13 ms·

A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy

115 points by jkuria 5y ago

aphextron 5y ago
I can't help but think that there was a certain special something that existed among that generation of late modern intellectuals immediately preceding and proceeding from the first world war. There's an intensity, a level of discipline and seriousness with which they engaged in their work that seems unique in human history. The twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, the Cubism of Picasso, Einstein's field theories, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All strove to break new ground and push the state of the art beyond what was comprehensible at the time with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today. They treated all of their endeavors, even the creative, with the rigor of a hard science and sought to construct theoretical frameworks around what had always been ephemeral, intangible notions.
- sdvs9so 5y ago
  I agree with this impression. I often reflect on our times and wonder why there seems to be such a stark difference. Why do we lack such figures, pushing the boundaries in the same impressive way? Is it that not enough time has passed to fully realize the impact of the discoveries and works of our time, like there has been for the work of the early 1900's? Have the problems gotten harder that we are bumping up against a kind of soft boundary that's preventing the seemingly frequent revolutionary breakthroughs? Or is it a matter separate from the practice of science or art; a phenomenon of culture that is impacting the our capacity to discover? I think it's an interesting question to mull over.
  - rytill 5y ago
    Were the breakthroughs of history regarded as such during their formation, generally speaking? Maybe we will look back on this period as one rife with breakthroughs, but can’t make the historic judgment in real-time.
    - davidivadavid 5y ago
      In the case of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, there certainly was a perception that something radical was being done.
- keiferski 5y ago
  One theory is something like this: early modernism was so fruitful because those participating in it were still trained in classical methods. They mastered the rules before breaking them. Picasso is a good example. He broke the rules of art in creative ways because he had such a firm understanding of artistic methods. Nietzsche, with his deep grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin philology, is another modern innovator. Today, however, we’ve largely adopted the conclusions of the innovators. Rather than try and recreate what led to these breakthroughs in the first place. Discipline and training are mostly irrelevant in a world that is more concerned with novelty and shock value.
  - raducu 5y ago
    Also, perhaps the fruits that can be masterly picked by single individuals have been picked already.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Yeah, this. And this IMHO is one of the reasons science is in crisis today, because in many ways it is still being conducted according to the late-19th- and early-20th-century models. Scientists are not generally rewarded for doing good science (e.g. replicating previous results or engaging in pedagogy), but rather for making Big Discoveries, because that’s what all the great scientists did before. Trouble is that as time goes by there are fewer and fewer Big Discoveries to be made, and making them gets more and more expensive, while at the same time there are more and more people graduating with STEM Ph.D’s. So you have more and more people chasing fewer and fewer opportunities for career rewards. Another perverse consequence of this dynamic is the pressure to publish any old crap because Big Discoveries are presented in papers and so it is assumed that papers will lead to Big Discoveries despite the obvious logical fallacy. Often it becomes a full-fledged cargo cult [1]. (I once made a very successful career by publishing a lot of crap, so I’m in a position to know.) Getting this right is a Really Hard Problem because there are entrenched interests for whom this poses an existential threat. There is a lot of power that comes from being an arbiter of truth in a society. (I think one of the great unsung heroes of humanity is Jimmy Wales. He could have cashed in bigly on Wikipedia, but he chose not to, and as a result Wikipedia is one of the greatest repositories of objective knowledge ever assembled. And it’s free. It’s a freakin’ miracle. Arxiv is also big step in the right direction IMHO.) [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.html https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.h...
- mLuby 5y ago
  Could be a coincidence, but that was just before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927) and Godel's incompleteness theorem (1931) dashed the dream of perfect knowledge.
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    Wittgenstein famously did not believe in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, as well as thinking Cantor's diagonalisation argument was bunk.
    - bifftastic 5y ago
      Can you say more of either of these? Especially the diagonalization argument which seems difficult to, er, argue with.
      - mannerheim 5y ago
        You can find what he had to say on Cantor's argument here: http://www.logicmuseum.com/cantor/wittgensteinquotes.htm http://www.logicmuseum.com/cantor/wittgensteinquotes.htm These are excerpts, some paragraphs are missing, but the gist is more or less there and you can find the full discussion in 'Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'.
        skoodge 5y ago
        Even the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are only a selection of some of Wittgenstein's notebooks made by the editors of his posthumous publications. It is not a work by Wittgenstein in the same sense as the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations. The Part II of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is the part on Cantor, is especially questionable. It is compiled from two documents of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, Ms-117 and Ms-121, but only about a third of the remarks in Ms-121 were included in the published book. There are also other notebooks were Wittgenstein discussed Cantor (most notably Ms-162a and Ms-126b) and which were not published at all. The editors made the decision to exclude some of these remarks because Wittgenstein's notebooks often contain merely drafts of remarks that were never fully developed, so it would be wrong to say that the published book is a deliberate misrepresentation of Wittgenstein's thoughts, but the situation is definitely quite nuanced and complex. I personally think that the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are very interesting, but that it's a disservice to Wittgenstein and any reader of his works to read his remarks on the philosophy of mathematics as a disconnected collection of aphorisms. The context really matters and his more mathematical remarks only make sense against the backdrop of the Philosophical Investigations and perhaps even his later writings such as On Certainty.
