8 ms·

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

65 points by stefankuehnel 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago
It's on my list. Right below -- no, not "right" below; well below -- The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost
- lukev 3y ago
  Yeah completely agreed... who needs real philosophy or literature when we have Harry Potter fanfic that does both?
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    We just hope you are not referring to Dante with that.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Inane comment. No one said anything about other literature. So tell us: have you read it?
    - lukev 3y ago
      Sigh. Sarcasm is always lost on the internet. I was replying to the actually insane comment who said the Tractatus was well below Milton on his reading list (presumably to express how little any of them are worth his time…?) I’ve read all three for the record.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        And spelling is also apparently lost: "inane" not the same as "insane." And your "presumably" is quite wrong: that's your invention. I'd happily stack my life reading list against yours, anytime. Those other two are "hope to read someday." Tractatus is "unlikely."
- mdp2021 3y ago
  The Tractatus is around 150kb of aphoristic text. The Commedia is a poem that can be hardly separated from notes and contains many intentional layers of interpretation. If you value economy of effort, there is a possibility that you will find the Tractatus more digestible.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I actually would like to read Dante and Milton.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      You should. But remember that the Commedia is of the kind that requires an intensive, prolonged, long-term approach.
stolenmerch 3y ago
A tree diagram that shows the overall structure of the numbering system and propositions: http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Interactive: over nodes, bars...
nabla9 3y ago
For those new to TLP, may I suggest Nagel's 3-page layman intro as a starting point: Wittgenstein: The Only Genius of the Century?(1971) [pdf] https://philpapers.org/archive/NAGWTO.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/NAGWTO.pdf
- icepat 3y ago
  It would be also good to read Wittgenstein's later thought on this work. He completely reversed course in Philosophical Investigations, and the contrast between early and late Wittgenstein is almost as important as the text itself.
  - nabla9 3y ago
    Nagel's intro is for both, TLP and Philosophical Investigations, and explains the difference.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Text version (after new OCR): https://pastebin.com/iEgCpBQ4 https://pastebin.com/iEgCpBQ4 (It may still contain some errors)
KhoomeiK 3y ago
I always felt like the Tractatus was similar in form to Sanskrit sutra texts—especially those with hierarchical structure e.g. Panini's Astadhyayi [1]. In the Astadhyayi, a sutra can serve as the anuvritti (context) for a subsequent sequence of sutras, and further anuvrittis may be nested within. This results in a tree-like structure where to understand any individual sutra, one must traverse up the tree to gather all the relevant context. While the enumeration scheme doesn't explicitly capture anuvrittis as the Tractatus does, later commentators did considerable work to uncover the hierarchical structure required to understand the text by clearly identifying anuvrittis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C4%81y%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...
hprotagonist 3y ago
I’ve often thought that a lot of mental anguish in young Wittgenstein’s life could’ve been prevented if Gödel’s incompleteness work had come a little earlier and he could have known how big the windmill he was tilting at really was.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  What is the exact relation between Wittgenstein's philosophical work and Gödel’s incompleteness work?
  - skyechurch 3y ago
    This is a really good question. Wittgenstein himself didn't think much of it, and it is generally believed he didn't really understand it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/#WittGodeUndeMathProp https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/... Talking about the Tractatus, I would suggest that Godel's work would be considered "nonsense", in that it attempts to use (mathematical) language to describe language, which is an invalid operation. This opinion went very much out of fashion, I suspect because computers do these operations with great success, but I believe he is saying something deep about meaning here, not about symbolic manipulation at all. But Wittgenstein didn't publish anything after the Tractatus (except a spelling dictionary for rural Austrian schoolchildren), and what has been published posthumously is extremely difficult, so this is probably a question for a very small number of subject matter experts. So not me. I'd ve very interested in better-informed opinions.
    - beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
      Later Wittgenstein is not really "extremely difficult". But it does present an understanding of meaning and language and philosophy that is quite different from the TLP, many would say it is fundamentally different although there are disagreements. I don't really know if he would have much to say about Godel's work based on his later writings. He would probably have to much to say about how others have used Godel's work and concepts, though, to make questionable connections to other things. If anything he would probably be very critical of the idea that it has profound insight into anything beyond niche questions of higher order math and computation. It makes sense in that context, but then it would be similar to the philosophers he criticized as constructing houses of cards out of "language games" if you were to apply it to something to which it has no contextual relationship at all, in which you case you could say it is "nonsense" when it outsteps the bounds of sense. Later Wittgenstein is not really concerned with fundamental, Platonic, truth. In fact, he is outright critical of the very idea. His later writings are more about method. He's far more interested in clarification as the goal of philosophy. He wants to dissolve seemingly intractable questions to reveal how they are the product of nonsensical language games filled with mistaken assumptions.
