Philosophical Fragments

(Substantific Marrow can be bought at
http://stores.lulu.com/emersonj.)

What Was Wittgenstein?
A Naïve Reading of Descartes' Discourse on Method
Aristotle and Mollusc Sex
Kenneth Burke Faked it Too
The Heap
What Was Cratylus Trying to Say?
Parmenides and Chuang Tzu in Szechuan
The Correct Handling of Contraditions
Freud and Reality

What was Wittgenstein?

Bibliography

Cook, Francis,  Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, Penn State, 1977.

Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens, Harcourt, 1999.

Damasio, Antonio, Descartes' Error, Avon, 1994.

Finch, Henry Leroy, Wittgenstein: The Later Philosophy, The Humanities Press, 1977.

Finch, Henry Leroy, Wittgenstein: The Early Philosophy, The Humanities Press, 1971.

Gudmunsen, Chris, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, Macmillan 1977.

John Holbo on “The Literary Wittgenstein”:http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=2661

Mandel, Ross, “Heidegger and Wittgenstein: A Second Kantian Revolution”, in Murray, ed., pp. 259-270.

Mistry, Freny, Nietzsche and Buddhism, de Gruyter, 1981

Murray, Michael, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Yale, 1978.

Nishitani, Keiji, The Self-overcoming of Nihilism, SUNY, 1990.

Nishitani, Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, California, 1982.

Odin, Steve, Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism, SUNY, 1982.

Rorty, A. E.. ed., The Identities of Persons , California, 1976.

Schneider, Edgar, Discovering my Autism, Jessica Kingsley, 1999

Toulmin, Stephen and Janik, Allan, Wittgenstein's Vienna, Touchstone, 1973.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1958.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ed. Von Wright, Culture and Value, Chicago,1977,

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, “On Heidegger on Being and Dread” (1929 letter to Waisman); in Murray, pp. 80-84, with commentary by editor.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, “Lecture on Ethics”, 1929:
http://www.galilean-library.org/witt_ethics.html

Wittgenstein and Hitler: a wretched book

Wittgenstein, Popper, and the Poker

Tendentiously selected Wittgenstein quotations

An analytic philosopher claims that Wittgenstein's time is past:

In the English-speaking philosophical world Wittgenstein's influence has declined markedly in recent years and he is in danger of becoming a marginal figure. This is in no small part due to the shift in the centre of gravity in the philosophical world from Britain to the United States and the influence of WVO Quine who argued that there is no sharp dividing line between philosophy and science. (Link)

Cool Kafkaesque things Wittgenstein said that don't seem like they could come from a contemporary analytic philosopher

PI, p.101
Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot?

PI, p. 127
We see the straight highway before us, but we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.

CV, p. 54, 1946
Yes, a key can lie forever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for

Wittgenstein’s forebodings about the future of philosophy

CV, p. 61, 1947
I cannot found a school because I do not want to be imitated. Not at any rate by those who publish articles in philosophical journals.

CV, p. 66, 1948
It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I would like to imagine it. May it soon – this is what I wish for it – be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. (Draft PI Preface)

PI, p. x.
It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another--but, of course, it is not likely.

Things I claim a real analytic philosopher could never have said

Letter to Waismann, 1929
I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread.
(This statement was censored by Max Black when he published the letter).

CV, p. 24, 1933-4
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

CV, p. 56, 1947.
Don't, for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense (Unsinn)! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

CV, p. 80, 1949.
For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of Dummheit than up on the barren heights of cleverness. (See also p. 39, 1940, p. 50, 1946, and p. 57, 1947.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Malcolm's Memoir )
....a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes... and a philosophical treatise might contain nothing but questions.

Wittgenstein rejects academic ethics

TLP 6.41-6.42
The sense of the world must lie outside the world..… and so it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.

Wittgenstein tries to speak of the things he says can't be spoken of

TLP #6.371-6.372
The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.

