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All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

wittgensteinproject.org

41–50 of 65 posts

Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#41

Do we know what Wittgenstein himself would have thought of this? Did he have opinions on "intellectual property" regimes? Did the "intellectual property" regime contemporaneous with him writing encourage or discourage his output? I mean, there's some thought that Giuseppe Verdi reduced his output when copyright was introduced: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1336802

Wittgenstein’s father was one of the richest men in the world. He inherited an enormous fortune and renounced it. That would suggest he felt property was an inhibition to his thinking and writing rather than an encouragement.

Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#42
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_one_hand TL;DR: Descartes (and others): We can't know for certain that the external world exists. GE Moore: "Here is one hand, and here is another. There are at least two external objects in the world." Wittgenstein was pointing out that this doesn't address any of the actual claims. (I think "agree" is a confusing word to use in the translation. "Know" would work b…

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!

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Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#44
post #33
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#45
Translations have their own copyright.

And so does the publisher for the design of the printed book.

So don't get too cocky copying books unless you understand the current status of various other possible copyrights you might be violating.

Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe your assurance is ironic. I assure you that my assurance is not ironic.

Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#47
post #25

Earlier 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…

As tends to be true of much of philosophy, the core insight of Wittgenstein is not too big, I think. His argument, at least in his later work with language games, revolves around "why is it that we look for truth with such unclear language? Is it even possible to clarify our language?" And that's both Socratic and also more specific than Socrates. It's done in a very down-to-business and direct tone, which gives it that ironic sensibility, since it projects confidence in an investigation that we can easily see is going to start reducing itself to the tiniest scraps of truth by assuming so little a priori.

Within the context of his mathematical investigations this question makes a lot of sense, though: the younger Wittgenstein was studying logic under Bertrand Russell and therefore had a lot of exposure to the idea of a formalized logical totality as represented by Principa Mathematica - this was the world he lived in. And he did not seem to feel that the incompleteness theorems settled the limitations of logical formalism either.

Re: All of Wittgenstein is now public domain

#49
post #28

Earlier 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!

The point isn't about the external world. It's about deduction vs induction, the point is about axioms. Axioms are arbitrary, thus deductive reasoning is ultimately arbitrary. If there is a hand then everything else falls out deductively. Using induction, it's trivially true that there is a hand. Using deductive reasoning to prove an inductive proposition is ultimately a waste of time, using inductive reasoning to cr…

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