/lit/ - Literature

Start with the Greeks

Analytic autism needs to stop existing. Stop enabling it.

>>11660031
>t. continental cuck who can't into logic

>>11660023
Thats a really long way back... or is it? frankly, i know very little about philosophy, other than that plato was a cunt.

>>11660031
Is this a shitpost or are you serious?
Regardless, i need to learn about him for study reasons, as well as for personal interest.

>starting with Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a terrible idea
Yep, it would be. That book is useless without a guide, and once you have a good guide the text itself is basically redundant. Start with Philosophical Investigations. I don't think a guide is strictly necessary for that, or even a good place to begin.

OP, i will ask differently. How about I start with philosophical investigations? Will i get rekt?

TLP isn't the greatest place to start. Philosophical Investigations would be good, or even the Ray Monk biography on Wittgenstein, terrific.

>>11660031
>Wittgenstein
>Analytic

t. complete retard that doesn't even have a philosophy 101-tier knowledge of the history of philosophy. Sure he exerted a profound influence on the analytic tradition, but he was also an anti-rationalistic mystic and at times extremely obscure.

>>11660043
>>11660049
Was literally just going to ask about this. Thank you, kind anons.

>>11660054
Language games usually put him in the analytic category so thats the right way to call him

Thank you everyone who helped. I will look into Philosophical Investigations.

What about Watzlawick? Can anyone recommend where to start, or a good summary of his work?

>>11660031
>Stop discussing ideas I don't agree with

>>11660048
No you won't get rekt. Anyone pretty much can read that book and get something from it. How much you get out of it will depend on how much effort you put into it, thinking through it's ideas and their consequences. But it's certainly not like climbing a mountain to read, if that's what you are worried about. It's as hard as you make it.

>>11660017
anyone who tells you to start with PI and then move on to TLP is a straight up brainlet

Start with basic logic and set theory, read some Frege and perhaps Russel, then dive into TLP and end with PI

>>11660299
t. pseud. Starting with PI has been obvious to generations of philosophy tutors.

>>11660325
>t. pseud
>"philosophy tutors"

wittgenstein seems to me like the last great 19C philosopher. i don't really know why.

>probably because it's wrong

still

>>11660382
>>11660325
Hey guys, Im a pseud too! please accept me as one of you? What do i do?

>>11660382
>type a meaningless post
>attach a cartoon image to it

The more intellectually inferior I feel, the better with you wonderful people:)

>>11660325
>Starting with PI has been obvious to generations of philosophy tutors.
Probably a good reason not to start with PI then

>>11660453

>>11660462
Whaddya doing here Bugs, this a serious philosophical discussion, there are no carrots here and im not a doctor.

Disregard everything else you've read in this thread.

I'll tell you. You'll want to skip the Tractatus for later because I just know you won't know what the fuck he is talking about. You'll want to read his notebooks, Philosophical Investigations, the blue book, and On Certainty.

Wittgenstien is famed for his aphoristic style. So you can read him in bite sized chunks paragraph by paragraph. Each paragraph is its own distinct thought, and provides its own basis. So just dig into an aphorism and try to sort out what you think.

>>11660299
although anyone who uses the word brainlet is automatically suspect, this guy is kinda correct

PI is partly a critique of the very theory he espouses in TLP.
You don't need to understand Russell and Frege's technical ideas (which are surprisingly not that relevant) but you do have to understand their framework.

so
1) read standford encylopedia on frege and then russell. only the language and logic bits. do read about frege's arithmetic

2) read TLP with a guide.

i read it when i was a precocious 14 year old and it was basically incomprehensible. i read it again a few years later with a guide and it was actually quite clear. the difficulty is not exagerated. most people did not understand it when it was published. including ludwig. read something post-1970

3) read PI. then on certainty. the other books arent that relevant
then read a guide of PI

4) throughout -- you might want to read Duty of a Genius like he said >>11660049
it's not that important to understanding his work. but its incredibly well written and entertaining

also i should say: there does seem to be an "allure" about wittgenstein. people want to read the philosophy of that enigmatic austrian with those piercing intense eyes.
but if you actually care about the theories, you should probably read frege and russell for their own sake -- regardless of their necessity for understanding witt

>>11660679
>Each paragraph is its own distinct thought
applied to PI -- which is literally just a collection of posthumous notes -- then yes

but applied to something so highly structured as TLP?? what do you mean here.

>have been increasingly interested in Wittgenstein
>see thread
>realize that I haven't looked up Wittgenstein's books yet
>google
>encounter "On Certainty"
>interesting
>"The book's concerns are largely epistemological, its main theme being that there are some things which must be exempt from doubt in order for human practices to be possible (i.e. 'doubt' being a practice as well)."
>"Another important point is Wittgenstein's claim that all doubt is embedded in underlying beliefs and therefore the most radical forms of doubt must be rejected since they form a contradiction within the system that expressed them. Wittgenstein also provides a novel refutation of various forms of philosophical skepticism."
>mfw
Does the philosophy rabbit hole never end, anons? I thought that philosophical skepticism was at least relatively secure, but Wittgenstein hasn't failed me yet...

