Site Map for Wittgenstein's Logic of Language and the history of philosophy

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is difficult.... One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down. (Culture and Value p. 48, 62)

The background of all this writing is "logic of language" or, in other words, How is the distinction between sense and nonsense made when discussing philosophical problems?

Further Topics in Logic of Language

• Family Likeness - Criticism of Wittgenstein's Simile

• Wittgenstein's Metaphor "Family Likenesses"
  • Description versus explanation ("theory")
  • But there are many meanings of the word 'theory' (Comparison versus theory)
  • "Family Resemblances" - What doesn't it mean? (What does it exclude?)
    • "Family Likeness" (The Blue Book)
    • Wittgenstein and Spengler
      • "Fibers of a rope" metaphor (The Brown Book)
  • "What the sign slurs over, the use makes clear"

• Religion and Language games

• The Method of Language games and the Philosophy of Religion
  • The expression "language game" in The Blue Book
    • Is prayer a language game? (Does that comparison make its nature clearer?)
    • Religion: where the meaning is not the meaning
• Is religious language a language game in the sense of 'part of speech'?
  • Language games and Maths and Sciences and Art
    • Mathematical Language games
    • Barren seeds of jargon and careless metaphor
  • Limits to Wittgenstein's game simile (Summary)
    • On the other hand - Proposition types as language games
• "For a blunder, that is too big"
  • Language and God as the Father
  • "The Father is all-powerful and all-good"
    • God is all-powerful and all-good (Saint Anselm and human experience
  • "Religious Experience"

• Gestalt Shift

• Philosophy as Gestalt shifts
• Query: Gestalt shift - what is it?
  • The Duck-Rabbit
  • Old Woman-Young Woman
    • How to See the Young-woman Aspect
  • Gestalt Shift as Simile
• "Seeing is theory-laden"
  • Kant and Wittgenstein
    • Philosophy as Gestalt shift (Other examples)
  • The three parts of a Gestalt shift
• Photograph Gestalt shift
  • Double-cross and the duck-rabbit
  • Final Remarks

• Moore's Paradox - Contradiction and Philosophy

• "Contradiction isn't the unique thing philosophers think it is"
  • 'It's impossible, but I believe it'
• Contradiction as proof of falsehood
  • Moore, Wittgenstein, and "the form of words"
• Contradictions in Form and Sense
  • 'Nothing is impossible' contradiction

• 'Meaning' = 'Explanation of meaning'

• The Fallacy (false presumption) of the Frameless Picture
  • Kant: Categories of Thought and Reality
    • Appropriate frames of reference
      • To the picture or to the picture frame?
    • Points of Reference and Idealism
  • What is the meaning of a word? and the possibility of metaphysics, a reply to the Epilogue of Copleston's A History of Philosophy, Volume VIII
  • Unexemplified = Undefined
  • George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant
    • Berkeley on the reification of general terms
      • The grammar of 'thing-in-itself'
• Aristotle and Kant (Realism versus Criticism)
  • Phenomenology
    • The "thing-in-itself" and Idealism
  • 'There are objects'
  • Contradiction versus "first principles"
    • Innate Ideas
    • Grammar is (like) the setup for a game
• The two possible meanings of 'meaning' (in contrast to 'nonsense') according to Wittgenstein
  • Is the explanation of meaning the meaning of a word?
• The common names in philosophy
  • Not two different ways of looking at the same thing (?)
• Factual (metaphysical) Principles versus Rules for Reasoning
  • Concepts are dictated by extra-mental nature: they are dictated by the picture, not part of the picture frame (Ockham)
• Endnotes
  • Kant, geometry, philosophy, and grammar
    • "Philosophical definitions" versus grammatical clarifications (Kant)
    • Kant and 'grammar'
  • Berkeley's Criticism of Locke's Distinction between Primary and Secondary Qualities

• Are all Tautologies idle?

• The Method of Tautologies in Ethics (Plato)

• Remarks about Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

• Introduction: the meaning of the title of Wittgenstein's book
• The limits of language according to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - "Language is not a cage"
  • The structure of reality is the structure of the proposition
  • What is 'unsayable' versus What is 'undefined'
    • Frege's response to the TLP ("unsayable" because incomprehensible)
  • Or maybe "language is a cage"
    • The facts that can account for concept-formation
• The meaning of 'nonsense' in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
  • The Recovery of Philosophy
    • The primacy of the proposition
    • Socratic Ethics
  • "The limits of my world"
    • Does Wittgenstein use the word 'world' ambiguously?
  • But if A shows itself, then isn't what A shows the meaning of A?
  • Final characterization of the TLP
    • "All that music has meant in my life"
• "Religious language is not metaphorical"
  • Religious-propositions (Proposition type)
    • But we mustn't generalize based on a very few cases only
    • Belief in God versus Belief that God exists
      • The declarative sentence and logical form
  • God as Creator of the World and Ethics
  • Unidirectional comparisons

