/lit/ - Literature

No

>>13104160
Beyond good and evil (avoid Zarathustra until you really feel at ease with Nietzsche - actually, more than at ease)
Wittgenstein -> pick a few pages from whatever and see if you like it. After all every sheet of toilet paper feels the same

Don't bother with TSZ, it's a slog & all the best parts of it are in the first third. Nietzsche probably expected the readers to spend time deciphering it, but it turned out boring.

t. brainlet who started (and stopped) reading Nietzsche with TSZ

You won't get anything from the Tractatus. There isn't even an expert consensus on what the Tractatus is even saying. The Philosophical Investigations is a better place to start.

Remember: Anyone who tells you to learn symbolic logic is a retard on par with an Econ major who tells you to learn macroeconomics when you say you're mildly interested in learning about social theory. He's giving you a very specific answer to a very general question. If someone tells you to learn logic just to read the Tractatus, they are giving you a recipe for wasting 3 years of your life and ensuring you will never be a good reader of philosophy.

Wittgenstein is not a giant. He had a bit of hype around him but nothing he said has had any grand implications or follow-up literature

As for beginning book my advice will always be start with the Greeks. Start with Plato, anything will do. You don't need to read 10 books from the Greeks but you should atleast read some Plato, Aristoteles and probably Homer. After that it's up to you, some say middle ages others just go straight to 19th-20th century. Nietzsche wouldn't be a bad follow-up

>>13104220

so you don't think symbolic logic is useful? who do you learn logic from then, aristotle?

>>13104160
If you've never read philosophy before - first read ABOUT these fags, before reading them firsthand. There's no shame in it. A hundred years' worth of smart people have put a ton of work into explaining these guys to dummies. They'll give you a guideline of how to read them. Otherwise you'll most likely get confused and/or bored a few pages in and give up.

>>13104232
Logic is dumb as fuck in general. Classical logic was probably never meant to be apodictic in the first place, but linguistic and heuristic. The belief that logic COULD be apodictic, built into modern philosophical logic as a tacit presupposition since the 19th century, is a bizarre and completely historically contingent conceit originating in the early modern period and based on the presumption of a bunch of neo-Platonists that mathematics could be a characteristica universalis with Euclidean certainty (keeping in mind, Euclid has no discussion whatsoever of apodictic proof, either). The pre-Fregean 19th century logicians were all outright metaphysicians and nobody would agree with their justifications (implicit or explicit) for thinking logic could be the the language of philosophy, let alone the language of being.

These ideas were all already exploded by linguistic philosophers in the 18th century. By 1900 nobody really believed in it. Even Husserl, who did have a kind of Brentanian neo-Aristotelian metaphysical conception of the noesis of mathematical and logical essences in his early work, still had this metaphysics to back up why he thought a logical language could ever be a characteristica universalis. Positivism is a weird exception born of late neo-Kantianism and didn't survive the 30s, that somehow rebelled against "metaphysics" while also presuming a fuckload of metaphysical shit. Godel and Wittgenstein, both implicit Kantians, exploded logical positivism before it even got off the ground.

What we know now as "philosophical logic" is just the dying embers of doddering professors trained by lingering Vienna-style positivists in the '50s and '60s, and turned into a kind of cottage industry within Anglo-analytic philosophy departments. It's watered down as fuck by pragmatism and crypto-continental philosophy of language a century late, but it will still make your thinking rigid forever. It's a common joke among people actually interested in philosophy in academic contexts that they are not "Philosophers" in the sense of coming from a Philosophy department. Everybody except analytics hates analytics.

>>13104227
>Wittgenstein is not a giant. He had a bit of hype around him but nothing he said has had any grand implications or follow-up literature

delusional

>>13104298
Also, the shorter answer is that the fundamental undecidability or irreducible interpretative nature of all uses of language, including logic which is a subset of language, makes logic AT BEST a heuristic. Once you realise it's a heuristic, why would you even care about it? Of what fucking use is quasi-logical "justified true belief" bullshit, really?

Also a good demonstration of the kind of rigid thinking that analytic insensitivity to language/hermeneutics causes: in the above paragraph I said "logic is a subset of language." Because I am not a filthy analytic, I understand that this statement is not some kind of clunky machine where "[{SUBSET} OF SET:{LANGUAGE}] is PREDICATED of {LOGIC}," and "[PREDICATION]" is similarly defined, and so on recursively (i.e. undecidably, terminating at some point in an irreducibly subjective interpretation). Even when analytics claim to understand this recursion problem, they still fucking think like this all the time. They don't realise they're doing it because they've been trained to do it. They look at sentences and texts and see a machine to be taken apart, reduced to its mechanical "units." Even when they incorporate a bunch of pragmatism into their writings they still do this. That's how learning logic and thinking like an analytic kills your brain.

