/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14177193]

where should i start with this motherfucker

[Anonymous No.14177202]

>>14177193
The Tractatus, obviously. If you need something to read beforehand, read Russell's The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.

[Anonymous No.14177206]

>>14177193
Saussure, you zoomer pseud fucker. Philosophy is a big long ass continuity.

[Anonymous No.14177291]

I phone never. Why does he look so cool

[Anonymous No.14177869]

>>14177202
I've read though that Psychological Investigations is in opposition to the concepts of Tractus. Is this true? I didn't know if I should just skip it. Please forgive my ignorance.

[Anonymous No.14177873]

The Greeks, newfag.

[Anonymous No.14178237]

With a poker, you logical positivist

[Anonymous No.14178302]

Definitely not the Tractatus. Likewise, Saussure has nothing to do with Wittgenstein and in fact most of what people think of when they use "Saussure" (whose Course in General Linguistics they've usually never read) is "Saussure" as a stand-in for structural linguistics and structuralist philosophy in 1950s-1960s France, which is not recognizably Saussurean.

>>14177869
Yes, he states directly in Philosophical Investigations that he no longer believes in the underlying philosophy of the Tractatus. The problem is that nobody agrees on what exactly the philosophy of the Tractatus is.

What can be known for certain is that the later Wittgenstein, which is the really famous Wittgenstein associated with post-war linguistic philosophy, as opposed to the younger Wittgenstein associated (erroneously) with Vienna positivism, was violently opposed to logicism of the Russell variety and definitely to Russell's overall worldview. Again, nobody agrees on the precise hows or whys of this, but that it is true is at least certain because Wittgenstein says as much.

The best place to start is the Philosophical Investigations. Again, not only is it more famous and what most people mean when they think of Wittgenstein, it's also less contentious. I've been in classrooms full of analytic philosophy fourth-year undergraduates, graduate students, and even professors who either no fucking idea what the TLP was all about. Or worse, had no idea what it was about, while also assuming they knew what it was all about. That's a dumb place to start.

There are many interpreters of later Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Invesigations). Most are horrible garbage. Saul Kripke is a retard. Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, and Stanley Rosen are good readers of Wittgenstein but I'm not sure they write on him directly. The Hacker and Baker commentaries to the Philosophical Investigations are massive and I've had professors recommend them as completely necessary for understanding the infinitely difficult thought of the PI, but frankly I found PI completely intuitive coming from a Gadamerian hermeneutics and American pragmatism background. So YMMV.

[Anonymous No.14178305]

>>14178302
>who either no fucking idea what the TLP was all about.
should be
>who had no fucking idea what the TLP was all about.

[Anonymous No.14178308]

>>14178302
>The problem is that nobody agrees on what exactly the philosophy of the Tractatus is.
Autism.

[Anonymous No.14178335]

>>14178308
Definitely, but the main problem seems to be whether he was after all suggesting a Russell-like logical atomism with a native realist ontology as the foundation for atomism, whether he was indifferent to the metaphysical grounds of logic and doing some kind of logicist project that has to be evaluated on its own grounds (in which case great job, because nobody knows what the fuck it is a century later), OR whether he was carrying out an immanent critique of Fregean philosophical logic in general by pushing some of its premises to their arid and solipsistic conclusions.

I always found the latter view the most compelling based on a gut hunch, and googling it now, it looks like Peter Winch himself defends something like a continuity thesis. But he says in PI 79-120~ where he's criticizing the logicist paradigm and its attempts to find "essences" of logical language/thought:
>114. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are." That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
And cf.:
>81. ... All this, however, can only appear in the right light only when one has attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning something, and thinking. For it will then also become clear what may mislead us (and did mislead me) into thinking that if anyone utters a sentence and MEANS or UNDERSTANDS it, he is thereby operating a calculus according to definite rules.