TLP 6.52-6.521-6.522
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and that is the answer. The solution to the problem of life I seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is this not why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been able to say what constituted that sense…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Ethics talk, 1929
Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

CV p. 45, 1944
Go ahead, believe! It does no harm.

CV, p. 64, 1947
It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate committment to a frame of reference. Hence, although it's belief, it's really a way of living, or a way of assessing life.

CV, p. 53, 1946
Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.
(See also CV, p. 56, 1947).

CV, p. 83, 1949
It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we always have to reach some firm ground, either a picture or something else, so that picture which at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as superstition.

Wittgenstein shows his severe side

Notebooks (1914-16), Blackwell, 1961, 82e
What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I found the world!

Toulmin p 236 (From a 1926 letter to Engelmann):
“Anyway, I am not happy, not because my rottenness troubles me, but within my rottenness”.

CV, p 48-9, 1946
“The hysterical fear over the atom bomb being experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutaryhas been invented. The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: If this didn’t have something good about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, - our disgusting soapy water science (ekelhaften seifenwäßrigen wissenschaft). And certainly that’s not an unpleasant thought, but who can say what would come after this destruction? The people making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed.”

CV, p. 63, 1947
I believe that bad housekeeping within the state fosters bad housekeeping in familes. A workman who is constantly ready to go on strike will not bring up his children to respect order either.

CV, p. 71, 1948
I think that the way people are educated nowadays tends to diminish their capacity for suffering. .......Endurance of suffering isn't rated highly because there is supposed not to be any suffering -- really it's out of date.

CV, p. 86, 1950
The child is wicked, but nobody teaches it to be any different and its parents spoil it with their stupid affection.

A lot of puzzling stuff from the end of the Tractatus

#6.371-6.372

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages…. The modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.

6.41-6.42 The sense of the world must lie outside the world..…

....and so it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

6.43—6.431—6.432

The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy man…..

So to at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end….

God does not reveal himself in the world.

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.52-6.521-6.522

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

Of course then there are no questions left, and that is the answer. The solution to the problem of life I seen in the vanishing of the problem.

Is this not why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been able to say what constituted that sense….

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

#7 What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

The Way Out:

‘I’ is not the name of a person, nor ‘here’ of a place, and ‘this’ is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It’s also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.
(PI, p. 123, #410)

A Naive Reading of Descartes'
Discourse on Method

Dennis Des Chene of Washington University (St. Louis) has posted a very nice (albeit critical)  response to my Descartes piece. He believes that I lept to a few conclusions here and there, and of course he's right. Here at Idiocentrism, skillfully leaping to conclusions is the basic paradigm.

While I still think that the metaphysical pages in the Discourse are pretty flimsy and that Descartes' professions of orthodoxy are pretty fishy, it's unlikely that Descartes was actually an atheist.  I've been told that in Lucien Febvre's  Rabelais and the Problem of Unbelief it is shown that religious belief during that period was in such confusion that almost everyone accused almost everyone else of being an atheist -- without anyone ever actually advocating atheism. (I can't stand the way that Febvre writes, but I did skim the book).

This pushes me to my back-up position. St. Augustine himself ridicules the childish idea that God is an old man with a white beard up in Heaven, and calls God a "spiritual substance". However, the God of the Old Testament, and the God of most believers as well, seems more like the childish version of God (and a pretty harsh version, in the case of the God of Abraham). Augustine's definition allows you to call practically anything "God" -- but do these abstract Gods have anything to do with the God people worship?

Response by Des Chene: includes a very interesting comment by T. H. Huxley on Descartes' religion.