bluetomcat 3y ago
The anti-philosophy philosopher who claims that other philosophers don't understand language :-)
- avmich 3y ago
  Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is (Guindon).
- ngcc_hk 3y ago
  The anti-philosophy philosopher tried to demo twice how all humans do not understand language, and that is including himself (and why the words about silence) and then later finding a round about way to let the butterfly off the jar. We are trapped by our language somehow. And I suspect the trap is our own trap. Just like a butterfly thought it has to open a door to escape and it can’t. The philosopher showed it by turning it around and demonstrate to it that it is always free. It is the attempt to open the lock that is the problem — because there is no lock.
zogrodea 3y ago
Those attracted to Wittgenstein's later thought like Philosophical Investigations would likely appreciate a lesser known philosopher's thought, that of R. G. Collingwood, too. I'm not alone in finding similarities (not plagiarism) in those two. A good, short introductory article on Collingwood is here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/how-the-untimely-death-of-rg-collingwood-changed-the-course-of-philosophy-forever https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/ho... And a quote from one of his books that reminds me of the private language argument: " This might seem to presuppose community of language between the speaker and hearer; for unless they were accustomed to use the same words, the hearer in using them to himself would not mean the same thing by them. But community of language is not another situation independent of the situation we have been describing, and prior to it: it is one name by which we refer to that situation itself. One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it. "The reader may object that if what is here maintained were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either for the hearer or for the speaker, that the one had understood the other. That is so; but in fact there is no such assurance. The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense. The question whether they understand each other solvitur interloquendo. If they understand each other well enough to go on talking, they understand each other as well as they need; and there is no better kind of understanding which they can regret not having attained." I find Collingwood to have more helpful insights for language and communication in general than Wittgenstein, because language as Collingwood explains it includes bodily gestures and, although he doesn't by any means neglect the spoken and written word (which are still important to him), he emphasises the importance of other types of language too. For example, to pull another quote: "Vocal language is thus only one among many possible languages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by a particular civilization, be developed into a highly organized form of emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that although any one of these languages might express emotion, vocal language has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent, function in the expression of thought. Even if this were true, it would not be of interest at the present stage in our discussion, for we are now dealing with language as it is before being adapted to serve the purposes of thought. As a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’" (Both quotes taken from The Principles of Art, where his main discussion of language is.)
acabal 3y ago
Definitely a singular and fascinating work. I produced a free ebook edition for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tractatus-logico-philosophicus/c-k-ogden https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...
stabbles 3y ago
It'd be great if more people had the audacity to say they've solved all problems in an academic field and then leave that field, instead of referring to that popular image that shows how your PhD is only a small dent/addition to the large circle of human knowledge.
- IKantRead 3y ago
  I also wished we had an academic world that valued that advancement of a field that wandering the world in thought and then showing up with a ground changing work was enough to get a Phd. It's hard to imagine a new Wittgenstein in the world, even with LW's connections, being able to show up at 40 years old with a work in hand, defend it and walk away with a PhD.
- epups 3y ago
  It's easier to do that when your field is relatively obscure, and when you're wrong.
dcre 3y ago
Once (in college I think) I was reading the Tractatus on a plane and the person sitting next to me asked “hey, whatcha reading?” I showed them the cover and the face they made was hard to describe but very memorable.
lisper 3y ago
IMHO, that this work is so highly regarded says more about the sad state of modern philosophy than it does about Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is linguistically and logically incoherent. For example: 1.1 The world is the totality of facts... 1.11 The world is determined by the facts... So which is it? Is the world identical with "the totality of facts" or is the world something separate from the facts whose nature is "determined by the facts"? It can't be both. To say nothing of the fact (!) that Wittgenstein never defines what he means by "fact". The standard Phil101 definition is that "a fact is that which is the case" but Wittgenstein writes: 1 The world is everything that is the case. So he uses the word "world" to mean what is usually denoted by "fact". So either facts are something other than "everything that is the case" or 1.1 is vacuous. And that's just the first three lines!
