This is not an academic text. It is not even a serious one, you could think. And, what’s even worse, it is of no use to you. Maybe it’s a subterfuge I use to express my own boorish ideas about this and that and everything else, as you might eventually suspect.
However, I try to pass it for a small presentation of Wittgenstein’s views. I do not assume that you know who this Wittgenstein guy was, so I’ll tell you right away: he was a philosopher. By the way, you don’t have to know what philosophy is. 🙂
Philosophers are human beings like you and me (At least this is what they please to believe). Their main occupation is to wonder at different things and to ask questions about them, much like little children do. What sorts of things? Well, to take only a few: God, the Truth, the Meaning of Life, the Immortality of the Soul, How Should One Live a Good Life and so forth.
Why do they do this? Haven’t you ever thought of anything of the like? Well, ask yourself, then, why did you do it? If you have no clue, then we might get along quite nicely, ’cause I haven’t got an answer to that myself.
“But why, then, do philosophers spend more time with this sort of activity than other people?”
Why do some people enjoy being hurt and abused? Beats me! This is not even a philosophical question but a scientific one. Perhaps it will come up that it has to do with your genes or your brains or the evolution of the species or something like that.
On the other hand, philosophical problems can never be solved by using scientific methods. Not all the philosophers would agree on this, of course, because there is hardly a thing on which all philosophers would agree, but those who don’t agree on this aren’t really philosophers, methinks.
So who was this Wittgenstein, anyway? I suppose you’re not interested into his life, but into his ideas. Now, his ideas were a little tricky and he also changed them a lot during his life, so keep paying attention! 🙂
One of the most important of his claims was that philosophy is nonsense. This one he held throughout his entire life.
He sometimes called his own activity the successor of the philosophy. Apparently, he thought the old way of doing philosophy was dead, and it had a successor which inherited the name “philosophy”, but was a completely different activity.
What was that which he was doing, anyway? Mainly, he was trying to prevent other fellows from doing philosophy. Strange as it may sound, he actually thought that he might succeed to do this by showing them that they were all wrong.
[to be continued]
I was reading today on wired.com the 42 of the biggest questions in science: “How did life begin? What’s the universe made of? Why do we sleep?”
Even if we can find the answers to the biggest questions in science, this will only satisfy our curiosity. I sincerely doubt that an answer to “What’s the universe made of?” can tell us more about the meaning of our lives in this universe.
However, what if we ask ourselves about god, about our soul and about our death? These questions or the answers to them can change the way we see the world.
As I understand from this post the way we tried to answer “the big questions of life” was wrong. I am looking forward to see an alternate view. 🙂
If I were the author of the article I would have started with : Wittgenstein, my favourite philosopher : Althoguh isolated and thought to be gay, Wittgenstein influenced the world of logic and philosophy with his claims. One of his greatest achievements was realising that philosophy is generally nonsense 😛
@alex: 10x for your comment; there are lots of people, to my knowledge, believing that science can give you the answers to all the big questions (including questions about god, life after death, the meaning of life a.s.o.);
I think Dawkins is a good example in this sense. Wittgenstein, otoh, took an entirely different path. In this respect his view is similar to the views of other “traditional philosophers”.
He diverges from them, however, when to “science cannot answer these questions” he adds: “and neither can philosophy” (this is still a blunt way of putting it, but I want to avoid spoilers 🙂 ).
@krossfire: “the world of logic”!? What was that again!? 🙂 The only worlds of logic are possible worlds (according to the standard semantics for modal logic). I don’t think W influenced any of those. 🙂
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The world of logic, as in ”the domain of logic”, since this was his primary ”qualification”.
@krossfire: actually, he has first studied engineering 🙂
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hee hee…nice one. made me more interested in Wittgenstein
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