/lit/ - Literature

>whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent

so then, dumb question for wittgenstein-anons.

how do you explain witch-burnings or heresy? it's true that today we can say, well, okay, the people who burned heretics also should not have spoken either. what happens if someone burns someone else as a heretic?

what happens if someone commits a crime?

except that people are always speaking. you can't prevent people from speaking unless you put them in monasteries. and some people don't want to be put in monasteries.
>tfw you should be put in a monastery
>this is true
>still tho

i like wittgenstein but i wonder about this. would we have wanted einstein to be silent? socrates maybe should have been silent. was it a good idea to kill him?

what about the greek tragedians? we can say, oh come on, there are no gods or furies. don't be crazy. be silent. but those plays are good and important.

i get the idea of quietism but i have these kinds of questions about it.
>so, you should be silent until you don't have them
>cannot argue with this
>&c

>>10156256
I guess a broken clock is right twice a day, and truisms aren't completely useless

>>10152313
I can't agree with this whole "metaphysics is useless" thing. Take Thales; he opposed the idea that "everything is actually made of water" to the traditional fourfold understanding of the world (earth, wind, water, fire) because the ancient Greeks lacked a proper conception of a unified existence. The Western world had a hard time with the concept of existence until Duns Scotus. But the problem wasn't that no one knew what existence was, the problem was that the different ways of expressing this concept seemed irreconcilable due to linguistic hang ups. So I would say that there's a way to do metaphysics "wrong," that way being to treat it as an empirical project , while the "right" way to do it is to treat it as a logical project, specifically one that works toward the clarification of language. Metaphysics is philosophically useful because it provides a gymnasium for tautology, a place where one can hone one's understanding of tautology and apply it to other areas of philosophy.