- Gormisdomai 3y ago
  In this critique have you considered that a way that that X can be logically determined by Y is by X just being Y.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Sure, but that's a vacuous observation. X being determined by Y is only useful when X and Y are somehow distinct. Simply having two different labels for the same object is not very interesting.
    - Gormisdomai 3y ago
      I would suggest that if one label is singular (the world) and the other is plural (the totality of facts) and you explain how the latter combine to form the former then the observation should be especially informative. In general pointing out that two labels point to the same object can be very informative and this is relevant for the context in which Wittgenstein was writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles
      - lisper 3y ago
richardanaya 3y ago
When your epistemological view is that all words are only representations of concepts of whim and not observation of reality, a lot of dumb ideas become possible, and Wittgenstein's is one of them. Woe to any person who gets lost in any of these ideas. If something in your gut says something wrong about a philosophy that's ultimate conclusion is "you can't say anything because you can't know anything", you should pay attention to it. To those who do, take the advice of your own teacher: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
- p_j_w 3y ago
  > “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If only…
hellothere1337 3y ago
From Freeman Dyson (a Physicist) interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byi3vOnVodQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byi3vOnVodQ Dyson: "...and next door to me there was Wittgenstein, who lived on the same staircase, and he always cooked for himself too, and so I used to cook my supper with the smell of fish from Wittgenstein's room next door." [Interviewer] And you got to get to know him? Dyson: "A little bit. Of course, Wittgenstein was a man who loved to torture people and so he invited me into his rooms one day - this was the closest contact I ever had with him, in fact. I mean, we passed each other very often on the stairs without speaking, but once he suddenly invited me into his rooms and said, 'Would you like to come and have a cup of coffee?' So I was thrilled, I said, 'Yes, I'll certainly come.' So I came in there and there was one chair, and he invited me to sit down in it, and it was a canvas deck chair which meant I was practically lying horizontally on this canvas chair, and he was standing uncomfortably waiting for me to say something, and so I found it acutely embarrassing, but in any case, I'd come in and so I thought I might as well try, and so eventually I decided I would start a conversation. So I said to him, 'Well, you know, I read the Tractatus and I'd be interested to know whether you still believe the things you said in the Tractatus or have you changed you mind?' And so Wittgenstein looked at me in a very, very hostile fashion and he said, 'Tell me please, which newspaper do you represent?' That was the end of the conversation. So there was another long silence, and then I drank the coffee and left. So I didn't get much out of Wittgenstein. I had the impression he was simply a charlatan. He loved to torture people and he was of course always extremely insulting to women. He couldn't tolerate women coming to his lectures, and he would just simply be so rude that they had to leave."
Gormisdomai 3y ago
A good place to start with understanding the context for Tractatus is reading about Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/
belfalas 3y ago
At university I had an acquaintance who was a philosophy major. His comment on Wittgenstein was: "it feels like the Tractatus is what he believes, and the Philosophical Investigations is what he can prove." Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.
__rito__ 3y ago
> The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. A notable harsh criticism (or the impossibility) of use of human languages to capture the reality can be found in Nagarjuna [0]. Nagarjuna's writings are esoteric. A gentle introduction can be the podcast episode [1] in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Prof. Peter Adamson. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna [1]: https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-change https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-change
niemandhier 3y ago
1. All that can be said are the statements of natural science. 2. The most powerful LLM is the sum of al that has been said. 3. No LLM can transcend the statements of natural science.
DieBruderBauer 3y ago
Another great book to read (which I read in college as a Philosophy major) is Timothy Williamson's Vagueness ...a brilliant magnum opus.
clbrmbr 3y ago
I do NOT recommend this book. Contemplation this book during college lead me into very difficult psychological territory, without any light at the end of the tunnel. Looking back, I was lead astray by the book’s false assumption that one formal system can capture all of philosophy. One is given the impression that Wittgenstein cracked the code of the mind-universe, and that if you cannot understand what he’s talking about, then you are just not cut out for intellectual work in this era. Of course I now realize that is hogwash, but it threw me for a loop at the time.
- clbrmbr 3y ago
  Reading some of the other very thoughtful comments on this thread, I realize the above probably says more about my psychology than it does about the TLP. Nonetheless, I think a cautionary tale is warranted here similar to long intensive meditation retreats… attempting to change your conception of the world based on TLP can break things!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RashidRefai 3y ago
Ask Ludwig Wittgenstein himself: https://knowtify.chat/gpinvite/vivVn2tN9Qagj85DZeqx/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein https://knowtify.chat/gpinvite/vivVn2tN9Qagj85DZeqx/Ludwig%2...