- ycombinete 5y ago
  Wittgenstein would have a very impressive DOTA MMR today.
  - Galaxity 5y ago
    Thanks. I have whiskey is my nasal cavity now.
    - godfreyantonell 5y ago
      I don't drink anymore. I was still able to vividly imagine the sensation of whisky out the nose.
- cutler 5y ago
  The same is true in literature. Who today compares with Elliot, Yeats, Huxley, Orwell or the war poets? Maybe that seriousness of purpose is only possible when civilisation is in the balance.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    One figure hanging over Western poetry for the second half of the 20th century is Celan, and it is hard to claim he is inferior to Eliot or Yeats. And if you like this kind of serious poetry, I really recommend J.H. Prynne (start with The White Stones), who is still active even. The problem with poetry today is not a lack of talent, it is an inability for that talent to get mass attention when 1) poetry has been marginalized in today's media landscape, and 2) cultural scenes are now so fractured that people can't reach agreement on who is great and therefore keep the list of great poets going.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  Also James Joyce, and others like him.
- astrange 5y ago
  Wittgenstein was one of the richest heirs in Europe so at the least he had all the time in the world, and lived in a time with such little competition that they gave him a PhD for writing a non-academic book none of them understood. Looking at his biography, you feel like people were just hanging out with him because he was rich, since his personality was so bad and he clearly hated everyone he ever met.
  - skoodge 5y ago
    To say that "people were just hanging out with him because he was rich" is a very biased and uncharitable reading of his biography. He gave away all his inheritance pretty early in his life and later often had to depend on friends such as Keynes, Russell and Moore to support applications for grants so that he could continue his research at Cambridge. Of course it's true that he came from an extremely privileged background and was never in danger of starving to death, but he could spend as much time on his philosophy as he did because he lived a modest life and was lucky enough to be supported by Russell when he first came to Cambridge.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today. Jaded cynicism, crass commercialism, and the dissapearance of a cultured class that is above mass market culture, they way high/upper middle class, academics, doctors, etc., one were. Believe it or not, for example, once there was a class of people, more so in Europe, that not only went to the Opera, but also actually liked it, followed it, could get the references, and knew its history and the history of classical/romantic/etc music, the way their today's equivalent will know the pop stars of the day. Given the above, it's easy that soem of them would take e.g. the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky's innovations seriously, even if only to be offended by them - and some of, course, to be inspired. Today's equivalent would at best read something like the New Yorker and the hacks featured in NYT best-selling books of the day, but will seldom have the wide culture that once was quite widespread across parts of the middle and upper middle classes. People also seem more desperate to sell out quick for a quick buck - even artists today just want to play the game, go ahead with the galleries and agents, and give out much more easily than an early 20th century artist. This diminishes the period between "serious work" and "selling out", often to zero (whereas for Picasso it took decades, and for Van Gogh, it never happened).
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Believe it or not, not all of those people were middle class. The UK and the US both had programs which made classical music accessible to the working classes, and they had a significant cultural impact. In the UK the post-war BBC carried on with (what is called) the Reithian tradition (after Lord Reith) until marketisation started to overwhelm everything in the 80s. This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. It was about giving people experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise, and to give them more choices about what to listen to and maybe enjoy. The UK also had an art school track for bright creative working class kids, some of whom went on to make a living in music and/or fashion. Marketisation also destroyed that, because of course student debt destroys your choices and limits your options so you literally can't afford to take risks.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. Today it's almost forbidden culturally to even suggest that it coule even be (superior). The thing is, to say such a thing, you need some kind of shared cultural basis (of what's superior and what's not), one that even those who don't "like X" (the way we might like peanut butter or not), nonetheless agree on (and whether they care or not, feel like it's somewhat their loss for not liking it). Those times, had that (shared cultural agreement). In more modern times, after the 60s especially, and in the US doubly so, culture is whatever one makes it, the mass consumer is king (because everybody wants his/hers money, so they treat them as such), and personal taste is the be all end all, end of discussion. Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach, for example, would be so self-evident and accepted by all (for the Bieber's and Drake's of their era), as to not even be worth saying.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Things all work around that time. Physics aside even maths ...
- decasteve 5y ago
