+axlrosea675 agreed; he is just repeating himself for the past 25 years...

mehranshargh totally. it's really annoying. plus he's somehow turned into a cowboy.

***** pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/188809542/athome.jpg :))

mehranshargh lol

+axlrosea675 I won't disagree that he's basically saying the same stuff he did in the 80's or 70's, but I don't think much else in contemporary philosophy is worth talking about. Contemporary philosophy seems to be in a state of refining pre-existing arguments now that all the best arguments, in their most general forms at least, have already been given.

Were his lectures recorded? If they were, are any of them freely available on the internet?

I would argue that, to the extent that this is true, it has always been the case. This point, in fact, is a central part of Wittgenstein's devastating critique of philosophy. Philosophers have only thought they were "trying to make sense of the world," when in fact, they were only ever making nonsense of it, only ever playing the language game, only ever trading in established doctrines and dogmas that could never be substantiated. . So I don't know who Fry and Laurie were, or what they intended to lampoon, but if they were deliberately making a distinction between critical theory and philosophy proper, than from a Wittgensteinian perspective anyway, such a distinction cannot be maintained.

Not sure that is an accurate assessment of that brand of philosophy that goes under the label of postmodernism here in the states, but I understand what you mean.

The continental philosophical tradition certainly does not privilage clarity and precision to the extent that the analytic tradition does. There is certainly a playful, rhetorical and perhaps even poetic dimension to their writing. But the idea that they wrote the way they did to shield themselves from their American critics (who weren't paying attention to them anyway) is absurd. There are distinct ideas, many of them insightful, to be discerned in those writings, if we take them time to read them.

31 Savage Cite the philosophers that you are speaking about that are in the continental philosophical tradition.

I think if you read them well you would think different. Foucault writes in a fairly straight forward, very readable style, though like the rest favoring the occasional poetic phrasing, so I don't see how this argument would apply to him. And while Derrida is very difficult to read, there is a clear argument in all of his texts. His difficulty lies mostly in the fact that a. he's very hard to translate, b. he likes to play around with language, c. he presupposes a whole lot of background knowledge from the reader. But it would be one thing if the informed reader could not get a clear thought out of these texts, but that just isn't true. If he was difficult with no substance behind it that would be 1 thing, but that's not the case. Though Lacan sometimes I actually do get that feeling with him, so I kind of agree with you there. But even he's readable, it's just sometimes he seems like..he's difficult just for the sake of it. As for modern feminism, not an expert on it but what I have read has been very easy stuff to read and understand (aside from Judith Butler), so idk why you're including it in that list.

Where can i find this please?!

Did someone found it?

@@bigdoug9045 There are two books called Talking Philosophy and The Great Philosophers. Can't find them for free online though.

It is this one: On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1979).

thank you!!! I found it online: prawfsblawg.blogs.com/files/wittgenstein-on-certainty.pdf

Thanks! please share with us later your idea of the relation between Qbism and this work!

I will read it and then comment deeply. But for what Searle says the connections is that in QBism (in fact, in quantum mechanics) some things just "are" , we are agents and our actions and the resulting experience are not backed up by a mechanism, there's not structure behind our agency and experience.

Well, Wittgenstein is philosophy. Heidegger is bullshit. That's your difference

@@anon-rf5sx Yes, maybe the most influential western thinker since Kant is ‘bullshit’ because he challenged traditional notions of subjectivity

There isn't !

Incidentally, there are many who view Wittgenstein and Kant as similar-minded in some aspects. Some think that Wittgenstein's private language arguments, for instance, could be reconstrued as transcendental arguments for the social aspect of language.

Rules are not unique to games. Organizations, grammar, even individuals have rules.