As someone who read Wittgenstein and Foucault before reading Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, etc. I sort of wish I had done things chronologically sometimes. Sometimes you have to start with the cooler, more recent stuff to spark your interest though –I don't think my reading of Hume would have been as complex or interesting without having read PI, for instance.

>>13104298
>>13104346


i'm not sure that i completely understand what you're saying, bear with me. specifically with the neo-platonists, you're saying that they were incorrect in believing that any kind of absolute truth could be represented with mathematical form, right? i think i know enough about Godel and Witt to understand the last paragraph, you're saying that no logical statement could ever completely exist as something universal?

so logic at it's core is just for the purpose of learning/process to get to an end goal, but outside of that it shouldn't be put on a higher pedestal than it is?

>>13104227
>Wittgenstein is not a giant

LMFAO, what?
Literally the single most important philosopher of 20th century, the whole analytic tradition is separated as pre and post-Wittgensteinian. Let’s not even mention late Witty’s influence and popularity among continentals in the second half of the 20th century.

>>13104220
I'm halfway through Tractatus and feel the same way. Should I just skip it and move on to PI. I only started TLP because I thought it was a prerequisite

>>13104416
>Literally the single most important philosopher of 20th century,
Bwahaha

>>13104395
Don’t listen to that poster.

The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness. Its task is one which is remote from the intuitions and the goals of the senses, remote from feelings and from the world of merely fancied representation. Considered from its negative side, this task consists in holding off the accidentality of ratiocinative thought and the arbitrariness in the choice to accept one ground as valid rather than its opposite.
Whenever logic is taken as the science of thinking in general, it is thereby understood that this “thinking” constitutes the mere form of a cognition; that logic abstracts from all content, and the so-called second constitutive piece that belongs to the cognition, namely the matter, must be given from elsewhere; hence that logic, since this matter does not in the least depend on it, can give only the formal conditions of genuine knowledge, but does not itself contain real truth; or again, that logic is only the pathway to real knowledge, for the essential component of truth, the content, lies outside it.

since thinking and the rules of thinking are supposed to be its subject matter, in these logic already has a content specifically its own; in them it has that second constituent of knowledge, namely a matter whose composition is its concern.

>>13104160
>What is a good place to start?
the greeks, you retard. otherwise you'll finish any of those books and understand half of it if you're lucky

>>13104433
>Wittgenstein isn’t one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century

>>13104395
Sorry about that. But yes pretty much. It's not that I even categorically think there can be no universal, metaphysical logic of essences. I am sympathetic to all kinds of weird mystical shit. Maybe we really can intuit the form of "Tree" directly. I don't know. But that is not something we can do, or at least not something anyone has ever done, within language itself. Philosophical Investigations is good for this.

The problem is that analytics either ignore this critique, or they somehow think they've integrated it, but then they go on thinking in tacitly logical terms anyway. They view signification, predication, "presencing," whatever you want to call it when a word or concept is employed, as a mechanical thing - so they reify both the concept itself (say "Tree," but even more frustrating when they do it with abstract things), AND they reify the process of predication, as if there is only one process of predication which we refer to when we say "predication." It's why it's frustrating to talk to them.

Perfect example of this: In analytic philosophy after 1945 there as interest in the nature and function of metaphor - metaphor being when you say something about something, like "Napoleon was a lion," which is clearly not a strict predication (you are not really saying Napoleon "was" a lion, literally), but still conveys meaning or does significative "work." What is the status of that statement, and such statements in general? The solution of most analytic philosophers of metaphor was to say that metaphor is a kind of window-dressing, meaning it's not predication, so it's not logical, so it has/conveys no "meaning." Once again you can see the presumption of a whole metaphysics of "predication" as a kind of machine, through which a term ("Napoleon") goes and on which is stamped a logically valid predication "{Napoleon} [is] {a man}." This metaphor shit confused them for decades. Then Ricoeur comes along and writes Rule of Metaphor, and shows that metaphor OF COURSE conveys meaning and is significative - it is not diminished by its not being a one-to-one predication of some logical simple to some unit concept (e.g. of {man} to {Napoleon}), but is in fact the main vehicle of language, meaning, and understanding, as a result of this very undecidability. Our understanding of the "concept" Napoleon, and the concept "lion" too, is premised on their undecidability.