  I've been going deeper into the mid-19th century to pre-WWI era. I keep thinking that the war eras of the 20th century and industrial consumerism lost the diversity of ideas and art that preceded it. I've been diving into (or revisiting) Darwin, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoi, to name a few. It was an incredibly rich era that could help us better navigate this one. I get a sense that Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, had a better connection to it and could articulate warnings of where the mid-20th century might end up if it progresses on its path. I don't think we've ever been closer to realizing their warnings.
- Inu 5y ago
  Wittgenstein's take: >I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.
  - skoodge 5y ago
    Here's another take by Wittgenstein from the preface of the Philosophical Remarks: "This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same." I can't help but feel that this description of the "vast stream" captures the current trend in most of software development and academia quite well...
    - javajosh 5y ago
      There is a beautiful give-and-take between the experience of variety (either consuming or producing) and the grasping of essence. They do not exist independently of each other, nor is one better inherently better than the other. They must be kept in balance, and yet the world seems to favor variety over understanding at every turn. Consider yourself lucky to be in the minority of those who appreciate what is truly rare and precious about humans, who are in turn a rare and precious part of life, which is in turn a rare and precious part of the universe.
    - biztos 5y ago
      > at its centre -- in its essence This desire is precisely what leads Faust to become so frustrated with the limits of human knowledge that he makes an ill-advised bet with (more or less) the Devil, trading an option on his immortal soul for the keys to that essence. In Goethe's Faust anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust
- kolbe 5y ago
  I think those same people are spending their mental energy on deciphering law, writing code, and trying to predict the stock market now.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Part of it is that there's just so many more people. Many more voices. And a louder speaker for them to yell into. And so much less reason to focus on any particular individual. You could spend your whole life studying philosophy/economics/political science, etc, write an amazing thesis, many volumes long, have all sorts of insights. And in terms of the world's massive population: how would you stand out? Would you be famous? Would people read you? Considered canon / important? Unlikely. You might get some notoriety, but that notoriety is more likely to spread to rather mediocre or showmen pop-philosophers like a Jordan Peterson (or their equivalent on the "left"). And in some ways knowledge of many kinds has been democratized, and information and materials more broadly available to all. So we're building a broader knowledge base and things are applied in that way, rather than by "great men"... which is likely the sign of a mature civilization and a more democratic ethos.
- raflemakt 5y ago
  Christopher Nupen has made an outstanding documentary about Viennese Radicalism portrayed in particular through Wittgenstein and Shoenberg. I can't recommend it enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRI_ZSh6iF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRI_ZSh6iF4
mmaunder 5y ago
Paywalled.
_aleph2c_ 5y ago
Freeman Dyson didn't think much of Wittgenstein: https://www.youtube.com/embed/byi3vOnVodQ?start=58 https://www.youtube.com/embed/byi3vOnVodQ?start=58
- davidivadavid 5y ago
  That didn't seem like a very substantial philosophical criticism.
  - new_guy 5y ago
    If you'd read his stuff it's crap, even Wittgenstein thought so in his later years.
    - lasagnaphil 5y ago
      Yeah, the 'later' Wittgenstein actually throws away a lot of his 'early' Wittgenstein and he actually admits that his quest for absolute undivisible logic was actually a bit embarrassing. The importance of his later works Philosophical Investigations seems to be underlooked in the article in favor of his earlier Tractatus, which is a bit sad. Wittgenstein's later work, although fiercely criticized by rigid supporters of logical atomism (such as Russell), seem to have contributed much more to the advancement of philosophy in overall.
- new_guy 5y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily say Wittgenstein is overrated but he became so 'good' because he bugged the sh*t out of Bertrand Russell. A bit like how George Harrison and Ringo Starr became so good because they were in the presence of Lennon and McCartney. Being around great people and in that kind of environment is what leads to these kinds of breakthroughs.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    maybe, but on the other hand Harrison was the technically most accomplished guitarist in the band and Lennon had commented that George was always asked to go jam with other musicians but he never was. Ringo Starr is often considered one of the great rock and roll drummers. I'd like to think they all became so good partly because they were in the presence of each other.
escape_goat 5y ago
I wish to celebrate Wittgenstein fans on this special day for them but in a certain sense everything changes philosophy for ever.
rendall 5y ago
Any way to read the article without giving your email away?
- sva_ 5y ago
  Bypass Paywalls Clean[0] works for me. I haven't audited it or anything though. Or just use https://outline.com/d2R5Dn https://outline.com/d2R5Dn [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
- bifftastic 5y ago
  Not meaning to be facetious, but it's in this week's hard copy.
  - realce 5y ago
    That was pretty funny.
- josu 5y ago
  https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA
logicchains 5y ago
I'd encourage everyone who's a fan of Wittgenstein to try reading Spinoza's "Ethics". Wittgenstein's Tractatus is basically just a rehash of the first half of that, but with the language updated to use a modern logical formalism. I.e. the words are different but the actual definitions given and structure of the argument are very similar. Wittgenstein even alludes to this in the name Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as Spinoza had another work titled Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Unfortunately it seems Wittgenstein didn't understand (or chose to reject) the second half of the treatise he borrowed from (which very roughly is "given this model of the world/ethics, a model of emotion, and a model of emotion as a function of the world/ethics, what doesn't it make sense to feel?"), and didn't live a happy life.
- thwave 5y ago