Aristotle and Mollusc Sex

Millner's review of Stott's Book

Pharyngula: Squid Porn, Part I / Part II / Part III

The sex life of the squid, according to me / Squid Sex: various sources

Aristotle, History of Animals, Book V (text cited here) /A more complete text of Aristotle, History of Animals. Book V / Aristotle dissected hermit crabs / Aristotle's biological texts, index page

Kenneth Burke Faked it Too

Apparently Burke had forgotten where he'd seen the phrase "trained incapacity", and the people trying to find it didn't know where to look. But economic historians did know. The subject recently (April 2007) came up on a History of Economics Societies discussion.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Instinct of Workmanship, and the State of the Industrial Arts, p. 347.

Hall, Robert A., Jr. "Thorstein Veblen and Linguistic Theory." American Speech 35.2 (1960): 124-30. (available through JSTOR).

Wais, Erin. "'Trained Incapacity': Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Burke" K.B. Journal 2.1 (2005): NP. Available at http://kbjournal.org/node/103

Dewey's "occupational psychosis" remains to be located.

Merton, Burke, and Dewey

The Heap

What was Cratylus Trying to Say?

Bibliography

Cornford, F. M., Plato and Parmenides, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.

Jowett, B. (tr.) Cratylus, in The Dialogues of Plato, Oxford, 1953.

Kahn Charles H. Language and ontology in the Cratylus. In Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek philosophy presented to Gregory Vlastos. Edited by Lee, Edward N., Mourelatos, Alexander, and Rorty, Richard. Assen: Van Gorcum 1973. pp. 152-176

Kahn, Charles H., The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge, 1979.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, The Concept of Representation, California, 1978.

Wheelwright, Philip, Heraclitus, Princeton, 1959.

Cratylus Wiki (cites me!) :-)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus, translated and introduced by Jowett

Parmenides and Chuang Tzu in Szechuan

Brumbaugh, R.S., Plato on the One, Yale, 1961.

Chang, Garma C.C., The Buddhist Teaching of Totality, Penn State, 1977.

Chen Chung-huan, "On the Parmenides of Plato", Classical Quarterly, o.s. XXXVIII.

------------- "The Problem of Homonymon in Plato's Theory of Ideas", Continent Magazine, Taipei, IX-10.

------------- "The Problem of Unity and the Concept of Substance", Continent Magazine, Taipei, III-5.

-------------[Chinese translation of Parmenides] Commercial Press, Beijing, 1982. (Written in Chungking during WWII).

------------ "What does Lao Tzu mean by the term 'Tao'". Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, Vol. 4, #2, 1964, pp. 150-61.

Cornford, Francis (tr), Plato and Parmenides, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957

Fang Tung-mei (Thomé), Creativity in Man and Nature, Linking Press, Taipei, 1980, "The Problem of Unity in the Philosophy of Plato", pp. 181-197.

Fang Tung-mei (Thomé), Hua-yen Tsung Chieh-hsueh, Taipei, 1981.

Girardot, Norman, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism, California, 1988.

Gudmunsen, Chris, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, Macmillan, 1977.

Halmos, P.R., Naive Set Theory, Springer, 1960.

Lau, D.C., The Tao Te Ching, U. Hawai'i, 1982.

Siu, R.G.H., The Portable Dragon, MIT, 1981.

Siu, R.G.H., Ch'i, A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life, MIT, 1974.

Smullyan, Raymond, The Tao is Silent, Harper, 1992/77.

Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion, Brill, 1977.

Vlastos, G., Platonic Studies, Princeton, 1973.

Wang, Hao, From Mathematics to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

Wang, Hao, Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to What We Know. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Paperback edition, 1987.

Watson, Burton, tr., Chuang Tzu, Columbia, 1968.
 

The Correct Handling of Contradictions
Among the Philosophers

Aporiae

Ford, Lewis, and Kline, George, eds. Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy, Fordham, 1983. (Kline, "Form, Concrescence, and Concretum", pp. 104 --146.)

Kline, George, Albert North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Sherburne, Donald, A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality, Indiana, 1966, pp. 127-8.

Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy?, Chicago, 1959, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing", pp. 221-233.

Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, Macmillan 1985.

Freud and Reality

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