Hmmmm. Well, which Wittgenstein? Early Wittgenstein very opposite of post-structuralism. Later W though, really not any essential difference aside from the tradition they were working within. I mean right off the bat, The P-S were so different even from themselves it's hard to know where to start. So let's start with Derrida since I think he's the closest analogue to Wittgenstein. They are so similar in fact that secondary lit on Derrida often contains long digressions on Wittgenstein, and W's work has been called deconstructive by some commentators, which is to say, that to understand one is in some ways to understand the other. They were both critiquing metaphysics/essentialism/foundationalism/philosophy as positive science on the basis of an investigation of the relation between philosophical questions and the language in which they are posed, and the way that language is determined by contexts of interpretation and language usage in particular forms of life. So both prioritize rhetoric/discourse/social practice over logic/epistemology. And this is also true of other post-structuralists, who inherit this from Heidegger. Because all post-structuralists were basically Heideggerian, and he was so similar to the later Wittgenstein, it's easy to see how W can easily fit into their their way of thinking. So W is a weird philosopher in this sense, standing as he did in between two traditions. Early W is closer to Frege, Russel, and the positivists. Later W is closer to Heidegger and the post-structuralists. But to return to Derrida, though their projects are essentially two very different ways of doing the same thing, the end goal was not the same. While W wanted to resolve or dissolve philosophical questions, D was more interested in opening them up. While W engaged in his critique in order to close the book on metaphysics, D did so in order to reopen it, by getting us to read old books in new ways. And this attitude can to some extent be generalized to others in his tradition and demarcate something like an essential difference. For where W is serious and negative, the PS are playful and positive. The death of philosophy for W meant the silencing, repression, and subordination of philosophy to the sciences. For the PS, it meant we should find new, creative ways of doing philosophy which did not see philosophy as a way of obtaining certain knowledge or absolute Truth. They are just two separate ways of approaching the same problem, one which W himself helped us to realize was a problem (along with Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Heidegger, which explains their fascination with those thinkers as well).

So nicely stated. Well done!

He doesn't say it in Tractatus. He mentiones it in his letter to Ludvig von Ficht.

+Legomies fin Thanks man, I appreciate this. I knew it wasn't in the Tractatus but since it wasn't in the Investigations or Culture and Value I had no idea where to look.

+Legomies fin i thank you on behalf of the rest of the people who also find this useful

Co masz przez to na myśli?

@@pierremcarsky język jako narzędzie/language as a tool.

When your only tool is Marx, everything looks like class analysis.

@@dx7tnt especially water. There should be book about water consumption versus alcohol and high in sugar drinks. Class division in compare to access to good quality water in modern times. It can also show toxicity of water around the world and language as a tool of propaganda against some communities.

All of them

@@dx7tnt how does it address the problem of induction?

@@WakeRunSleep You'd have to read him to find your angle. As he says in On Certainty, 287. The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions.

right, they only delve into his contribution to the philosophy of language.

Langauge has different levels; the lowest the picturial representation of the world: you can picture an "apple". The next level is methaphorial representation: "apple of my eye", one cannot see this but can understand its meaning due to methaphor and simily. The next level is the abstract level: "society", "invasion", etc. One cannot picture these, but can understand their meanings in context. Later Wittgenstein philosophy was to move from the first level to the next. Big deal? you decide.

My humble opinion: big, very big, because he is pointing out the subjectivity in semantics; the reason why not only so many of the alleged problems in philosophy inherited from Classical times, are not problems at all; but to make sure we frame the precised intended meaning of meaningful terms in the remaining real problems. Thanks very much for the uploads! They are great!

Thank you for this comment, I laughed

What about the effable?

Why don't you try reading some before insisting we get rid of him?

Your weak definition of a game allows other things to be defined as games that we would have never considered. Things like eating or typing on a keyboard.

boobbbers Eating can be a game. If you attach a certain payoff to it. Like for example, competitive eating. Likewise for typing contests. Your understanding of what I said seems to be weak.

And just to help you out, I didn't say the definition of a game. I said the common element. Try to make your brain work.

Another common element of a game is that humans make it. But that's trivial. If you understand the issue that Wittgenstein had with the idea of games, you wouldn't be talking about just "common elements" that games and other things have (nor would you be taking Searle's words so literal). What Wittgenstein was trying to do talk about the common element that all games and ONLY games had, which in other words, is the definition of games. Not only that, your definition of a game means that if you played a game, lost, and received no payoff, then what you played was not a game.

You're still struggling. *I* told you what a common element was because the claim was that you can't find one, not that you couldn't make-up a definition. Definitions are semantics, common elements are logic. Secondly, you don't HAVE to receive a payoff for something to be a game. 0 is a potential option. There just has to be a potential payoff. This element is not the same as the definition, so you trying to assert or argue as though I did is further confusion.

What do you get paid to do?