic irony. I assure you, however, that this comment is not ironic, nor is the one after this.