65 points by stefankuehnel 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

It's on my list. Right below -- no, not "right" below; well below -- The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost

lukev 3y ago
Yeah completely agreed... who needs real philosophy or literature when we have Harry Potter fanfic that does both?
- mdp2021 3y ago
  We just hope you are not referring to Dante with that.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Inane comment. No one said anything about other literature. So tell us: have you read it?
  - lukev 3y ago
    Sigh. Sarcasm is always lost on the internet. I was replying to the actually insane comment who said the Tractatus was well below Milton on his reading list (presumably to express how little any of them are worth his time…?) I’ve read all three for the record.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      And spelling is also apparently lost: "inane" not the same as "insane." And your "presumably" is quite wrong: that's your invention. I'd happily stack my life reading list against yours, anytime. Those other two are "hope to read someday." Tractatus is "unlikely."
mdp2021 3y ago
The Tractatus is around 150kb of aphoristic text. The Commedia is a poem that can be hardly separated from notes and contains many intentional layers of interpretation. If you value economy of effort, there is a possibility that you will find the Tractatus more digestible.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I actually would like to read Dante and Milton.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    You should. But remember that the Commedia is of the kind that requires an intensive, prolonged, long-term approach.

stolenmerch 3y ago

A tree diagram that shows the overall structure of the numbering system and propositions: http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/

mdp2021 3y ago
Interactive: over nodes, bars...

nabla9 3y ago

For those new to TLP, may I suggest Nagel's 3-page layman intro as a starting point: Wittgenstein: The Only Genius of the Century?(1971) [pdf] https://philpapers.org/archive/NAGWTO.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/NAGWTO.pdf

icepat 3y ago
It would be also good to read Wittgenstein's later thought on this work. He completely reversed course in Philosophical Investigations, and the contrast between early and late Wittgenstein is almost as important as the text itself.
- nabla9 3y ago
  Nagel's intro is for both, TLP and Philosophical Investigations, and explains the difference.
mdp2021 3y ago
Text version (after new OCR): https://pastebin.com/iEgCpBQ4 https://pastebin.com/iEgCpBQ4 (It may still contain some errors)

KhoomeiK 3y ago

I always felt like the Tractatus was similar in form to Sanskrit sutra texts—especially those with hierarchical structure e.g. Panini's Astadhyayi [1]. In the Astadhyayi, a sutra can serve as the anuvritti (context) for a subsequent sequence of sutras, and further anuvrittis may be nested within. This results in a tree-like structure where to understand any individual sutra, one must traverse up the tree to gather all the relevant context. While the enumeration scheme doesn't explicitly capture anuvrittis as the Tractatus does, later commentators did considerable work to uncover the hierarchical structure required to understand the text by clearly identifying anuvrittis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C4%81y%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...

hprotagonist 3y ago

I’ve often thought that a lot of mental anguish in young Wittgenstein’s life could’ve been prevented if Gödel’s incompleteness work had come a little earlier and he could have known how big the windmill he was tilting at really was.

bheadmaster 3y ago
What is the exact relation between Wittgenstein's philosophical work and Gödel’s incompleteness work?
- skyechurch 3y ago
  This is a really good question. Wittgenstein himself didn't think much of it, and it is generally believed he didn't really understand it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/#WittGodeUndeMathProp https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/... Talking about the Tractatus, I would suggest that Godel's work would be considered "nonsense", in that it attempts to use (mathematical) language to describe language, which is an invalid operation. This opinion went very much out of fashion, I suspect because computers do these operations with great success, but I believe he is saying something deep about meaning here, not about symbolic manipulation at all. But Wittgenstein didn't publish anything after the Tractatus (except a spelling dictionary for rural Austrian schoolchildren), and what has been published posthumously is extremely difficult, so this is probably a question for a very small number of subject matter experts. So not me. I'd ve very interested in better-informed opinions.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
    Later Wittgenstein is not really "extremely difficult". But it does present an understanding of meaning and language and philosophy that is quite different from the TLP, many would say it is fundamentally different although there are disagreements. I don't really know if he would have much to say about Godel's work based on his later writings. He would probably have to much to say about how others have used Godel's work and concepts, though, to make questionable connections to other things. If anything he would probably be very critical of the idea that it has profound insight into anything beyond niche questions of higher order math and computation. It makes sense in that context, but then it would be similar to the philosophers he criticized as constructing houses of cards out of "language games" if you were to apply it to something to which it has no contextual relationship at all, in which you case you could say it is "nonsense" when it outsteps the bounds of sense. Later Wittgenstein is not really concerned with fundamental, Platonic, truth. In fact, he is outright critical of the very idea. His later writings are more about method. He's far more interested in clarification as the goal of philosophy. He wants to dissolve seemingly intractable questions to reveal how they are the product of nonsensical language games filled with mistaken assumptions.