  There's a very interesting comparison to be made between Wittgenstein and Spinoza, but saying something like "basically just a rehash" completely missed the point. Saying that Spinoza is "just a rehash" of Stoic ideas is a bit more correct, and still not very interesting outside of a very specified discussion. The title "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was not Wittgenstein's idea, but Moore's.
edflsafoiewq 5y ago
The article does not seem to really say how Wittgenstein changed philosophy forever.
- mabub24 5y ago
  The Tractus had an impact, for sure. But, from my experience, more see his later works, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations, as far more influential. Wittgenstein is very fascinating because of this incredible turn in his work away from the intensely mathematical idea of philosophy towards one that was far more linguistic and anthropological. In arguments like the Private Language argument, Meaning as Use, Rule-following and forms of life, he advanced a philosophical position that disrupted a philosophical skepticism that formed the bed rock of philosophers like Descartes, and many that follow and that are still enthralled with the Cartesian picture. He advanced that a number of long standing philosophical questions were often non-sense, in the sense that they involved the misuse of language and grammar (in a Wittgenstein-ian sense aka, in the sense that one can explain the use and rules for the use of a word) into trails that cannot but lead to dead-ends. His arguments around pain, vision, and psychology, are also fascinating. Though some say it is a mischaracterization, I often find his writing from this era to be very therapeutic. He has a way of presenting arguments so that you can see through them.
  - mcshicks 5y ago
    I was going to say I found Philisopical Investigations much more interesting than Tractus.
  - nmyk 5y ago
    Just to add some color to your comment as I think the idea that philosophy can be therapeutic is counterintuitive for a lot of people: consider the loneliness of depression, a big part of which (at least for me) is the seemingly insolvable problem of being trapped in my own head. "No one else could possibly understand how I feel" seems to be true not even just for me, but for the human condition. We're not mind-readers. Nonsense, Wittgenstein seems to argue. If no one else could understand how you feel even in principle, then neither could you. If you can talk about it then people will understand, because we use the same words the same way. And when we don't, it's not because of some kind of epistemological solitary confinement - it's just a misunderstanding, and there are language games for resolving those too. You don't have to read philosophy to know that "no one else could possibly understand how I feel" is actually a common sentiment, though. The truly therapeutic part for me was the idea that even though there may be problems that can't be solved, they can sometimes be dissolved. (i.e. seeing the problem statement itself as nonsense)
ur-whale 5y ago
https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA
robin_reala 5y ago
Tractatus is available as a high quality and free/libre ebook from Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tractatus-logico-philosophicus/c-k-ogden https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta... (This publication was a driving factor us in our production pipeline coping with MathML, and the necessary SVGs.)
froh 5y ago
on a tangent Wittgenstein also had horrible family drama (several brothers taking their own lifes) and personal exploration of and uncertainty about homosexuality, and he went to the same school as Hitler at the same time, at a very similar age. http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2012/04/ludwig-wittgenstein.html?m=1 http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2012/04/ludwig-wittgenstein...
- fiftyacorn 5y ago
  Yeah the Hitler one was weird. He also lectured Alan Turing
- elefanten 5y ago
  No citations and the writing style make this feel like a pretty sketchy "thing on the internet".
  - froh 5y ago
    oh it matches all serious Wittgenstein biographies. back in the late 1980s in my catholic highschool we discussed in philosophy class that Wittgenstein was gay.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Both he and Heidegger did it. Buy I am not sure I have much respect of Heidegger.
choonway 5y ago
AlphaGo changed Chinese Philosophy way more than most westerners realize.
- slfnflctd 5y ago
  This comment is absolutely crying out for more elaboration. I tried to do a little searching on my own, but couldn't find anything close.
  - gonzo41 5y ago
    There's a netflix doco that you'll enjoy. But essential AI beat the game of go and the world wobbled for a moment but kept spinning.
  - NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
    The game is deeply connected to philosophy in China (Chinese philosophy), as in placing value of a mystical nature on mastering the game. AlphaGO made the pitch of deep wisdom can be found in go questionable. Just my take. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/in-the-age-of-google-deepmind-do-the-young-go-prodigies-of-asia-have-a-future https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/in-the-a... https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f3341444e/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f3341444e/index.html
    - guscost 5y ago
      > AlphaGO made the pitch of deep wisdom can be found in go questionable. Well sort of, but perhaps what it made questionable is the stronger pitch that wisdom translates to mastery of go.
      - NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
        It goes both ways, my take is how it was perceived by some is as improve in go=improve in wisdom
- jaratec 5y ago
memming 5y ago
"The key here is to understand that by constant-time, we don’t mean that operations can’t take a varying amount of time. Instead, we mean that the timing signal generated by our operations doesn’t leak any secret information."
- memming 5y ago
  I just realized that this comment was meant for another post. Sorry!
biztos 5y ago
Anyone interested in both Wittgenstein and film should see Derek Jarman's "Wittgenstein" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_(film) I don't know enough to comment on its biographical accuracy but it's a great weird movie by one of the greatest experimental directors of our age. [Edit: mentioned in TFA but very briefly. Not sure where to watch it now but... internets...]