>>11660816
philosophical scepticism has always been pretty stupid

>>11660679
For consensus: this is the right idea.

>>11660842
My current understanding is that essentially nothing is really absolutely confirmable -- including unconfirmability itself, a world without absolutes always being open to the sudden entrance of the absolute -- or at the very least if there are absolutes they are not knowable/available to humanity, particularly individual persons but also humanity overall. The only thing, to my current understanding, that could really be argued to be properly "known" is sense experience or "minding" in the present moment, memory and selfhood and language and reason all being cast in some level of doubt. The response is then a pragmatism in the tradition of Peirce and William James, in which one operates on probablistic or provisional truths (i.e. practical assumptions) as a method of getting around, accomplishing things, etc., in contrast to the dysfunctional skepticism of the Greek Sceptic school.

I would appreciate having any errors in the above thought process teased out.

the american pragmatist tradition is a bit unfashionable.
the main problem is (W james) defines truth as "useful to the believer" (he went through variations of this sort of definition)

the problem is that we are often in situations where the usefulness of a belief exists only if it is True (in the sense of corresponding to reality)

for example: you have lost your dog. i say "don't worry, believing your dog is safe will be useful to you!" -- does that assure you? ""knowing"" (in the strong pragmatic sense) that you dog is sage?

not really. it sort of fails its own test. we use "truth" and "false" in order to increase our accuracy (a la correspondence theory) of beliefs.

>>11660887
>>11661030
in terms of the classic sceptic argument:
1) you dont know you arent a brain in a vat
2) if you have hands then you arent a BIAV
therefore 3) you dont know you have hands

then the responses are
1) accept conclusion (greek sceptics, though different conception)
2) deny the first (descartes) from by deducting that you arent a BIAV
3) deny the first FROM the fact the conclusion is false (moore)
4) shrug your shoulders (hume)
5) [most fashionable rn] deny that "know" in the assumption is a different "know" in the conclusion (epistemic contextualism)

>>11661030
I totally agree that it was a mistep on James' part to refer to useful beliefs as "true," which is why I hedged with phrases like probablistic truth, provisional truth, practical assumption, etc. I think that his willingness to use the word "truth" as in "personal truth" was in part due to his sympathy to religious believers and his dislike of neo-Hegelian certainty-claims. While not popular in philosophy, Jamesian pluralism and pragmatism are clearly related to modern relativism and pursuit of "personal meaning," although James himself conceded that pragmatism was really a systemization of what the common folk did to begin with, so his philosophies on this point may be the product of this trend rather than vice versa.

I would argue that Jamesian practical assumptions are defensible insofar as, in your dog example, blindly ignoring the possibility that your dog is not safe is not necessarily the most useful response. It is certainly useful (in an organismic sort of way, which is of course what James was getting at) to hope that your dog is safe, but if one is interested in their dog's safety they must be willing to consider that their dog is not safe and take appropriate action. The dog's situation is not known, but both possibilities are in a certain way simultaneously assumed, offering the fruit of both emotional solace and prudent action.
>>11661060
1) My stance.
2) Deduction itself is questioned.
3) Doesn't Moore's hand argument hinge of common sense intuition? My intuition is different.
4) Hume's thought, I think, aligns somewhat with my interest in pragmatism. Practical assumptions, while not truths, are taken to be stronger/more useful assumptions if scientific empiricism/previous experience is supportive of them. I have to admit, here, that having spent some time with STEM research has influenced me on this point.
5) I am unsure what you mean by this, but I smell language games. Could you expand on this point?

>>11661030
that's not what pragmatism is though, at least not for Peirce. it's not a matter of 'usefulness' as you describe. it's instead that the meaning of a conception/thing is merely the aggregate of all of its consequences/observations.

>>11661254
Isn't that basically Hume?

>>11661254
im aware -- im talking mainly about James, who uses it to claim religious knowledge is legitimate

>>11660054
>antirational mystic
whats your proof of this meme besides him saying "mystical" once, telling you to shut the fuck up and kicking away the ladder

who would you rather have as an analyst, lacan or wittgenstein?