bluetomcat 3y ago

The anti-philosophy philosopher who claims that other philosophers don't understand language :-)

avmich 3y ago
Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is (Guindon).
ngcc_hk 3y ago
The anti-philosophy philosopher tried to demo twice how all humans do not understand language, and that is including himself (and why the words about silence) and then later finding a round about way to let the butterfly off the jar. We are trapped by our language somehow. And I suspect the trap is our own trap. Just like a butterfly thought it has to open a door to escape and it can’t. The philosopher showed it by turning it around and demonstrate to it that it is always free. It is the attempt to open the lock that is the problem — because there is no lock.

zogrodea 3y ago

Those attracted to Wittgenstein's later thought like Philosophical Investigations would likely appreciate a lesser known philosopher's thought, that of R. G. Collingwood, too. I'm not alone in finding similarities (not plagiarism) in those two. A good, short introductory article on Collingwood is here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/how-the-untimely-death-of-rg-collingwood-changed-the-course-of-philosophy-forever https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/ho... And a quote from one of his books that reminds me of the private language argument: " This might seem to presuppose community of language between the speaker and hearer; for unless they were accustomed to use the same words, the hearer in using them to himself would not mean the same thing by them. But community of language is not another situation independent of the situation we have been describing, and prior to it: it is one name by which we refer to that situation itself. One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it. "The reader may object that if what is here maintained were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either for the hearer or for the speaker, that the one had understood the other. That is so; but in fact there is no such assurance. The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense. The question whether they understand each other solvitur interloquendo. If they understand each other well enough to go on talking, they understand each other as well as they need; and there is no better kind of understanding which they can regret not having attained." I find Collingwood to have more helpful insights for language and communication in general than Wittgenstein, because language as Collingwood explains it includes bodily gestures and, although he doesn't by any means neglect the spoken and written word (which are still important to him), he emphasises the importance of other types of language too. For example, to pull another quote: "Vocal language is thus only one among many possible languages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by a particular civilization, be developed into a highly organized form of emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that although any one of these languages might express emotion, vocal language has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent, function in the expression of thought. Even if this were true, it would not be of interest at the present stage in our discussion, for we are now dealing with language as it is before being adapted to serve the purposes of thought. As a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’" (Both quotes taken from The Principles of Art, where his main discussion of language is.)

acabal 3y ago

Definitely a singular and fascinating work. I produced a free ebook edition for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tractatus-logico-philosophicus/c-k-ogden https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...

stabbles 3y ago

It'd be great if more people had the audacity to say they've solved all problems in an academic field and then leave that field, instead of referring to that popular image that shows how your PhD is only a small dent/addition to the large circle of human knowledge.

IKantRead 3y ago
I also wished we had an academic world that valued that advancement of a field that wandering the world in thought and then showing up with a ground changing work was enough to get a Phd. It's hard to imagine a new Wittgenstein in the world, even with LW's connections, being able to show up at 40 years old with a work in hand, defend it and walk away with a PhD.
epups 3y ago
It's easier to do that when your field is relatively obscure, and when you're wrong.

dcre 3y ago

Once (in college I think) I was reading the Tractatus on a plane and the person sitting next to me asked “hey, whatcha reading?” I showed them the cover and the face they made was hard to describe but very memorable.

lisper 3y ago

IMHO, that this work is so highly regarded says more about the sad state of modern philosophy than it does about Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is linguistically and logically incoherent. For example: 1.1 The world is the totality of facts... 1.11 The world is determined by the facts... So which is it? Is the world identical with "the totality of facts" or is the world something separate from the facts whose nature is "determined by the facts"? It can't be both. To say nothing of the fact (!) that Wittgenstein never defines what he means by "fact". The standard Phil101 definition is that "a fact is that which is the case" but Wittgenstein writes: 1 The world is everything that is the case. So he uses the word "world" to mean what is usually denoted by "fact". So either facts are something other than "everything that is the case" or 1.1 is vacuous. And that's just the first three lines!