115 points by jkuria 5y ago

I can't help but think that there was a certain special something that existed among that generation of late modern intellectuals immediately preceding and proceeding from the first world war. There's an intensity, a level of discipline and seriousness with which they engaged in their work that seems unique in human history. The twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, the Cubism of Picasso, Einstein's field theories, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All strove to break new ground and push the state of the art beyond what was comprehensible at the time with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today. They treated all of their endeavors, even the creative, with the rigor of a hard science and sought to construct theoretical frameworks around what had always been ephemeral, intangible notions.

sdvs9so 5y ago
I agree with this impression. I often reflect on our times and wonder why there seems to be such a stark difference. Why do we lack such figures, pushing the boundaries in the same impressive way? Is it that not enough time has passed to fully realize the impact of the discoveries and works of our time, like there has been for the work of the early 1900's? Have the problems gotten harder that we are bumping up against a kind of soft boundary that's preventing the seemingly frequent revolutionary breakthroughs? Or is it a matter separate from the practice of science or art; a phenomenon of culture that is impacting the our capacity to discover? I think it's an interesting question to mull over.
- rytill 5y ago
  Were the breakthroughs of history regarded as such during their formation, generally speaking? Maybe we will look back on this period as one rife with breakthroughs, but can’t make the historic judgment in real-time.
  - davidivadavid 5y ago
    In the case of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, there certainly was a perception that something radical was being done.
keiferski 5y ago
One theory is something like this: early modernism was so fruitful because those participating in it were still trained in classical methods. They mastered the rules before breaking them. Picasso is a good example. He broke the rules of art in creative ways because he had such a firm understanding of artistic methods. Nietzsche, with his deep grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin philology, is another modern innovator. Today, however, we’ve largely adopted the conclusions of the innovators. Rather than try and recreate what led to these breakthroughs in the first place. Discipline and training are mostly irrelevant in a world that is more concerned with novelty and shock value.
- raducu 5y ago
  Also, perhaps the fruits that can be masterly picked by single individuals have been picked already.
  - lisper 5y ago
    Yeah, this. And this IMHO is one of the reasons science is in crisis today, because in many ways it is still being conducted according to the late-19th- and early-20th-century models. Scientists are not generally rewarded for doing good science (e.g. replicating previous results or engaging in pedagogy), but rather for making Big Discoveries, because that’s what all the great scientists did before. Trouble is that as time goes by there are fewer and fewer Big Discoveries to be made, and making them gets more and more expensive, while at the same time there are more and more people graduating with STEM Ph.D’s. So you have more and more people chasing fewer and fewer opportunities for career rewards. Another perverse consequence of this dynamic is the pressure to publish any old crap because Big Discoveries are presented in papers and so it is assumed that papers will lead to Big Discoveries despite the obvious logical fallacy. Often it becomes a full-fledged cargo cult [1]. (I once made a very successful career by publishing a lot of crap, so I’m in a position to know.) Getting this right is a Really Hard Problem because there are entrenched interests for whom this poses an existential threat. There is a lot of power that comes from being an arbiter of truth in a society. (I think one of the great unsung heroes of humanity is Jimmy Wales. He could have cashed in bigly on Wikipedia, but he chose not to, and as a result Wikipedia is one of the greatest repositories of objective knowledge ever assembled. And it’s free. It’s a freakin’ miracle. Arxiv is also big step in the right direction IMHO.) [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.html https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.h...
mLuby 5y ago
Could be a coincidence, but that was just before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927) and Godel's incompleteness theorem (1931) dashed the dream of perfect knowledge.
- mannerheim 5y ago
  Wittgenstein famously did not believe in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, as well as thinking Cantor's diagonalisation argument was bunk.
  - bifftastic 5y ago
    Can you say more of either of these? Especially the diagonalization argument which seems difficult to, er, argue with.
    - mannerheim 5y ago
      You can find what he had to say on Cantor's argument here: http://www.logicmuseum.com/cantor/wittgensteinquotes.htm http://www.logicmuseum.com/cantor/wittgensteinquotes.htm These are excerpts, some paragraphs are missing, but the gist is more or less there and you can find the full discussion in 'Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'.
      - skoodge 5y ago
        Even the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are only a selection of some of Wittgenstein's notebooks made by the editors of his posthumous publications. It is not a work by Wittgenstein in the same sense as the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations. The Part II of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is the part on Cantor, is especially questionable. It is compiled from two documents of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, Ms-117 and Ms-121, but only about a third of the remarks in Ms-121 were included in the published book. There are also other notebooks were Wittgenstein discussed Cantor (most notably Ms-162a and Ms-126b) and which were not published at all. The editors made the decision to exclude some of these remarks because Wittgenstein's notebooks often contain merely drafts of remarks that were never fully developed, so it would be wrong to say that the published book is a deliberate misrepresentation of Wittgenstein's thoughts, but the situation is definitely quite nuanced and complex. I personally think that the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are very interesting, but that it's a disservice to Wittgenstein and any reader of his works to read his remarks on the philosophy of mathematics as a disconnected collection of aphorisms. The context really matters and his more mathematical remarks only make sense against the backdrop of the Philosophical Investigations and perhaps even his later writings such as On Certainty.
ycombinete 5y ago
Wittgenstein would have a very impressive DOTA MMR today.
- Galaxity 5y ago
  Thanks. I have whiskey is my nasal cavity now.
  - godfreyantonell 5y ago
    I don't drink anymore. I was still able to vividly imagine the sensation of whisky out the nose.
cutler 5y ago
The same is true in literature. Who today compares with Elliot, Yeats, Huxley, Orwell or the war poets? Maybe that seriousness of purpose is only possible when civilisation is in the balance.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  One figure hanging over Western poetry for the second half of the 20th century is Celan, and it is hard to claim he is inferior to Eliot or Yeats. And if you like this kind of serious poetry, I really recommend J.H. Prynne (start with The White Stones), who is still active even. The problem with poetry today is not a lack of talent, it is an inability for that talent to get mass attention when 1) poetry has been marginalized in today's media landscape, and 2) cultural scenes are now so fractured that people can't reach agreement on who is great and therefore keep the list of great poets going.
