Here, for the next almost 2 pages, is the nub of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein exposed language mistakes at the heart of Philosophy.  So much so that he felt that Philosophy ought to give up and concentrate on curing them.  But it seems to me he didn’t take his own advice and continued churning out Philosophy. His thought is divided into early and late. There was a leap between them. His first…

(I’ve kept all parts of Kant on Knowledge together, so this chapter is awfully long.  The nub of it is down to the first horizontal line.  Takethe rest in easy stages.  I’ve left Kant’s Ethics to another chapter.) Kant felt he had achieved a revolution of Copernican proportions in Philosophy by coming up with hisTranscendental Idealism — which very roughly is that we can never know things in themselves as…

It is another example of the pottiness of Philosophy. This first page down to the first horizontal line gives the nub:                                                                                                   …

‘Philosophy’ has never been Wisdom: 4, Plato’s Universals and Forms (The ‘Socratic Problem’ is that Socrates never wrote anything down.  All we have is what Plato wrote as having been said by him.  So we don’t really know what of it was Plato’s own thinking or that of Socrates. Plato ascribed the theory of Universals and Forms to Socrates, but it is usually ascribed to Plato.) The nub of this…

My university course in Philosophy astonished me from the moment the professor first opened his lips.  It sounded like something from those schoolboys who are brilliant at mental arithmetic and at solving puzzles made of squiggly wire.  I couldn’t believe that was what Philosophy was. It certainly didn’t sound like Wisdom to me. It was Wisdom, I thought, for people of rationalistic mind (using ‘rationalistic’ in the modern sense of…