>>11661030
>>11661060
>>11661238
>>11661254
>no response

>>11661866
lots of things are used for the more "mystical" interpretation -- partly his personal life

>>11661238
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contextualism-epistemology/

essentially:

almost everyone prescribes to JTB+
that is, knowledge is Justified True Belief (with extra stuff to answer Gettier)

the sceptical paradox is:
not K(x)
x->y
K(y)

where x is "i am not a BIAV" and y is "I have hands"

the contextualist wants to say that "know" in the premise is not the same "know" in the conclusion

not K(x)
x-> y
k(y)

is no paradox

the contextualist (normally) says its Justification which contaminates Know with context-dependence, whereas James is going to say its Truth

im an epistemic contextualist, but im a contextualist about most terms

>>11660031
This. All the contrarians who replied are cucks.

>>11661972
agreed but only if you can see Continental is also worth its weight in kindling, which seems too bitter a pill for many of you self-invested and neurotic schoolmen, as evidenced by the ritual denunciation of a living caricature who is beside the point.

>>11662007
>>11661972
>all philosophy i havent read is pointless

>>11662022
>if you think it's bad you must'nt've even read it
neoscholastic cope

>>11660017
You can't pretend to get into LW and NOT start with the Tractatus. What are you even on about

>>11661030
This is the typical vulgar understanding of epistemological pragmatism, especially James'. Pragmatists are closer to empirical naturalists than to some kind of self-deluding "I believe whatever is useful or pleasing to me" shit. The "utility" or "pragmatic" aspect of the epistemology DOES express greater truth (in the classical, correspondence sense that you point out) in the long run. But the point is that we cannot access that truth except by moving toward it.

A pragmatist is simply saying that someone in the 18th century believing in the luminiferous aether is not so much flat "wrong," as if he should have "known better" by "looking more closely at the facts" (which facts?), but was instead doing the best with what he had at the time. Likewise with space-filling atoms, classical mechanics, and Aristotelian explanations of gravity. No doubt most of our "beliefs" will look hilarious to future observers too, but no amount of squinting at them at this moment will produce correcterer versions of those beliefs; it's not like Aristotle could have squinted real hard at his theory of gravity and come up with Newtonian physics, or Newton could have just avoided some delusional blunder and rushed all the way to Einstein's conception of relativity. All knowledge is on the way to better knowledge. We make our way in the world by making the world talk-aboutable and think-aboutable, and language is always an imperfect instrument. Modern scientific naturalism owes an enormous debt to American pragmatism because of this outlook. It's also similar to Bachelard and postpositivist epistemology more generally.

People always misinterpret James in this way because he sometimes expresses his pragmatism infelicitously. For example people often misconstrue The Will to Believe as a Pascalian wager (and even Pascal's wager wasn't a "Pascalian wager" in the way people make fun of it). There are whole books on how James is jettisoning truth in favour of comforting self-delusion. But he is not doing that at all. He is actually, in effect, justifying HUNCHES. He is closer to saying that Einstein should "carry out" his hunch that the universe is a harmony, and not chaotic at base, by attempting to apply that hunch to reality, to see if it actually works and bears fruit ("cashes out" in James' terms in Radical Empiricism). His point is just: we're all little Einsteins, we all have our little hunches, especially about massive metaphysical questions whose answers will not come for many thousands of years, if they ever come at all. We don't proceed as a species by suspending all judgment or thought about those hunches, we proceed by trying to realise them in the world, by mobilising our subordinate everyday conceptions in order to see if the hunches can bear fruit. That is the "utility" of an idea: it was useful for leading to FUTURE, CORRECTER IDEAS, and to the current holder of the "useful" idea insofar as he values those correcter ideas - NOT useful delusions.

>>11662252
based, redpilled, and high IQ

>>11660054

I studied him at University in Logic and went on to take a module devoted to him and it was fucking night and day.

>>11662252
Could you recommend any reading for me to be more articulate about these points? Hardcore James fan but best educated in regards to his psychology rather than his philosophy.

>>11662252
terrific post. thanks for sharing this anon.

>>11662252
Also, do you want to be friends? Willing to exchange some sort of contact info just on the grounds of you being a well-educated James fan, especially one who clearly knows more than me on at least one facet of my single favorite thinker. To be completely honest, my understanding of pragmatism is half intuited from previous works like Varieties and Talks to Teachers.

>>11662252
>>11662290
>>11662323
I happen to have the Telegram app installed already, so I made a group called Radical Empiricism there. I am more than willing to ban any obvious trolls that enter. If you would prefer another method of contact, I do feel the need to say that I would prefer not to share a telephone number or an email on this utter shithole of a website.

If you choose to make a Telegram account, it is my understanding that you can join the Radical Empiricism group by following this link:
https://t.me/joinchat/KR3KdA_d6xxoXaUlLPl1yQ

bump

>>11663280
whats there to bump? op already got his answer and the discussion is going nowhere

>>11660412
>>11660462
Someone, somewhere, wants to fuck that cartoon animal.

>>11663286
i like watching people talk about things i don't understand

>>11660723
What edition of the Tractatus is best? I have pic related on my PC but it has no footnotes or anything...