For Ricoeur this was an obvious point because he didn't presume, a priori, a clunky mechanical conception of language, as being composed of "predicative functions" (conceptualized mathematically), into which are slotted stable and unchanging unit-concepts. Logicians whether they know it or not tend to think in these terms. It's no accident that Ricoeur reads and incorporates the thinking of Witt's Philosophical Investigations in Rule of Metaphor while it took decades for analytics to properly appreciate it, because Wittgenstein says the same shit in there that Ricoeur is.

>Can I start with these two giants or should I start with others?
Greece.

>>13104433
absolute brainlet you are

not op. i read some wittgenstein and it was just autism over linguistics that i didn't give a tenth of a shit about. is that...it?

>>13104468
>Maybe we really can intuit the form of "Tree" directly

Gee, I wonder what it is you’re doing when you think “Tree” if not intuiting some concept of tree in itself, abstracted from the essentiality of a tree-object through thought.

>>13104440
What you are saying is transcendental/phenomenological, which is fine by me - I am a transcendental phenomenologist. I DO think that something like Kant's categories could exist, that "pure" logic would be the science of the conditions of possibility of thought in the abstract, and that it's probably our greatest concern as human beings to figure out these abstract conditions. It's just that I don't think Kant's unjustified supposition of his own categories is useful - do you agree with Kant's categories? On what grounds? Nobody has ever taken them seriously.

My problem isn't with someone suggesting a new categorial deduction, for instance like Brentano/Husserl trying to show the noesis of logical simples. My problem is when logicians simply ASSUME that their convenient linguistic constructs (like "predication") are categorial, pure forms of thought itself. You have to justify that shit first. Show me how the fuck you have deduced that your dinky little demonstration, on paper, of why it's immoral for me to take the last slice of pizza, is adequate to the pure categories of ratiocination as such. Don't just jump ahead to the pizza problem and IMPLY that you've given me an apodictically secure deduction.

>>13104468
Should have included pic related. Whoever created this picture is a genius.

>>13104481
Gee, I don't know what I'm doing either. I guess I'd better just assume that the metaphysical nature of how thought works is simple and transparent. Let's throw out all that gestalt psychology (big influence on BOTH phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein) that actually tries to get at the transcendental features of essence-intuition, and just assume that "thinking" is "thinking" is "thinking."

Plato's Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides

Then you won't have to read Wittgenstein, because he says nothing that these four dialogues doesn't cover.

>>13104487
>It's just that I don't think Kant's unjustified supposition of his own categories is useful - do you agree with Kant's categories? On what grounds? Nobody has ever taken them seriously.

The quote is from Hegel, who shares this same critique of Kant’s transcendental logic. In the Science of Logic, it is Hegel’s concern with outlining an absolute ground for logic that necessitates nothing external but itself, it’s unity and movement is all done through internal necessity.

“Essential to science is not so much that a pure immediacy should be the beginning, but that the whole of science is in itself a circle in which the first becomes also the last, and the last also the first.
Conversely, it follows that it is just as necessary to consider as result that into which the movement returns as to its ground. In this respect, the first is just as much the ground, and the last a derivative; since the movement makes its start from the first and by correct inferences arrives at the last as the ground, this last is result. Further, the advance from that which constitutes the beginning is to be considered only as one more determination of the same advance, so that this beginning remains as the underlying ground of all that follows without vanishing from it. The advance does not consist in the derivation of an other, or in the transition to a truly other: inasmuch as there is a transition, it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the ever present and self-preserving foundation of all subsequent developments, remaining everywhere immanent in its further determinations.

If it were not this pure indeterminacy, if it were determined, it would be taken as something mediated, would already be carried further than itself: a determinate something has the character of an other with respect to a first. It thus lies in the nature of a beginning itself that it should be being and nothing else. There is no need, therefore, of other preparations to enter philosophy, no need of further reflections or access points.

If pure being is taken as the content of pure knowledge, then the latter must step back from its content, allowing it free play and without determining it further. – Or again, inasmuch as pure being is to be considered as the unity into which knowledge has collapsed when at the highest point of union with its objectification, knowledge has then disappeared into this unity, leaving behind no distinction from it and hence no determination for it”

>>13104496
>I guess I'd better just assume that the metaphysical nature of how thought works is simple and transparent.
Or prove through logical necessity like philosopher’s have been doing...

