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 relation 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 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 Meditations Continue Reading …
No, It’s Not Just Semantics
It shouldn’t need saying that there’s a difference between linguistic and conceptual definitions, or that every system of knowledge rests on unproven axioms or assumptions — mathematics, logic, and science as much as philosophy. That’s why philosophical “meta discussions” about these fields — and knowledge in general — become genuinely interesting and problematic (rather than merely a matter of linguistic confusion or semantics), even while we know that that these problems don’t bear on their practical application.
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 Continue Reading …