/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19838866]

Why the fuck isn't Wittgenstein more influencial ?
He basically proved that all meta-physical questions have no actual meaning, yet modern philosopher still continue to wonder about these kind of questions. In philosophy teaching they still discuss about topics like "what is courage" etc, when it was proven to be moot.
I mean, even in common parlance it should now be admitted that 80% of all "deep" questions don't actually have any meaning, yet we still continue to function that way, and assume that 1 word = 1 thing.
Why is that ? you'd think his work would have been a true redpill

[Anonymous No.19838879]

>>19838866
Because nobody wants to read his convoluted garbage. He's just not appealing. He's Hegel without the intrigue.

[Anonymous No.19838890]

>>19838866
Because analytic philosophy ignores everything humans found interesting about philosophy in the first place.

[Anonymous No.19838910]

finally an opportunity to post this

[Anonymous No.19838932]

>>19838866
>Why the fuck isn't Wittgenstein more influencial ?
literally the most influential philosopher of the 20th century

[Anonymous No.19838940]

>>19838932
>literally the most influential philosopher of the 20th century
how come it's not widely accepted in general population that lots of questions make no sense then ?
Count the number of time in your daily life there are retarded argument about "no, doing this isn't actually generous, being generous is actually doing XX" etc

[Anonymous No.19838954]

>>19838866
Because his ideas were not useful. And ultimately that matters more than whether they were true.

[Anonymous No.19838955]

>>19838940
from your example it's quite clear you don't understand wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.19838958]

>>19838932
Uhm, you ever heard of Heidegger, sweatie?

[Anonymous No.19838960]

If you're gonna tell people, "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence," then don't be surprised when people instead pass over your work, and continue to speak about things that interest them, even if you consider it, possibly correctly, to be gibberish.

[Anonymous No.19838971]

Didn't he beat a girl while teaching elementary school math?

[Anonymous No.19838976]

>>19838890
Witty is continental.

[Anonymous No.19838977]

>>19838866
>Why the fuck isn't Wittgenstein more influencial ?
Because he was a pseud and so are you

[Anonymous No.19838978]

>>19838960
I'm not that autistic about it. And Wittgenstein also said that it's OK to talk about meaningless things because it has a social function.
I'm talking about why in real arguments (ex philosophy in 2022) we still discuss about meta-physical concepts whose meaning is purely derived from language

>>19838955
ok, explain it to me then

[Anonymous No.19838981]

>>19838971
Yeah but to be fair he was a WW1 vet and she probably did get a question wrong

[Anonymous No.19838985]

>>19838958
> Heidegger
What did he influence?

[Anonymous No.19838986]

>>19838940
yeah, it's the later witty that's influential, not tractatus autistico-philosophicus

[Anonymous No.19838988]

>>19838985
David Kaczynski before his wife turned him against his brother.

[Anonymous No.19838993]

>>19838971
would it matter if he did?

[Anonymous No.19838995]

>>19838988
>David Kaczynski
really?
this heideggerian aspect is never brought up in any ted threads

[Anonymous No.19839000]

>>19838985
Existentialism and linguistic post-structuralism, the most important schools of 20th Century Continental philosophy, can all be traced back to him. Derrida and Sartre directly cite him as primary influence.

[Anonymous No.19839008]

>>19838866
Wittgenstein may have admitted he was not clever enough to truly solve some problems of semantics and reality and philosophy and Truth and understanding, but he could only speak from himself,the knew nothing of the evolved innovated mental abilities of humans who would exist after him

[Anonymous No.19839012]

>>19839000
>Sartre
Ooof, what a clown.

[Anonymous No.19839015]

>>19839008
its cazy to me that you people actually have read some philosophical literature and still think like this.

[Anonymous No.19839037]

>>19838866
>He basically proved that all meta-physical questions have no actual meaning
He didn't prove shit, his tractatus is a convoluted mess, and his numbering system is pseudorigorous. He doesn't lay out theorems and prove them from axioms or previous theorems, he moreso just makes claims and sometimes (when he feels like it) loosely justifies them. Wittgenstein is unironically a bigger pseud than russel.

[Anonymous No.19839040]

>>19838958
The dwarf of Todtnauberg was a true German Denker, not a mere philosopher.

[Anonymous No.19839055]

>>19838971
Yes, he beat another student who happened to die within the same week, supposedly from "unconnected circumstances" (aka family cover-up for his murder)

[Anonymous No.19839080]

The Tractatus was disproven because you cannot claim philosophy (metaphysics) is bullshit without making a philosophical argument yourself. Ludwig realized this and stopped doing philosophy and in his Investigations he tried to just observe things without actually making philosophical arguments. But even in those observations he is using ambiguous words, so essentially he is trying to make the same argument he made in the Tractatus without actually making the argument. So he didn't really prove anything, he just assumes it is obvious that he is right.
This is of course the main issue with philosophy: Philosophy is irrefutable. Because refuting would require more philosophy. It is a self-contained system, a social, almost religious activity driven by what is fashionable.