publicola1990 5y ago
Also James Joyce, and others like him.
astrange 5y ago
Wittgenstein was one of the richest heirs in Europe so at the least he had all the time in the world, and lived in a time with such little competition that they gave him a PhD for writing a non-academic book none of them understood. Looking at his biography, you feel like people were just hanging out with him because he was rich, since his personality was so bad and he clearly hated everyone he ever met.
- skoodge 5y ago
  To say that "people were just hanging out with him because he was rich" is a very biased and uncharitable reading of his biography. He gave away all his inheritance pretty early in his life and later often had to depend on friends such as Keynes, Russell and Moore to support applications for grants so that he could continue his research at Cambridge. Of course it's true that he came from an extremely privileged background and was never in danger of starving to death, but he could spend as much time on his philosophy as he did because he lived a modest life and was lucky enough to be supported by Russell when he first came to Cambridge.
coldtea 5y ago
>with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today. Jaded cynicism, crass commercialism, and the dissapearance of a cultured class that is above mass market culture, they way high/upper middle class, academics, doctors, etc., one were. Believe it or not, for example, once there was a class of people, more so in Europe, that not only went to the Opera, but also actually liked it, followed it, could get the references, and knew its history and the history of classical/romantic/etc music, the way their today's equivalent will know the pop stars of the day. Given the above, it's easy that soem of them would take e.g. the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky's innovations seriously, even if only to be offended by them - and some of, course, to be inspired. Today's equivalent would at best read something like the New Yorker and the hacks featured in NYT best-selling books of the day, but will seldom have the wide culture that once was quite widespread across parts of the middle and upper middle classes. People also seem more desperate to sell out quick for a quick buck - even artists today just want to play the game, go ahead with the galleries and agents, and give out much more easily than an early 20th century artist. This diminishes the period between "serious work" and "selling out", often to zero (whereas for Picasso it took decades, and for Van Gogh, it never happened).
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Believe it or not, not all of those people were middle class. The UK and the US both had programs which made classical music accessible to the working classes, and they had a significant cultural impact. In the UK the post-war BBC carried on with (what is called) the Reithian tradition (after Lord Reith) until marketisation started to overwhelm everything in the 80s. This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. It was about giving people experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise, and to give them more choices about what to listen to and maybe enjoy. The UK also had an art school track for bright creative working class kids, some of whom went on to make a living in music and/or fashion. Marketisation also destroyed that, because of course student debt destroys your choices and limits your options so you literally can't afford to take risks.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. Today it's almost forbidden culturally to even suggest that it coule even be (superior). The thing is, to say such a thing, you need some kind of shared cultural basis (of what's superior and what's not), one that even those who don't "like X" (the way we might like peanut butter or not), nonetheless agree on (and whether they care or not, feel like it's somewhat their loss for not liking it). Those times, had that (shared cultural agreement). In more modern times, after the 60s especially, and in the US doubly so, culture is whatever one makes it, the mass consumer is king (because everybody wants his/hers money, so they treat them as such), and personal taste is the be all end all, end of discussion. Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach, for example, would be so self-evident and accepted by all (for the Bieber's and Drake's of their era), as to not even be worth saying.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Things all work around that time. Physics aside even maths ...
decasteve 5y ago
I've been going deeper into the mid-19th century to pre-WWI era. I keep thinking that the war eras of the 20th century and industrial consumerism lost the diversity of ideas and art that preceded it. I've been diving into (or revisiting) Darwin, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoi, to name a few. It was an incredibly rich era that could help us better navigate this one. I get a sense that Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, had a better connection to it and could articulate warnings of where the mid-20th century might end up if it progresses on its path. I don't think we've ever been closer to realizing their warnings.
Inu 5y ago
Wittgenstein's take: >I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.
- skoodge 5y ago
  Here's another take by Wittgenstein from the preface of the Philosophical Remarks: "This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same." I can't help but feel that this description of the "vast stream" captures the current trend in most of software development and academia quite well...
  - javajosh 5y ago
    There is a beautiful give-and-take between the experience of variety (either consuming or producing) and the grasping of essence. They do not exist independently of each other, nor is one better inherently better than the other. They must be kept in balance, and yet the world seems to favor variety over understanding at every turn. Consider yourself lucky to be in the minority of those who appreciate what is truly rare and precious about humans, who are in turn a rare and precious part of life, which is in turn a rare and precious part of the universe.
  - biztos 5y ago
    > at its centre -- in its essence This desire is precisely what leads Faust to become so frustrated with the limits of human knowledge that he makes an ill-advised bet with (more or less) the Devil, trading an option on his immortal soul for the keys to that essence. In Goethe's Faust anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust
kolbe 5y ago
I think those same people are spending their mental energy on deciphering law, writing code, and trying to predict the stock market now.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Part of it is that there's just so many more people. Many more voices. And a louder speaker for them to yell into. And so much less reason to focus on any particular individual. You could spend your whole life studying philosophy/economics/political science, etc, write an amazing thesis, many volumes long, have all sorts of insights. And in terms of the world's massive population: how would you stand out? Would you be famous? Would people read you? Considered canon / important? Unlikely. You might get some notoriety, but that notoriety is more likely to spread to rather mediocre or showmen pop-philosophers like a Jordan Peterson (or their equivalent on the "left"). And in some ways knowledge of many kinds has been democratized, and information and materials more broadly available to all. So we're building a broader knowledge base and things are applied in that way, rather than by "great men"... which is likely the sign of a mature civilization and a more democratic ethos.
raflemakt 5y ago
Christopher Nupen has made an outstanding documentary about Viennese Radicalism portrayed in particular through Wittgenstein and Shoenberg. I can't recommend it enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRI_ZSh6iF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRI_ZSh6iF4

