Locke on God: Locke was an empriricist who believed that all of our knowledge comes ultimately from our senses, see my earlier post. So, he believed that we construct our idea of God from our sensory experiences of this world. Or, more precisely, from experiences of one’s own human existence: its duration, its knowledge, its power, its wisdom, and other admirablee qualities. And from our ‘reflections’, our thinking, on these qualities. …
Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: Locke 1, Empiricism
I thought that Locke, with his reputation as one of the first empiricists, would have just stated the obvious: That philosophers should believe the evidence of their senses like everyone else has always done. Mere words, with which we do our logicking, stem at least partly from our senses. This would have begun a liberation of philosophy from the logicking madness that had gone before. But no, he got there…
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Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: Locke 2, Politics
The USA’s Founding Fathers were influenced by John Locke’s concepts that mankind was endowed by nature with inalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that man at some stage had made a social contract with government to protect these rights. Both of them were in his Two Treatises of Government of 1690. Thomas Jefferson was well-versed in political philosophers of the Enlightenment. But. as stated…
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Analytic Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 21: Quine 2
Here follows a whole litany of Quine’s thoughts that I have failed to tie into my first post on him (here) but am afraid to omit for fear of leaving something important out. My philosophically retarded mind can’t even grasp some of them: From here: Another approach to Quine’s objection to analyticity and synonymy emerges from the modal notion of logical possibility. A traditional Wittgensteinian view of meaning [in his…
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Analytic Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 18: later Wittgenstein
The later Wittgenstein was drifting away from his original thoughts (which I had summarized here). He began to think now that meaningful language wasn’t just the picturing of sensory or scientific facts in the world (as well as logic and maths). He did such a volte-face that he now said in effect: Words mean what you use them for in the context you share with your audience (i.e. the ‘language-game’…
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Analytic Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: chapter 17: Early Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein’s thought is divided into early and late Wittgenstein. There was a radical break between them. The early W. said that statements, unless they are of logic or maths, only have meaning if they refer to facts. This stimulated other philosophers into Logical Positivism which said just about the same thing: ‘Facts’ have to be verifiable. But the later W. then did an about-turn and said that words mean what…
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Analytic Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 20: Quine 1
Quine is famous for saying that there is actually no difference between so-called ‘analytic’ and so-called ‘synthetic’ statements. The difference had first been recognized by Hume (or by even earlier empiricists) but only so named by Kant. It had, since then, become gospel in Philosophy.. The example of analytic statement that everyone gives is ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, which is inevitably and necessarily 100% true because of the definition of…
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Bertrand Russell Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 16: Bertrand Russell 4: break statements into logical atoms
(See the first two paragraphs of my first post on BR, here.) BR thought that many problems of Philosophy could be solved by exposing the hidden elements of meaning that statements are made of. Philosophy had always created insoluble pseudo-problems for itself by not exposing them. This was his Logical Atomism or Logical Analysis. Russell’s had previously tried to reduce mathematics to logic, which was called Logicism (see here). Now…
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Russell's epistemology Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 15: Bertrand Russell 3: What is Knowledge?
(See the first two paragraphs of my first post on BR, here.) Thirdly on Russell, here is a summary of his Epistemology: his understanding of what knowledge is and how we acquire it. [first published in his book The Problems of Philosophy (1912), continued in his Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), and in his article The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics (1914).] I am suddenly speechless on what to…
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Bertrand Russell Logicism Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk, 14: Bertrand Russell 2: boiling maths down to logic
(See the first two paragraphs of my first post on BR, here.) Russell’s attempt to show that mathematics is just glorified logic is called Logicism. It was a pretty convincing attempt. He published it in Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) which he wrote with Whitehead. This post is a summary of it, paraphrased from other sites that explain it for us. Logicism is in the philosophy of mathematics and consists of one…
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