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…
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‘Philosophy’ has always been Bunk: Kant’s Noumena and Phenomena
(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…
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‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: Descartes
(First is the nub of what he said.) Let me jump to about 1637 AD for another example of the pottiness of Philosophy: ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – wrote Descartes. Descartes couldn’t convince himself he existed till it occurred to him that he was thinking! Therefore he must exist! Did he really think as an adult person that he couldn’t believe he existed until the…
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‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: Plato, his Universals and his Forms
the doc is now the definitive version now, 29’62022 Squeeze this in, from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/aristotle it’s a better explanation than what I’ve got below Plato argued that all sensible objects are related to some universal entity, or “form.” For instance, when people recognize some particular book for what it is, they consider it as an instance of a general type (books in general). This is a fundamental feature of human experience,…
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‘Philosophy’ has never been Wisdom: 1, Overview
29/06/ 2022 The document on this is now the up-to-date version ‘Philosophy’ has always been by the wrong kind of mind, a mind like those of annoyingly precocious schoolboys who are brilliant at mental arithmetic and at solving puzzles made of squiggly bits of wire, and who keep asking Why? What it lacks is human intelligence, a human sensibility to human life. (That last phrase, coined by Leavis for…
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Locke Proof of God Morality Anti-Philosophy
‘Philosophy’ has always been bunk: Locke 3, on God and Morality
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. …
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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 what I’ve written here. 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…
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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 ‘analytic’ and ‘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 the word…
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