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It's not really just Derrida, is it? I find the most powerful anecdote of the whole bunch is that of Wittgenstein. The article mentions him -- Outside France,

It's not really just Derrida, is it? I find the most powerful anecdote of the whole bunch is that of Wittgenstein. The article mentions him -- Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. -- but just mentioning "the early works" offhand is misleading, since it goes a lot deeper than that. Wittgenstein wasn't just "a part of the church". After the Tractatus, he was hailed by many of them, especially among the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle that most closely resemble "skeptics" and techie-technocrats today, as their Jesus. And with Philosophical Investigations, later on, he criticized the climax of his earlier work, and became an apostate of sorts. Everyone with a passing interest in this topic should check out Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, "Duty of Genius". It's very well told.

yarrel 10y ago
Wittgenstein is interesting in the history of philosophy as the guy who ruined it twice. Had he lived longer there's no doubt he would have done it again.
biggestlou 10y ago
And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.
- ianai 10y ago
  It was in my early 20s that I was most active with philosophy. Let's not forget that many (most?) philosophers first lived their lives and then wrote about it in their end years. I'm betting my story will be similar.
- ASipos 10y ago
  34.
wanda 10y ago
I must point out that Wittgenstein should not be considered a messiah to logical positivists, because while they saw his Tractatus as the holy grail — the ultimate philosophical weapon, the end of the line for those vacuous, angst-ridden, mysticism-indulging continentalists — they grossly misunderstood Wittgenstein's point. I have found the following quote by F. H. Bradley to capture the folly of the Vienna Circle: "The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles." (F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality) (I typically whip this quote out whenever conversing with a peer in the overtly cynical industry of software development. Many of my peers over the years have been quite convinced that philosophy is nonsense, but this is already a philosophical stance.) Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein despised the logical positivists, audacious and hasty as they were to presume that his Tractatus was little more than a weapon against continental philosophy and metaphysics, and an answer to all philosophical problems. I think anyone who perceives Wittgenstein as a logical positivist or a champion of theirs has only read or only understood the final statement of the book: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (or something like that). This does not mean that the continental philosopher should not speak, for two reasons: 1. if you have understood continental philosopher's work, he typically is not attempting to speak from a privileged, metaphysical position, but rather from a wholly anthropic and internal perspective; 2. Wittgenstein was not trying to tell metaphysically minded philosophers to shut up, but rather that their efforts were doomed by virtue of being without any meaning w.r.t. the real world. Wittgenstein all but condemns his own book to Hume's philosophical fire in the preface to the Tractatus, stating that he who understands what Wittgenstein came to understand, and recorded in the book, will realise that to grok the book is to ascend a ladder and kick the ladder away beneath you. This is because the book itself is without meaningfulness by its own standards. In a similarly unsettling (for logical positivists) vein, Wittgenstein bundled mathematical propositions in with those nasty, problematic metaphysical ones, because for Wittgenstein, both are tautologies, or truisms. Think about this statement: 'God is an omnipotent being'. Using a typical definition of the word 'God', this is a truism, because the word God lacks a reference to a real world object and is instead intended to signify something with the following properties: - existence - omnipotence - omniscience - omnipresence So the statement 'God is an omnipotent being' is equivalent to 'an omnipotent being is an omnipotent being'. Which is the same as saying '2+2 = 4', because 2+2 is the definition of 4, and can be considered an alias to 4, just as 4 is the definition of 2+2 and so on. Mathematics is an infinite set of truisms, and the only reason we don't have a total understanding of mathematics is that we are not omniscient and because there are, as has been proven, propositions in mathematics that cannot be proven. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein's Tractatus is nothing more than its conclusion: that there can be no meaningful conversations about topics like deities and ethics because they are beyond the epistemology of humans — or as I like to phrase it, out of scope. Yet he arrived at this conclusion by being rather more similar to a continental philosopher in his thinking than any analytic philosopher. His work has not stopped nearly every human from discussing such topics in the years after his work was published, and while Wittgenstein was mostly careful to avoid such discussions, this was simply because he considered it a waste of energy and time.

yarrel 10y ago

Wittgenstein is interesting in the history of philosophy as the guy who ruined it twice. Had he lived longer there's no doubt he would have done it again.

biggestlou 10y ago

And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.

ianai 10y ago
It was in my early 20s that I was most active with philosophy. Let's not forget that many (most?) philosophers first lived their lives and then wrote about it in their end years. I'm betting my story will be similar.
ASipos 10y ago
34.

wanda 10y ago

I must point out that Wittgenstein should not be considered a messiah to logical positivists, because while they saw his Tractatus as the holy grail — the ultimate philosophical weapon, the end of the line for those vacuous, angst-ridden, mysticism-indulging continentalists — they grossly misunderstood Wittgenstein's point. I have found the following quote by F. H. Bradley to capture the folly of the Vienna Circle: "The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles." (F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality) (I typically whip this quote out whenever conversing with a peer in the overtly cynical industry of software development. Many of my peers over the years have been quite convinced that philosophy is nonsense, but this is already a philosophical stance.) Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein despised the logical positivists, audacious and hasty as they were to presume that his Tractatus was little more than a weapon against continental philosophy and metaphysics, and an answer to all philosophical problems. I think anyone who perceives Wittgenstein as a logical positivist or a champion of theirs has only read or only understood the final statement of the book: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (or something like that). This does not mean that the continental philosopher should not speak, for two reasons: 1. if you have understood continental philosopher's work, he typically is not attempting to speak from a privileged, metaphysical position, but rather from a wholly anthropic and internal perspective; 2. Wittgenstein was not trying to tell metaphysically minded philosophers to shut up, but rather that their efforts were doomed by virtue of being without any meaning w.r.t. the real world. Wittgenstein all but condemns his own book to Hume's philosophical fire in the preface to the Tractatus, stating that he who understands what Wittgenstein came to understand, and recorded in the book, will realise that to grok the book is to ascend a ladder and kick the ladder away beneath you. This is because the book itself is without meaningfulness by its own standards. In a similarly unsettling (for logical positivists) vein, Wittgenstein bundled mathematical propositions in with those nasty, problematic metaphysical ones, because for Wittgenstein, both are tautologies, or truisms. Think about this statement: 'God is an omnipotent being'. Using a typical definition of the word 'God', this is a truism, because the word God lacks a reference to a real world object and is instead intended to signify something with the following properties: - existence - omnipotence - omniscience - omnipresence So the statement 'God is an omnipotent being' is equivalent to 'an omnipotent being is an omnipotent being'. Which is the same as saying '2+2 = 4', because 2+2 is the definition of 4, and can be considered an alias to 4, just as 4 is the definition of 2+2 and so on. Mathematics is an infinite set of truisms, and the only reason we don't have a total understanding of mathematics is that we are not omniscient and because there are, as has been proven, propositions in mathematics that cannot be proven. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein's Tractatus is nothing more than its conclusion: that there can be no meaningful conversations about topics like deities and ethics because they are beyond the epistemology of humans — or as I like to phrase it, out of scope. Yet he arrived at this conclusion by being rather more similar to a continental philosopher in his thinking than any analytic philosopher. His work has not stopped nearly every human from discussing such topics in the years after his work was published, and while Wittgenstein was mostly careful to avoid such discussions, this was simply because he considered it a waste of energy and time.