So right there in his critique of logicism, which has both a naive realism about facts or states of affairs in the world and a naive and implicitly metaphysical theory about how particular thoughts and utterances relate to the "essential" structures of thought/langauge (predication, judgment, etc.), he comes out and says "and I my myself was mislead in this way." Unless I'm misinterpreting something here.

[Anonymous No.14178338]

>>14178335
>logical atomism with a native realist ontology
should be
>logical atomism with a NAIVE realist ontology

Fuck.

[Anonymous No.14178381]

>>14178302
thank you for the sincere and informed answer. im into literature and not necessarily philosophy all the time but lately ive been curious about wittgenstein.

[Anonymous No.14178565]

>>14177193
Mein Kampf

[Anonymous No.14178586]

>>14178381
No problem, I actually feel like a dick now because I started the first post by being really dismissive of the Saussure/Russell guys who probably meant well. I originally only meant to write a few sentences so it wouldn't be a big deal to tersely say "not Saussure," but I ended up writing a lot so I seem like a condescending pedantic prick in hindsight.

Wittgenstein goes really well with continental philosophy in the same way certain strains of pragmatism do. Analytics tend to make him into a kind of post-positivist linguistic philosopher in a way that is (in my opinion) very narrow, and still essentially analytic in spirit even when it seems to be rebelling from analytic thought. The simplifications of Wittgenstein down into a post-metaphysical or anti-metaphysical quietist seem like hackjobs to me. I think he's more profitably read in the same vein as Nietzsche or definitely William James, or like or I said, Heidegger/Gadamer, and even aspects of Hegel or Schopenhauer too. All of whom have deep aesthetic dimensions to their epistemology-slash-metaphysics. I think you can even connect the radical aesthetico-epistemology of these thinkers back to metaphysical traditions like Platonism or Neoplatonism, or various other philosophers dependent on them like Hamann, Novalis, or Holderlin, or Schelling's later work "primal" symbols as phenomenologically irreducible.

All of this is to say: (1) The continental tradition has tended more and more toward an aestheticized approach to consciousness, allowing us to talk about conscious experience as "all in one taking," with no presupposed logical distinctions (for example that logical "propositions" are "real" thoughts, but aesthetic, artistic, or metaphorical thoughts are somehow second-order thoughts, or mere "window dressing" for real thought), and Wittgenstein not only fits into this tradition but his personal trajectory recapitulates it (moving from an initial logicism to such a conception of thought as totally immanent); and (2) there is no reason that such a philosophy has to negate other possible ideas, like mysticism, metaphysical insight, primal symbols, Jungian archetypes, or whatever you are interested in. The conceptual move that Wittgenstein represents doesn't negate the possibility of other moves, which is what I think the hardcore analytics and "therapeutic" Wittgensteinian philosophers miss.

[Anonymous No.14179967]

>>14178302
>Kripke is retarded

stopped reading there.

[Anonymous No.14179978]

>>14178302
>Saul Kripke is a retard

care to back this up or are you trolling

[Anonymous No.14180183]

>>14178302
>Saul Kripke is a retard

Dropped.

[Anonymous No.14180203]

>>14178302
>Best place to start is PI
>Definitely not the Tractatus
No. Everyone who salivates over late Wittgenstein like you, to the point of acting like other interpreters, other philosophers, and even early Wittgenstein, are absolute trash to be avoided, needs to be murdered personally. Nobody likes you cultist insufferable snob fuckers. Fuck you. Just read people who are wrong for the sake of learning, and stop being so up your ass about everyone but you being dumb. Especially given that late Wittgenstein is ass anyway, as far as correctness goes. But I would still read him and value him in spite of that, because that's the right mentality to take and /lit/ fuckers who don't read shit because they think it's wrong need to kill themselves.