Gormisdomai 3y ago
In this critique have you considered that a way that that X can be logically determined by Y is by X just being Y.
- lisper 3y ago
  Sure, but that's a vacuous observation. X being determined by Y is only useful when X and Y are somehow distinct. Simply having two different labels for the same object is not very interesting.
  - Gormisdomai 3y ago
    I would suggest that if one label is singular (the world) and the other is plural (the totality of facts) and you explain how the latter combine to form the former then the observation should be especially informative. In general pointing out that two labels point to the same object can be very informative and this is relevant for the context in which Wittgenstein was writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles
    - lisper 3y ago

richardanaya 3y ago

When your epistemological view is that all words are only representations of concepts of whim and not observation of reality, a lot of dumb ideas become possible, and Wittgenstein's is one of them. Woe to any person who gets lost in any of these ideas. If something in your gut says something wrong about a philosophy that's ultimate conclusion is "you can't say anything because you can't know anything", you should pay attention to it. To those who do, take the advice of your own teacher: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

p_j_w 3y ago
> “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If only…

hellothere1337 3y ago

From Freeman Dyson (a Physicist) interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byi3vOnVodQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byi3vOnVodQ Dyson: "...and next door to me there was Wittgenstein, who lived on the same staircase, and he always cooked for himself too, and so I used to cook my supper with the smell of fish from Wittgenstein's room next door." [Interviewer] And you got to get to know him? Dyson: "A little bit. Of course, Wittgenstein was a man who loved to torture people and so he invited me into his rooms one day - this was the closest contact I ever had with him, in fact. I mean, we passed each other very often on the stairs without speaking, but once he suddenly invited me into his rooms and said, 'Would you like to come and have a cup of coffee?' So I was thrilled, I said, 'Yes, I'll certainly come.' So I came in there and there was one chair, and he invited me to sit down in it, and it was a canvas deck chair which meant I was practically lying horizontally on this canvas chair, and he was standing uncomfortably waiting for me to say something, and so I found it acutely embarrassing, but in any case, I'd come in and so I thought I might as well try, and so eventually I decided I would start a conversation. So I said to him, 'Well, you know, I read the Tractatus and I'd be interested to know whether you still believe the things you said in the Tractatus or have you changed you mind?' And so Wittgenstein looked at me in a very, very hostile fashion and he said, 'Tell me please, which newspaper do you represent?' That was the end of the conversation. So there was another long silence, and then I drank the coffee and left. So I didn't get much out of Wittgenstein. I had the impression he was simply a charlatan. He loved to torture people and he was of course always extremely insulting to women. He couldn't tolerate women coming to his lectures, and he would just simply be so rude that they had to leave."

Gormisdomai 3y ago

A good place to start with understanding the context for Tractatus is reading about Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/

belfalas 3y ago

At university I had an acquaintance who was a philosophy major. His comment on Wittgenstein was: "it feels like the Tractatus is what he believes, and the Philosophical Investigations is what he can prove." Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.

__rito__ 3y ago

> The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. A notable harsh criticism (or the impossibility) of use of human languages to capture the reality can be found in Nagarjuna [0]. Nagarjuna's writings are esoteric. A gentle introduction can be the podcast episode [1] in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Prof. Peter Adamson. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna [1]: https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-change https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-change

niemandhier 3y ago

1. All that can be said are the statements of natural science. 2. The most powerful LLM is the sum of al that has been said. 3. No LLM can transcend the statements of natural science.

DieBruderBauer 3y ago

Another great book to read (which I read in college as a Philosophy major) is Timothy Williamson's Vagueness ...a brilliant magnum opus.

clbrmbr 3y ago

I do NOT recommend this book. Contemplation this book during college lead me into very difficult psychological territory, without any light at the end of the tunnel. Looking back, I was lead astray by the book’s false assumption that one formal system can capture all of philosophy. One is given the impression that Wittgenstein cracked the code of the mind-universe, and that if you cannot understand what he’s talking about, then you are just not cut out for intellectual work in this era. Of course I now realize that is hogwash, but it threw me for a loop at the time.

clbrmbr 3y ago
Reading some of the other very thoughtful comments on this thread, I realize the above probably says more about my psychology than it does about the TLP. Nonetheless, I think a cautionary tale is warranted here similar to long intensive meditation retreats… attempting to change your conception of the world based on TLP can break things!

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RashidRefai 3y ago

Ask Ludwig Wittgenstein himself: https://knowtify.chat/gpinvite/vivVn2tN9Qagj85DZeqx/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein https://knowtify.chat/gpinvite/vivVn2tN9Qagj85DZeqx/Ludwig%2...