>Let's throw out all that gestalt psychology (big influence on BOTH phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein) that actually tries to get at the transcendental features of essence-intuition, and just assume that "thinking" is "thinking" is "thinking."
Yes, you should throw away Psychology when dealing with metaphysical questions because by definition you wouldn’t be dealing with metaphysical questions, but psychological ones. The form of cognition is the cognition. No psychological reasoning gets beyond that.

>>13104440

i don't think i can completely agree with this due to some transcendental experiences of my own that i don't think logic can completely apprehend, but i see what you're saying.

>>13104468

i understand a bit better now, thanks. gonna step out of this one for now lol

>>13104515
I have been meaning to go back and read Hegel properly and maybe the British Idealists too. I'm sympathetic to this sort of Absolute Idealism but I think a lot of versions of it are wishy-washy, so I want to do it properly and carefully. Do you have any recommendations?

>>13104547
The whole problem is that you have to define what logical necessity is before you can use the power of logical necessity to "define" what logical necessity "is." What is "necessity?" Wittgenstein calls this presumption the "hardness of the logical must," and he wrote the whole book On Certainty about it. What does it mean when someone says, "This deduction is absolutely certain, so I am right and you are wrong," and the other person replies "Nah cunt, you're wrong." Is one of them "really" wrong? How do you adjudicate that? By appealing to the logic itself, as a force someone compelling consent? But the whole dispute is ABOUT the logicality of the logic itself in the first place, and we manifestly have a situation where consent has NOT been compelled.

A quick glance at the history of philosophy, especially during the early modern period and Enlightenment when people had the highest degree of faith possible in apodictic proof, will show us that not one such "self-evident" proof in all of human history has ever been self-evident to more than a handful of people. Every philosophical book published between 1700-1750 claimed to deduce, with absolute certainty that any reasonable person could not possibly disagree with, the nature of the world, and all arrived at conclusions or began with premises that you would immediately object to today. So what's the status of "logical certainty?"

>Yes, you should throw away Psychology
You're misidentifying the (legitimate) critique of psychologism with a critique of phenomenology here.

Psychologism in the sense of presuming that the pure (i.e., metaphysical) conditions of thought all depend upon language and psychology is dumb, agreed. It just begs the question, by presuming what the nature of language and psychology "are," which was the thing to be settled in the first place. The best you can do with that kind of psychologism is end up in scepticism and nihilism: we can't say anything about anything, true knowledge of reality as such is impossible.

But that is not the same as phenomenology. Gestalt psychologists noting, and even backing up empirically, that noesis of unit-concepts or "universals" DOES seem to be a thing, is a useful investigation into the pure conditions of thought. You can't simply presume the latter - you have to investigate them.

>>13104160
yes but would you agree that milk is for the pussy?

>>13104611
>Do you have any recommendations?

Science of Logic since it’s the work where he begins from the absolute beginning without any determinations or concepts.

>>13104160
Why them anon? What kind of person are you? One interested in learning about the world around them and developing a deep understanding thereof, or one interested in purportedly dissolving the very possibility of that because it's edgier and more in line with ironic shitpost culture?

I recommend you read excerpts or secondary literature summaries of them first so you know what you are about to learn. That can also help you with context. When it comes to philosophy, it's best to start with easy but important stuff. Plato (Meno and Euthyphro are the best starts) and Descartes (Meditations 1 and 2) are where I recommend people start. At some point it's good if you have a basic understanding of the major figures in the history of philosophy, and that doesn't require reading all of them but you should know what they're each about. Read Nietzsche and Wittgenstein when you feel ready.

>>13104632
reminds me of Kris Kramski's movies

>>13104298
>logic is dumb as fuck in general
Are you fucking serious

>>13104611
>>13104487
>>13104515

Do you/you guys have recommendations on where to start with phenomenology, particularly Husserl? I've read the Science of Logic, and know Kant, Fichte, etc pretty well. I know Frege and analytic philosophy very well. And I love 19th century anti-psychologism, it's an interest of mine that brought me to Herbart, Bolzano, etc. I have Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and dig Twardowski. I also have read quite a bit on Bradley and British Idealism, I have Appearance and Reality and read parts, and I have two books on Bradley that I've also partly read. So it sounds like I have the knowledge you're talking about + more, but Husserl and phenomenology are a shameful lacuna in my case. Honestly Wittgenstein is also a lacuna for me, but at least I know the two books I have to read, and I've read parts + secondary literature already. Need help with Husserl/phenomenology (Ingarden could be cool) recs.