[Anonymous No.14180253]

>>14177869
If you're interested more in the PI-styled ideas, you are welcome to read that instead of the Tractatus. It's not super necessary to read it to get PI. Wittgenstein does change plenty between early and late stages. That being said, some ideas in the Tractatus do anticipate ideas in PI. For example, his idea that some sentences are without sense or even nonsense, which appears in the Tractatus, seems to nicely evolve into what it looks like in PI. The last line of the Tractatus looks like a principle of silence about what is inexpressible publicly, which might anticipate ideas in the PI about the impossibility of private language. If you're interested in Wittgenstein himself in general though, then the Tractatus is the natural starting place. So it depends on whether you've got a historical/philosophical survey interest in a philosophical figure, or want to look into something specifically for its ideas.

[Anonymous No.14180508]

>>14177193
frege and russell

[Anonymous No.14180530]

>>14178302
>Saul Kripke is a retard.
kek, would you mind to elaborate on that?

[Anonymous No.14180878]

>>14180508
this is the right answer.

read "function and concept" and "sense and reference" by Frege, read "on denoting" and "on reference" by Russell. Then read the tractatus, then PI. If you're still interested read "on certainty" and the blue book

[Anonymous No.14180890]

Tractatus, but read Russell's On Denoting and some basic Frege's theory of meaning (I don't remember the exact titles now), you won't get anything of it otherwise

[Anonymous No.14181047]

Aristotle and Frege

[Anonymous No.14181066]

>>14180530
>>14180183
>>14179978
>>14179967
notice how the fat loser with zero conception of kripke didn't return

[Anonymous No.14181074]

>G.E. Moore suggested that he submit his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) as a doctoral thesis
>Wittgenstein clapped his two examiners – the eminent philosophers Russell and Moore – on the shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry. I know you’ll never understand it.”

[Anonymous No.14181229]

>>14181074
based but Moore>Witty>Russell are the true patrician rankings

[Anonymous No.14181261]

>>14177193
Start with "In The Loop"
Hilarious fast-paced political comedy

[Anonymous No.14182038]

>>14181066
I just don't reply to phoneposters who reply to long careful descriptions of something they've never read by picking one thing they half-understand out of it and going "lol prove it?? proof??" Kripkenstein is widely known as being so bad that it's almost a joke. Even the sentence I just typed was more careful than the "lol u prove? kripke u say bad? no?" replies the other guys wrote.

[Anonymous No.14182587]

>>14182038
The only legitimate criticism of kripkestein is that it's bad exegesis. That's what all the objections boil down to.
>but muh that's not what he meant.
1st off that's a terrible objection because it's not like the actually words that witty wrote are determinate at all in the sense of affirming one interpretation over another. 2nd, who cares about exegesis or being true to the text. Kripke's arguments are leaps and bounds better than any of the interpreters that seethe about Kripke's 'misinterpretation.' The reason you got so many dismissive responses is that you said something very dumb. When I'm at a restaurant with friends and we are independently calculating what a 10% tip would be, if all my friends and I except one person agree that 10% would be $5 and the one dissenter says "no it's 7 cents, not $5, idiots!" The correct response is to dismiss him because what he said is obviously false. I know you probably don't have friends so you can't relate to the case but consider the take-away. When someone says something very dumb and obviously false, you should dismiss them. That's what happened here.

[Anonymous No.14182622]

>>14182587
If you think Kripke's interpretation delivers a coup to Wittgenstein, we're not going to agree very much on anything. You might as well be advocating phrenology. Kripke doesn't even creatively distort Wittgenstein while understanding him to improve on him, he literally just doesn't understand him in the first place, as is shown by the fact that he keeps scratching his head over basic things like the private language argument. Even if you disagree with the private language argument (which I do myself, or at least I disagree with extreme hypostatized forms of it), it's not difficult to understand. Cf. Winch's critique of Kripke in Idea of a Social Science, where Winch is noticeably baffled by how Kripke could have missed the point, or cf. Rorty (who I dislike, but he's correct here) discussing Kripke as almost bewilderingly narrow-minded.