[Anonymous No.19839081]

>>19838971
Yes, and beat her very severely.
The thing is, it wasn't seen as inappropriate because he beat her, people did that all the time, but because he beat her over failing a math question, something no one should expect a girl to get in the first place.
The villagers got so angry he had to flee the town in the night.

[Anonymous No.19839090]

>>19839081
>>19839055
kek
there are people who idoloze this guy

[Anonymous No.19839097]

>>19838971
It was a boy of 11 years, not a girl.

[Anonymous No.19839104]

>>19839097
Nope, that was another one.

[Anonymous No.19839108]

>>19839090
So what? People like his philosophy and ideas, they don't give a shit for the gossip, personal side. Only women and mindless bugmen care about that shit.

[Anonymous No.19839134]

>>19839090
People often miscatecorize Witty, as saying there is an Early (tractactus) Witty and a Late (investigations) Witty. In fact, a true expert on Witty knows he had *many* phases. Masturbating-over-mathematical-constructs Witty, Child-beating-across-rural-germany Witty, Pederast Witty, forgot-what-he-meant-by-his-earlier-writings Witty...
The man *was* something...

[Anonymous No.19839928]

>>19838866
Ah, yes, a delusional, 'violent' (as much as an Austrian can be, looking at you, Clitler) girl-hitting, homosexual is just what I'm looking for in my life.

No, he was not a mystic.
Yes, every child grows up and realizes that living their life is more important than certain philosophies. Wittgenstein is for the 'men' who failed to do this properly.

t. Literally the most quoted thing in all time; "There are more things in-"

[Anonymous No.19840005]

>>19838866
If you're referring to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus phase, then he's not so influential today because he himself abandoned the central thesis of the tractatus in his later work, the philosophical investigations. Now, if you're referring to why the Wittgenstein from the PI is not so influential today, the reason is that the whole "school" of ordinary language philosophy has been discredited after the book "Words and things" by Ernst Gellner, and then most of analytic philosophy turned out to stop pursuing a linguistic analysis

[Anonymous No.19840045]

>>19838866
Johann Georg Hamann literally made the exact same epistemological conclusions 200 years earlier but actually is useful because he used his knowledge to work in REAL PHILISOPHY u gay Austrian wigga.

[Anonymous No.19840101]

>>19839928
>Ah, yes, a delusional, 'violent' (as much as an Austrian can be, looking at you, Clitler) girl-hitting, homosexual is just what I'm looking for in my life.
Sounds pretty based ngl

[Anonymous No.19840313]

>>19838971
With this new information in mind, where do I start with Wittgenstein?

[Anonymous No.19840686]

>>19838940
>Count the number of time in your daily life there are retarded argument about "no, doing this isn't actually generous, being generous is actually doing XX" etc
This is just semantics though. A clearer way of communicating that point would be, "If you want X result, you should do this. If you want Y result, however - which I suspect you do - you should do this other thing."

(haven't read Witty btw)

[Anonymous No.19840693]

>>19840005
>he himself abandoned the central thesis of the tractatus in his later work
He abandoned the tractatus phase to enter the bulldozer phase.

[Anonymous No.19840713]

>>19838940
>how come it's not widely accepted in general population
Homer Simpson literally name checks him to show how sophisticated he is. You can't get much more pop-culture and exposure to general population than that.
>"no, doing this isn't actually generous, being generous is actually doing XX"
What?
>>19838995
Hmmm grasscore filmmaker Terrance Malick did his thesis in Heidegger, and like Dave's brother went off on a sabatical... to France rather than the shack, but still, really gets the noggin' joggin'

[Anonymous No.19840910]

>>19839928
>horatio
I haven't heard that quoted very often

[Anonymous No.19841073]

>>19838866
I'll try to give you an answer that isn't all ad hominem invective, or passing over the question.

1. Wittgenstein is quite influential. He is probably one of the most influential philosophers of the century.

To be sure, he isn't as influential as a Kant or a Hegel, but that's because no one has been recently, and likely no one will be again. Philosophy began splitting into more distinct subfields in the late 19th century (perhaps earlier, Hegel is arguably the last person to develop an entire system encompassing all aspects of the discipline). This has made it harder for any one thinker to dominate all of "philosophy." It is much harder now to be up to date on all the arguments and developments in a subfield. But more to the point, each subfield of philosophy is adjacent to different scientific disciplines. Philosophy of mind is adjacent to neuroscience, neurology, psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, etc. Philosophy of language is adjacent to semiotics, neuroscience, information science, linguistics, etc.