>>13105036
logic is thinking with training wheels, if you can't go without you won't go far

>>13106019
Does your proposed thinking without logic have any method for distinguishing truths from falsehoods, apart from maybe by observation/acquaintance/intuition of existents? By the way I find dialetheism extremely appealing, but even dialetheists don't tell you to stop following logic in most contexts.

>>13104160

>>13106019

To add to >>13106405, do you also intend to tell us that there does not exist a distinction between valid and invalid inference, and do you intend to tell us that you don't employ rules of inference yourself in your philosophical and day-to-day thought?

>>13104160
why don’t you just READ THE SHIT AND STOP TALKING?! JUST READ THE FUCKING BOOKS AND TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT FOR YOURSELF?! IF YOURE TO RETARDED TO FIGURE IT OUT, THEN COME BACK. BUT YOU’RE NOT GONNA UNDERSTAND FUCKING WITTGENSTEIN ENTIRELY ON YOUR FIRST READ SO QUITE BEING A FAGGOT AND JUST THE READ THE FUCKING BOOK FOR CHRIST SAKE ITS ONLY LIKE 80 PAGES!!!!!

>>13104160
>Can I start with these two giants
Unironically no. You will die.

no you don't

>>13104298
Quine, in 1950s when every postivism settled down, he said the Principia Mathematica as something like "the single greatest achievement in philosophy". I didn't get about this not only the fact that whitehead made greater achievement in my opinion, but also the fact that Quine completely passed other Russell's academic pieces. He falled in analytics then why he recommended this?
I think the answer of this question answers the mystery of reversion of apodicticity. Development in philosophy of mathematics, especially Frege's attempt to convert mathematics into logic, made him to think the reverse of logic in apodicticity. No matter how strange its attempt is, there's the fact that PM made an incredible evolution of logic after the aristotelian logic. I think it is not a surprise that logicism, not logic as a whole, is very close to what your reply want to disagree with.

Half of this thread is one guy freaking out because his philosophy readings have little to no material bearing on the ideas of today and is convinced logic is somehow unusable because he cant define terms.
I wonder how these people will act when logical systems and neuralnets make true chinese-room type entities. Will they argue philosophy with computers and insist that the computer does not function?

>>13104160
start by becoming fluent in german since translated nietzsche is shit

>>13104160
Just read. If you feel like you don't understand, you're right and should pursue secondary material or a reading group for assistance

>>13104160
For Wittgenstein you need to read Ray Monk's 'The Duty of Genius'.
Don't let the larpers and pretentious faggots here put you off.

>>13104298

This is what it sounds like when a person thinks he's much smarter than he actually is.

>>13104160
i too read thinkers based off of how germanic their names sound

Is it a good idea to start reading Nietzsche with The Dawn of Day or Beyond Good and Evil? I want to read The Gay Sciences eventually, however I don't have the book at my disposal yet. I am planning to read most of his work, but I am not too familiar with philosophy or well-read in general. Help me out lads, please.

>>13108180
i started with his untimely meditations fwiw

>>13104426
Wittgenstein himself annulled TLP, he basically started PI on a clean slate.

>>13108299
Not true in the least and LI builds off of Tractatus' work immensely you retard.
He has some change or advancement in ideas and schooled himself but the way you are misrepresenting it is dishonest.

>>13106019
based retard

>>13104515
>Thus the beginning of philosophy is the ever present and self-preserving foundation of all subsequent developments, remaining everywhere immanent in its further determinations.
>If it were not this pure indeterminacy, if it were determined, it would be taken as something mediated, would already be carried further than itself: a determinate something has the character of an other with respect to a first. It thus lies in the nature of a beginning itself that it should be being and nothing else. There is no need, therefore, of other preparations to enter philosophy, no need of further reflections or access points.

>yfw hegel explains the true virginity of sophia in contrast to the formal virginity of mary

>>13108767

I'm serious, you ming-mongs.

>>13108149
This.

>>13104346
What's your opinion on Wittgenstein? What's your opinion on Peter Hacker's take on Wittgenstein? What's your opinion on Kripke's take on Wittgenstein? I'd be happy to read your answers, anon.

>>13104160
You're being quite the cliche, OP.

>>13109730
>>13104468
Bump for you before I go to bed, please answer my questions

>>13104368
Why do you wish you had started chronologically?

>>13104416

He's definitely not the most important philosopher of the 20th century though. He's only relevant because he was autistic failed engineer and other autists who aren't smart enough to be engineers can read him and feel smart.

>>13104232

Symbolic Logic is ridiculous nowadays. They've started including proofs which take into account whether or not a premise is true in another world. As if that fucking matters.