The whole premise of Wittgenstein's critique of logicism is that it presupposes certain metaphysical frameworks, and Kripke effectively responds to this critique by saying "no it doesn't! Look, if I just presuppose this metaphysical framework, I can show that it doesn't!" Thanks Kripke.

You say I am dumb and likewise I think you are dumb. The difference is that I have tried very hard to see Kripke in a positive light, and read a lot of critiques of him to see if maybe I'm missing something and being uncharitable. This is a Wittgensteinian hermeneutic approach:
>"We say of some people that they are transparent to us. [H]owever ... one human being can be a complete enigma to another. ... We cannot find our feet with them."

I couldn't find my feet with Kripke, so I immediately assumed, not that he was as retarded as he seemed (why would a famous smart guy, writing a book in which he could potentially embarrassing himself, be so shallow and retarded?), but that I was missing something. So I read more, and more, and I found out that not only is Kripke simply dumb, most mainstream analytics agree that he is extremely dumb on this and related subjects.

You appeal to the old analytic workhorse of self-evidence ("who cares about exegesis?" ... what matters is if something is "obviously false"). But as I tried to explain above, in the posts you evidently read about as much as you've read Wittgenstein himself, this notion of self-evidence is an a priori metaphysical presumption (the presumption that there is a self-standing "per se notum" to which any "proposition"/"judgment" refers), and is the single most dangerous and problematic metaphysical assumption underlying early analytic philosophy. So like Kripke, you are recapitulating the very thing Wittgenstein critiques about you in your very dismissal of him, without understanding his critique.

For years I wondered whether Kripke was trying to revive it in some clever way, some elegant return to logical simplicity that actually requires a special insight to achieve. But it turns out, no, he just doesn't understand the critiques of it. Nor do you.

[Anonymous No.14182690]

>>14177193
with the blue book duh

[Anonymous No.14182714]

>>14182622
>If you think Kripke's interpretation delivers a coup to Wittgenstein
Not that anon but this isn't even what Kripkenstein is about. Like at all.
>Kripke doesn't even creatively distort Wittgenstein while understanding him to improve on him, he literally just doesn't understand him in the first place, as is shown by the fact that he keeps scratching his head over basic things like the private language argument.
Kripke freaking starts by saying his project isn't necessarily about getting Wittgenstein right or representing his ideas as either Wittgenstein's ideas, or ones he himself accepts. He says it is "Wittgenstein as it struck Kripke and posed a problem for him" for a reason. It's really not different from how continentals look at philosophers of the past, find that they strike them and pose a problem, or produce an insight for them, and move from there. They're not dealing in rigorous hermeneutics. They get shit from historians of philosophy all the time, but they (the historians) don't get the fucking point. It's philosophically worthwhile to allow people you read to strike you a certain way, such that you can go off from that in a new direction. Kripkenstein's rule following paradox problem and Kripke's engagement of it is worthwhile philosophy in its own right.
>I couldn't find my feet with Kripke, so I immediately assumed, not that he was as retarded as he seemed (why would a famous smart guy, writing a book in which he could potentially embarrassing himself, be so shallow and retarded?), but that I was missing something. So I read more, and more, and I found out that not only is Kripke simply dumb, most mainstream analytics agree that he is extremely dumb on this and related subjects.
You're a fucking snob dude and it's really annoying. It boils down to this whole "Either I'm retarded or you're retarded" crap. Reserve that word for the actual pseuds outside philosophy, and stick to wrong/right views or good/bad arguments and you stop sounding like an insufferable brat.

[Anonymous No.14182767]

>>14182714
As I said, Kripke is entitled to creatively distort Wittgenstein or use him as a jumping off point for his own thoughts. It's just that the best way to do this would be to actually understand Wittgenstein on his own terms first, which Kripke doesn't do. And Kripke does indeed make polemical statements about the internal consistency of Wittgenstein's position, from a basis that Wittgenstein himself attacks. Which isn't to say that Wittgenstein's attack necessarily works, but that Kripke not even addressing the attack shows he doesn't understand it.