mmaunder 5y ago

Paywalled.

_aleph2c_ 5y ago

Freeman Dyson didn't think much of Wittgenstein: https://www.youtube.com/embed/byi3vOnVodQ?start=58 https://www.youtube.com/embed/byi3vOnVodQ?start=58

davidivadavid 5y ago
That didn't seem like a very substantial philosophical criticism.
- new_guy 5y ago
  If you'd read his stuff it's crap, even Wittgenstein thought so in his later years.
  - lasagnaphil 5y ago
    Yeah, the 'later' Wittgenstein actually throws away a lot of his 'early' Wittgenstein and he actually admits that his quest for absolute undivisible logic was actually a bit embarrassing. The importance of his later works Philosophical Investigations seems to be underlooked in the article in favor of his earlier Tractatus, which is a bit sad. Wittgenstein's later work, although fiercely criticized by rigid supporters of logical atomism (such as Russell), seem to have contributed much more to the advancement of philosophy in overall.
new_guy 5y ago
I wouldn't necessarily say Wittgenstein is overrated but he became so 'good' because he bugged the sh*t out of Bertrand Russell. A bit like how George Harrison and Ringo Starr became so good because they were in the presence of Lennon and McCartney. Being around great people and in that kind of environment is what leads to these kinds of breakthroughs.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  maybe, but on the other hand Harrison was the technically most accomplished guitarist in the band and Lennon had commented that George was always asked to go jam with other musicians but he never was. Ringo Starr is often considered one of the great rock and roll drummers. I'd like to think they all became so good partly because they were in the presence of each other.

escape_goat 5y ago

I wish to celebrate Wittgenstein fans on this special day for them but in a certain sense everything changes philosophy for ever.

rendall 5y ago

Any way to read the article without giving your email away?

sva_ 5y ago
Bypass Paywalls Clean[0] works for me. I haven't audited it or anything though. Or just use https://outline.com/d2R5Dn https://outline.com/d2R5Dn [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
bifftastic 5y ago
Not meaning to be facetious, but it's in this week's hard copy.
- realce 5y ago
  That was pretty funny.
josu 5y ago
https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA

logicchains 5y ago

I'd encourage everyone who's a fan of Wittgenstein to try reading Spinoza's "Ethics". Wittgenstein's Tractatus is basically just a rehash of the first half of that, but with the language updated to use a modern logical formalism. I.e. the words are different but the actual definitions given and structure of the argument are very similar. Wittgenstein even alludes to this in the name Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as Spinoza had another work titled Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Unfortunately it seems Wittgenstein didn't understand (or chose to reject) the second half of the treatise he borrowed from (which very roughly is "given this model of the world/ethics, a model of emotion, and a model of emotion as a function of the world/ethics, what doesn't it make sense to feel?"), and didn't live a happy life.