Since virtually all philosophy relies on empiricism to some degree, doing philosophy in these subfields requires also being knowledgeable about the adjacent fields. This is increasingly more difficult as human knowledge expands. Developing systems that seek to "explain it all," is increasingly difficult.

Certainly parts of philosophy are posterior to the sciences, such a questions of what truth is in epistemology, but others get bound up in the sciences, such as "how do humans aquire knowledge."


2. I take it you are talking about the Tractatus. Not everyone agreed that Wittgenstein had proved his propositions there, including Wittgenstein himself years later.

Positivism as a whole essentially died, and at the hands of positivists. Read Wittgenstein's Investigations and Quine's paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism.

Nor did everyone find his premises valid. The whole logic picture claim rests on thoughts and then words applying to objects. It is very much not clear that this is the case and the nature of these objects is not a settled. Wittgenstein didn't solve the hard problem or get at the essential question of Post-Kantian metaphysics vis-á-vis the nature of the external world and our knowledge of it.

Second, if you're going with atomic facts corresponding to objects, and positing two value logic as necissary for saying anything of meaning, then you have quite a problem when two value logic doesn't apply to physical objects, re: superposition.

Ordinary language theory has died out. It doesn't jive with empircle findings in information theory. Language can't be all social either, since DNA is a coding language occurring in nature (it's also been used to store books and jpegs). Information is now a framework used for understanding physics, and claims that language is just a system to refer to objects gets very circular.

[Anonymous No.19841084]

>>19841073
Or just check the Stanford Encyclopedia and Google criticisms lol. There are tons.

It was a very weak claim that philosophy was "solved."

[Anonymous No.19841113]

>>19838866
You're way behind. Forget that shit being meaningless, what's worse is that qualia isn't real. So there isn't actually anything to talk about.

[Anonymous No.19841704]

>>19840713
Terry did go to the shack and actually met Heidegger in his early years whilst doing his bachelors

[Anonymous No.19841955]

>>19838866
REEE I WONT STAND FOR NIHILISM FUCK YOU WITTY

[Anonymous No.19841983]

>>19840910
Me either but it isn’t really a criticism of the limits of epistemology, rather perhaps just human epistemology

[Anonymous No.19842298]

>>19839037
He explicitly rejected the Tractatus in every single work he wrote after it

[Anonymous No.19842420]

>>19841073
Great, thoughtful post. Sums things up nicely.

[Anonymous No.19842439]

Who?

[Anonymous No.19842463]

>>19838866
He literally disagrees with half of the shit he’s written. Hard to be influential when even you try and refute yourself

[Anonymous No.19842518]

>>19842463
>Postulates a thesis
>Immedeately refutes it
>Refuses to elaborate further
>Dies
I unirinically believe that however insightful Witty's works really are, all of his influence is actually built on how utterly based he was.

[Anonymous No.19843171]

>>19841073
Information Science makes Wittgenstein's claim that language applies to objects stronger. It shows that information is a factor of physical processes and grounds it in them.

However, the fact that books can be written and stored in DNA, or that the instructions for the production of proteins coded in DNA can be transcribed into ASCII text, or even into very repetitive and convoluted ordinary language certainly means that if Wittgenstein was right about one core concept, he was certainly naive about the entire system. Representationalism finds some grounds in innovations in information science and physics, but it's also an incomplete story. For one, the holographic principal says this representation is only of objects' "surfaces." Second, there is massive error and data loss between transmission, the compression is non- reversible and becomes, as semioticians advocate, a new form that only relates directly to others of its type.

Without an answer to the Hard Problem, and apparent predicate dualism you can't articulate how language symbols correspond to physical things, which is what his Tractus actually needs to prove. No answer is forthcoming though.

I see only two coherent approaches here. A sort of pragmatism, such as evolutionary epistemology, or a Hegelian "the truth is the whole" system, where symbols arise from specifics, objects, as Wittgenstein suggests, but then also shape cognition, which is the true ground of being (provided you take the Absolute Idealist argument that Kant's Copernican Turn means speaking of the noumenal is meaningless).

It is phenomenal how well Hegel has held up to time but it makes me suspicious that the system is actually vacuous in a way that isn't apparent, because it is so flexible.

[Anonymous No.19843248]

>>19843171
The roots of the reality we percieve, the universe is either physically real or it is not (Gods computer)

If the former, then there must be greater limits, greater chances of knowing more and more the fundamentals.

