In Philosophical Investigations, section 174, Wittgenstein is discussing the temptation to describe the experience of acting with deliberation (in drawing a line parallel to another, say) as a “quite particular inner” experience. At this point in the text, he has been discussing reading in order to shed light on the concept of understanding, which he had been discussing in Continue Reading …
Dyson on Philosophy
Freeman Dyson has a review of Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? in the early November issue of The New York Review of Books. Dyson is an esteemed physicist who, as a young man, cinched the link between accounts of quantum electrodynamics given separately by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonanga in the late 1940s. He probably should've been included in Continue Reading …
A.C. Grayling on Wittgenstein
I've mentioned Oxford's Very Short Introductions before on the blog, but I can't help pointing out another written by A.C. Grayling on Wittgenstein. It's a great example of distilling something complicated down into digestible hunks in an honest presentation and analysis. Very well done. In addition, he's a fine essayist with a number of collections worth reading, such as Continue Reading …
No, It’s Not Just Semantics
The paradigmatic philosophical debate concerns whether there is such a thing as philosophy at all. And if so, what it is. At Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pigliucci has an excellent post responding to the oh-so-common, Wittgenstein-inspired claim that philosophy is just a matter of confusion about language. (One species of this argument is that dualism is a "category mistake" Continue Reading …
An Analytic Philosopher Grapples with “Soul”
If Star Trek's Data were to write about the soul, it might be this self-parodyingly soulless: Soul talk is expressive in the same way as other nondescriptive utterances, like "oh my God" or "ouch" or "yuck" or (with head nodding to music) "Yeah, that's funky." There is no clear referent for those. They don't seem to refer to or represent anything—they seem somehow Continue Reading …