>It boils down to this whole "Either I'm retarded or you're retarded" crap.
I just said that when I don't understand something I give it every possible chance to prove to me that I'm the one that's wrong, and that I put in a lot of tedious hours trying to check myself against my own human arrogance in assuming something I don't understand is simply dumb.

This was in response to a post where you called me dumb without demonstrating it, spent a paragraph expounding on how sometimes people are just dumb (in this case, me), and justifying a handful of other people giving worthless replies of "lmao you're dumb." Maybe I'm a snob but at least I'm not a disingenuous asshole like you're being.

[Anonymous No.14182873]

>>14182767
>This was in response to a post where you called me dumb without demonstrating it
Like I said, I'm not the anon who wrote >>14182587 that was someone else. My particular issue with you is attitude, not intelligence. Maybe that's dumb of me to fixate on, especially on /lit/ of all places, but I hold philosophically-knowledgeable people to a higher standard than I do the /lit/ pseuds. I can tell you're educated, so I have no need to question your intelligence. Even if (honestly) I disagree with you about philosophical views you hold, I'm not going to act like you're somehow mentally deficient if you can't come to agree with my philosophical views. But you go out of your way to portray your philosophical foes as actually mentally defective in a way that's just so full of yourself, it's awful. I feel this even if I think your foes are wrong just like you do. Just as an example, since I'm pretty sure I've seen you on /lit/ before: There was once a time you, or someone that sounds just like you, went out of your/their way insinuating that just about everyone except Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Peirce, such as ordinary language philosophers (like Ryle and Austin), the Pittsburgh people (Brandom, McDowell), and Derrida too, were actually stupid, in the mental deficiency kind of sense. Here you're doing it with Kripke. It's one thing to say it as a shitpost, but you sound so seriously committed to this picture of philosophers as being as stupid as pseuds or worse, that it just comes across as snobbishness. Like you really think these philosophers are ACTUALLY stupid compared to you? Maybe in jest I'll call them stupid myself, but I don't actually think they're mentally deficient and I wouldn't want to suggest that. After all, at end of the day, they're saying some valuable, or at least I've felt so after studying them. Even if I think they're super wrong, I'll read their stuff, they'll make me a little mad, but I end up realizing they are brilliant people all the same, worthy of being called philosophers. To me it ends up looking like another case of cult-of-Wittgenstein crap.

[Anonymous No.14182996]

>>14182622
I'm >>14182587

I'm not going to waste my time responding to the things you said because you didn't respond to my substantive points and I have actual things to do. But as anon above me noted, your attitude is obnoxious and evidence that you're not as smart as you think you are. Go read Semantic reference by Kripke again, go prove the modal logic theorems he proved at 15, go read NN. If you've done these things before do it again, you clearly didn't understand any of it. What's more likely, the contemporary cult of wittgenstein is tribalistic and narrow-minded or everyone else is wrong about about the guy who invented modal logic as a teenage?

[Anonymous No.14183066]

>>14182996
Don't phonepost.

>>14182873
I don't think it's dumb to hold people to a standard of good behaviour. That's the whole reason I refused to interact with those other guys. So I appreciate it.

I don't think your representation of my own behaviour is completely correct though. The most I did was say Kripke's a dipshit in passing, on 4chan, and I apologised for it a bit (admittedly obliquely and not much) in a subsequent post. It's not like once I got called on this I dug my heels in and simply repeated myself. I tried to prove that I had in fact read Kripke and given him every chance and I think he's just flat wrong. This was in response to the other guy deliberately arguing in shallow, merely rhetorical ways in completely bad faith, presumably because he wants to defend Kripke on a personal level. I may have said a few dickish things in response because I genuinely do think Kripke is dumb (sorry), but fundamentally I did try to address his ideas themselves.