If it is fake, it is still limited, but we would presume a greater distance and difficulty of comprehending the fundamentals. (Like a community of concious entities in the gameworld of Minecraft, building particle accelerators, to try to determine what the fundamental substance of their world is composed of)

In any event, quantity, physicality, substanceness must exist. It must exist some way. And so I can't least seems theoretically possible, that the physical fundamentality of substanceness can be deduced by refinements of testing and contemplating what it seems it could possibly be like and what it seems like it could not possibly be like, refining until left with, what seemingly most likely is

[Anonymous No.19843423]

>>19838866
“What is courage” is an ethical question, and no philosopher has destroyed the need for metaphysics

[Anonymous No.19843771]

>>19838866
>>19843248

[Anonymous No.19844430]

>>19843771
Not an argument, say something if you think there is something to be said

[Anonymous No.19844435]

>>19838866
People are too stupid for him.

[Anonymous No.19844711]

>>19843423
I mean, no philosopher has destroyed the need for heroin either.

[Anonymous No.19844719]

>>19838866
> all meta-physical questions have no actual meaning

already refuted by Guenon

[Anonymous No.19845996]

>>19843248
This, someone reply

[Anonymous No.19846843]

>>19843248
Cmon

[Anonymous No.19846937]

>>19838971
>One villager described him as "that totally insane fellow who wanted to introduce advanced mathematics to our elementary school children."[8] The physical punishments were not unusual in Austria for boys at the time, but the villagers were unhappy that he was doing it to the girls too. Girls were not expected to grasp algebra, writes Monk, much less have their ears boxed over it.[12]
What a total chud incel. I bet he was a pedo too

[Anonymous No.19847000]

>>19846937
based witty making no distintion between the genders

[Anonymous No.19847007]

>>19844719
The only metaphysics I've seen from him was a contradiction wrapped in sophistry.

[Anonymous No.19847068]

>>19838890
>Wittgenstein
>analytic
Retard

[Anonymous No.19847131]

>>19838940
W literally was in favor of the opposite view that everyday use of words by regular (non philosopher) people within their form of life was the ultimate source of meaning. So defining generosity by giving examples from experience was not "retarded argument" in his view but rather the only legitimate bedrock for meaning-making –whether the word "generous" would be an apt use in that context. He was more concerned with the way colleagues like Russell and other positivists handled meaning than the "general population"

[Anonymous No.19847146]

>>19838866
He’s the most famous philosopher of the 20th century.

[Anonymous No.19847153]

>>19838932
What was the deal with him and communism? How come he didn't think dialectical materialism wasn't gibberish too?

[Anonymous No.19847323]

>>19847146
>fame

[Anonymous No.19848143]

>>19838866
The twenty non-living philosophers with whom the most target faculty respondents identified

[[David Hume]] 139
[[Aristotle]] 118
[[Immanuel Kant]] 113
[[Ludwig Wittgenstein]] 73
[[Frege]] 70
[[Lewis]] 69
[[Russell]] 61
[[Quine]] 61

- What Do Philosophers Believe?
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers

[Anonymous No.19848172]

>>19839080
this is a modification of the thesis Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment starts out with

[Anonymous No.19848216]

>>19848143
Interesting paper. I'm surprised Hume is the top choice because he doesn't seem to get the same attention as Kant and the Greeks generally. The respondents are clearly skewed towards analytic philosophy. Then again Hume's observations about the illusory nature of our perceptions and sense of self is the exact sort of thing that a bunch of analytics could get behind

[Anonymous No.19848252]

>>19848143
>Frege
Why does anyone follow him? Weren't literally all his efforts obsolesced by later logicians?

[Anonymous No.19848312]

>>19838866
Because if his ideas were accepted, philosophers would be out of a job

[Anonymous No.19848339]

>>19838954
Yeah, basically this. You can tell people that "What is courage?" has no meaning, and it is still no less compelling a question. When people talk, they're not talking about words. Wittgenstein failed to notice this because he was autistic.
Don't get me wrong. I like Wittgenstein. He's written things that I think of almost every day, yet clearly his observations were highly unusual and not easily integrable with how people actually think and talk.

[Anonymous No.19848346]

>>19847007
> was a contradiction wrapped in sophistry.
such as?

[Anonymous No.19848362]

>>19848339
>The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated, seems to me unassailable and definitive and if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved

He said that philosophical questions are useless.

[Anonymous No.19849668]

>>19838971
Witty was homosexual. He raped the boy to death, his rich family paid hush money.

[Anonymous No.19850598]

>>19848143
Makes sense. I feel like the Hegels of the world would get into interdisciplinary fields like cognitive science/AI, complexity, etc.

And the semiotics and linguistics attracts people who might have been more open to continental philosophy.

Your Platos and Plotinuss and maybe some of the Hegels also have theology to go to, since philosophy of religion isn't as big but theology programs have non-denominational folks doing studies.

[Anonymous No.19850605]

>>19850598
Never thought of it before, but Hegel would love AI. You're taking being and trying to find a way to make itself know itself as itself.