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According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued. I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenste
by neilk 14y ago
According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued.
I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt.
Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.
- xenophanes 14y agoWittgenstein is the guy who got fired as a schoolteacher for violence against his students, and threatened a philosopher with violence when he was losing an argument. To be thought of merely as an eccentric is lucky for him, given his history. He was a thug.
- neilk 14y agoOh, I would not want Wittgenstein teaching any child of mine. He is one of the people who deserves to be called an Asperger's sufferer. He could be roused to fury if something wasn't up to his exacting intellectual standards. When he was an architect he once had workmen raise a ceiling by 30 mm (a little more than an inch) so the dimensions of the room could be perfect. There's something about his life, which I think many on this board could identify with -- he was at once extremely proud of his mind, but also aware that he was a victim of his own relentless obsessions. This is why it's almost heroic how, through rigorous, dedicated adherence to philosophizing, he was able to show that philosophizing was not everything.
- jasomill 14y ago"A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense." (LW, 1944)
- nqureshi 14y agoThis. Exactly this. I couldn't have said it better.