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Wittgenstein himself went on to criticize parts of the Tractatus later in life. It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the mos

Wittgenstein himself went on to criticize parts of the Tractatus later in life. It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.

logicchains 11y ago
>It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand. Why's that? All moral propositions ultimately rest on either circular reasoning or unjustified assumptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, also see the argument in Wittgenstein's aforementioned Tractatus), so searching for absolute philosophical truth is doomed to failure. There's even a school of philosophy based around this approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism.
- danharaj 11y ago
  I didn't intend to imply that one should search for absolute philosophical truth. In fact, such an idea comes readily into conflict with my statement: it's just the search for an item on the menu that satisfies one completely extended to menu items that have not yet been written. If you define the success condition for the search to be arriving at the final truth, then yes, you are doomed to failure. That's definitely not my success condition for philosophical inquiry, but now we are getting into why I think philosophy is valuable, which is a bit out of scope here I think, because we both agree that philosophy is valuable. I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. At the very least one should put the Tractatus in context with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus is very assailable.
  - logicchains 11y ago
    >I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. I didn't mean to imply this, rather I meant it as a starting point, to give the commenter an example of a philosophical text that is more formal in its definitions, and hence might frustrate them less. I should probably have made it clearer though that I was just presenting the quote from Tractatus, not necessarily endorsing it.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      Well, then it seems that I take issue with your statement purely because I'm a jerk who thinks that the idea that philosophy should leave you less frustrated rather than more frustrated is a bad idea ;)

logicchains 11y ago

>It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand. Why's that? All moral propositions ultimately rest on either circular reasoning or unjustified assumptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, also see the argument in Wittgenstein's aforementioned Tractatus), so searching for absolute philosophical truth is doomed to failure. There's even a school of philosophy based around this approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism.

danharaj 11y ago
I didn't intend to imply that one should search for absolute philosophical truth. In fact, such an idea comes readily into conflict with my statement: it's just the search for an item on the menu that satisfies one completely extended to menu items that have not yet been written. If you define the success condition for the search to be arriving at the final truth, then yes, you are doomed to failure. That's definitely not my success condition for philosophical inquiry, but now we are getting into why I think philosophy is valuable, which is a bit out of scope here I think, because we both agree that philosophy is valuable. I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. At the very least one should put the Tractatus in context with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus is very assailable.
- logicchains 11y ago
  >I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. I didn't mean to imply this, rather I meant it as a starting point, to give the commenter an example of a philosophical text that is more formal in its definitions, and hence might frustrate them less. I should probably have made it clearer though that I was just presenting the quote from Tractatus, not necessarily endorsing it.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Well, then it seems that I take issue with your statement purely because I'm a jerk who thinks that the idea that philosophy should leave you less frustrated rather than more frustrated is a bad idea ;)