thwave 5y ago
There's a very interesting comparison to be made between Wittgenstein and Spinoza, but saying something like "basically just a rehash" completely missed the point. Saying that Spinoza is "just a rehash" of Stoic ideas is a bit more correct, and still not very interesting outside of a very specified discussion. The title "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was not Wittgenstein's idea, but Moore's.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago

The article does not seem to really say how Wittgenstein changed philosophy forever.

mabub24 5y ago
The Tractus had an impact, for sure. But, from my experience, more see his later works, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations, as far more influential. Wittgenstein is very fascinating because of this incredible turn in his work away from the intensely mathematical idea of philosophy towards one that was far more linguistic and anthropological. In arguments like the Private Language argument, Meaning as Use, Rule-following and forms of life, he advanced a philosophical position that disrupted a philosophical skepticism that formed the bed rock of philosophers like Descartes, and many that follow and that are still enthralled with the Cartesian picture. He advanced that a number of long standing philosophical questions were often non-sense, in the sense that they involved the misuse of language and grammar (in a Wittgenstein-ian sense aka, in the sense that one can explain the use and rules for the use of a word) into trails that cannot but lead to dead-ends. His arguments around pain, vision, and psychology, are also fascinating. Though some say it is a mischaracterization, I often find his writing from this era to be very therapeutic. He has a way of presenting arguments so that you can see through them.
- mcshicks 5y ago
  I was going to say I found Philisopical Investigations much more interesting than Tractus.
- nmyk 5y ago
  Just to add some color to your comment as I think the idea that philosophy can be therapeutic is counterintuitive for a lot of people: consider the loneliness of depression, a big part of which (at least for me) is the seemingly insolvable problem of being trapped in my own head. "No one else could possibly understand how I feel" seems to be true not even just for me, but for the human condition. We're not mind-readers. Nonsense, Wittgenstein seems to argue. If no one else could understand how you feel even in principle, then neither could you. If you can talk about it then people will understand, because we use the same words the same way. And when we don't, it's not because of some kind of epistemological solitary confinement - it's just a misunderstanding, and there are language games for resolving those too. You don't have to read philosophy to know that "no one else could possibly understand how I feel" is actually a common sentiment, though. The truly therapeutic part for me was the idea that even though there may be problems that can't be solved, they can sometimes be dissolved. (i.e. seeing the problem statement itself as nonsense)

ur-whale 5y ago

https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/TwwDA https://archive.is/TwwDA

robin_reala 5y ago

Tractatus is available as a high quality and free/libre ebook from Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tractatus-logico-philosophicus/c-k-ogden https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta... (This publication was a driving factor us in our production pipeline coping with MathML, and the necessary SVGs.)

froh 5y ago

on a tangent Wittgenstein also had horrible family drama (several brothers taking their own lifes) and personal exploration of and uncertainty about homosexuality, and he went to the same school as Hitler at the same time, at a very similar age. http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2012/04/ludwig-wittgenstein.html?m=1 http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2012/04/ludwig-wittgenstein...

fiftyacorn 5y ago
Yeah the Hitler one was weird. He also lectured Alan Turing
elefanten 5y ago
No citations and the writing style make this feel like a pretty sketchy "thing on the internet".
- froh 5y ago
  oh it matches all serious Wittgenstein biographies. back in the late 1980s in my catholic highschool we discussed in philosophy class that Wittgenstein was gay.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Both he and Heidegger did it. Buy I am not sure I have much respect of Heidegger.

choonway 5y ago

AlphaGo changed Chinese Philosophy way more than most westerners realize.

slfnflctd 5y ago
This comment is absolutely crying out for more elaboration. I tried to do a little searching on my own, but couldn't find anything close.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  There's a netflix doco that you'll enjoy. But essential AI beat the game of go and the world wobbled for a moment but kept spinning.
- NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
  The game is deeply connected to philosophy in China (Chinese philosophy), as in placing value of a mystical nature on mastering the game. AlphaGO made the pitch of deep wisdom can be found in go questionable. Just my take. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/in-the-age-of-google-deepmind-do-the-young-go-prodigies-of-asia-have-a-future https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/in-the-a... https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f3341444e/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f3341444e/index.html
  - guscost 5y ago
    > AlphaGO made the pitch of deep wisdom can be found in go questionable. Well sort of, but perhaps what it made questionable is the stronger pitch that wisdom translates to mastery of go.
    - NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
      It goes both ways, my take is how it was perceived by some is as improve in go=improve in wisdom
jaratec 5y ago

memming 5y ago

"The key here is to understand that by constant-time, we don’t mean that operations can’t take a varying amount of time. Instead, we mean that the timing signal generated by our operations doesn’t leak any secret information."

memming 5y ago
I just realized that this comment was meant for another post. Sorry!

biztos 5y ago

Anyone interested in both Wittgenstein and film should see Derek Jarman's "Wittgenstein" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_(film) I don't know enough to comment on its biographical accuracy but it's a great weird movie by one of the greatest experimental directors of our age. [Edit: mentioned in TFA but very briefly. Not sure where to watch it now but... internets...]