>Just as an example, since I'm pretty sure I've seen you on /lit/ before: There was once a time you, or someone that sounds just like you, went out of your/their way insinuating that just about everyone except Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Peirce, such as ordinary language philosophers (like Ryle and Austin), the Pittsburgh people (Brandom, McDowell), and Derrida too, were actually stupid, in the mental deficiency kind of sense.
I don't know if it was me. I like Derrida a lot, but I absolutely hate the Pittsburgh neo-Hegelians. Ryle I think is very bad, and Austin I think is OK in small doses. Peirce I am not the biggest fan of, or at least not the contemporary biosemiotic version of Peirce, and I've had some pretty big arguments with a Peirce guy on here before. But I've definitely posted polemical "fuck analytic philosophy" rants on here before, I'll admit. Those were pretty obviously jokey polemics though.

>It's one thing to say it as a shitpost, but you sound so seriously committed to this picture of philosophers as being as stupid as pseuds or worse
I will grant you that I might have had shitty mannerisms or been a pompous cunt for sure, but if there's one thing I'll defend, it's that I at least take the ideas seriously. I can't even give myself credit on a character level for doing this, because I think (like I indicated above) I just have a natural tendency to assume I must be wrong first, and only slowly come around to the possibility that some venerable philosopher is a dumbass. We seem to agree on this basic method.

The Pittsburgh people are prime examples though. They are out and out bad philosophers. This does happen sometimes. But I judge their philosophy first, and make polemical joke comments second, for fun at most. So:
>Like you really think these philosophers are ACTUALLY stupid compared to you?
Ultimately I think this is a secondary issue. If they're wrong, they're wrong. I do agree about the Wittgenstein cultists being obnoxious though (as I indicated above).

[Anonymous No.14183093]

>>14183066
Also on the subject of the Wittgenstein people, I should say I'm no orthodox Wittgensteinian. In an earlier post I said a bunch of things that would have me laughed out of any Wittgenstein circle. This gets me to a point that I meant to make in the above post, but forgot to: Fundamentally I just don't want to reply to someone who is not really trying to have a fair dialogue with me. I said a lot of things, and people zeroed in on one sentence, lazily excised it from its context, and lazily posted "lol u srs?" What am I supposed to reply to that? "Yes, I am serious, and let me tell you further why, by writing another 3000 characters so you can reply with a single paragraph from your iPhone again, repeating the same shit you already said."

That's what bothers me. If someone wants to say polemical shit to me, or call me a retard, that's fine. But I will see it as white noise unless they actually say something of substance while doing it. There's a difference between saying:
>LOL do you seriously believe Plato was a neo-Pythagorean? Seriously??? I can't believe it. You SERIOUSLY, REALLY believe that?? Like omg, I can't believe it, you seriously think that, don't you? Wowwwww duuuuude, wooooooowwwww I can't believe that you really .. [etc. for fifteen more posts like this].
... and saying:
>Plato was a neo-Pythagorean you fucking idiot. [Scholar] proved this in [book]. You're repeating some circa 1900 opinion about Plato that has been debunked like ten times you retard.

The latter doesn't bother me because I'm on 4chan. The former just makes me think "This guy probably read 40 pages of this in some class he took a few years back, he has subsequently based part of his identity on adherence to this text or the school it represents, and it personally upsets him that I don't like the text." White noise, and effeminate to boot since he's trying to emotionally manipulate his opponent into conceding. Might as well just give the logical form of the argument and say "YOU'RE GAY IF YOU THINK THAT, ERGO, DON'T THINK IT."

[Anonymous No.14183104]

[Spoiler]Hot ziggety![/spoiler]

[Anonymous No.14183108]

>>14183104
FUCK
U
C
K

[Anonymous No.14183126]

>>14183066
Well, anon (I'm the second anon you're replying to), I must say you're growing on me. Your response is one of the better ways I would have hoped you to respond, and that's uplifting. Thanks for the exchange.

[Anonymous No.14183504]

>>14177291
he's pretty handsome