• Wolf and Duck | Pictures and Language-Meaning

• Logic of language and philosophy
• Can a picture be nonsense?
  • The Picture is the Meaning
  • The Picture is not the Meaning
  • Undefined combinations of words versus Absurdity
    • Definition, Idea, Abstraction
    • Normal Use
    • Absurd. Without meaning
  • The order of logical questioning
  • Wolf and Duck
• "Foundation or No Foundation?"
• Philosophy of Western Religion
  • Life's Goal (Paul at Athens)
    • Forms, Blends, and God
    • 'There will be a Last Judgment'
  • Two Principles - Literal and Metaphor
    • Two Ways of Thought (Enlightenment empiricism)
  • "Fool and Heretic"
    • An Alternative Ending
  • The limit of religion, that is, of the concept 'religion'
    • Natural science, Metaphysics, and God
    • The Range of Reason
  • Ethics and Philosophy
  • Philosophy and Religion
    • What God is Not
      • "All-powerful and All-good"
      • An "Ethical Religion" (not an explanatory religion)
      • Standards (Yardsticks)
    • The Historical Evolution of the Concept 'God'
  • Mysticism and Philosophy
    • The limit of concept revision
    • Divine Providence
    • [Mysteries of Faith]
    • The proposition 'God is the heavenly Father'
    • Mysticism and delusion
      • To see beyond what cannot be seen beyond (To perceive the imperceptible (ghosts, spirits))
• Philosophical Doubt
  • Things "established once and for all time"

• Fox and Cat

• Sense, nonsense, and reason (and Hume)
  • Reason evaluating experience
  • The distinction between 'wisdom' and 'foolishness'
  • What would a reason look like here?
  • Axioms and "the passions"
• The true master in philosophy | To let the theories fit the facts
• Superstition versus religion, a distinction
  • Averroes on Philosophy and Theology
    • The limit of metaphysics -- is experience
      • Plato, metaphysics versus experience
    • Metaphysics and the closed mind
  • Further thoughts about religion and evil (many confused)
    • "The Goal of Life"
    • Why is there evil?
      • Augustine in Copleston
  • "God as a working-hypothesis" (Religion and Superstition)
  • "The death of God" (Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer) | The death of concepts
    • Perennial Philosophy (Eternal Questions)
      • The riddle is the ultimate question in philosophy
  • Paths to and from Atheism

• A Theory is not an Insight into Reality itself

• Conceived facts, selections and arrangements (Imagination)
  • A theory is not a description of "how things really are"
• Making proper use of the theory of evolution. An example.
  • Instinct and concept-blindness inducing phenomenon blindness
    • The Task of a theory, and the Abuse of a theory
  • A comparison does not say what a thing is, only what it is like
    • Philosophy is conceptualizing (revising or inventing concepts). A conception gives meaning, as a definition does
  • Unconceptualized phenomena are invisible
  • How does Socrates know what he knows?
• Of first and last questions. First questions.
  • Has Aristotle a logic of language, i.e. does he set a standard to distinguish between sense and nonsense?
    • Logic and the Consensus
    • Philosophical Yardsticks
  • "What philosophy is?"
    • Skepticism, not indifference but active doubt
    • 'Philosopher' and 'Philosophy'
    • Where are the limits of philosophy? (PI § 68)
    • The wisdom loved in "love of wisdom"
  • What is Socratic philosophy?
    • Category Mistake
    • What is important to know?
    • What, then, is wisdom?
    • Vice is ignorance (of the good)
    • Standard for 'knowing': Socrates' method
    • When ignorance is preferable to knowledge
    • A man of moral virtue
    • Socrates and knowledge
  • The ambiguous oracles
    • Too much when wisdom is Nothing too much
  • And Wittgenstein's Philosophy
    • The limitations of Wittgenstein's world-picture (axioms)
  • And Platonic Philosophy
    • Plato's early view about the meaning of common names
      • If the meaning of a common name is an essence, then its meaning is unchanging, and therefore its meaning must be knowable without knowing anything of the particular context in which the common name is used
        • What is the meaning of the word 'tree'?
    • Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato
      • Plato and knowledge
      • Where indeed? (Plato and Socrates)
  • "Natural Philosophy"
• Postscript: "So long as it's not stupid"

• The Christian Religion without Supernaturalism

• The Christian Religion (according to Albert Schweitzer, mostly)
  • "God created the world"
  • The Relationship of the God of Nature to the God Within Us
    • An Ethical versus an Explanatory Religion
    • The Contrast between God and the World
    • What to do with this Contradiction
  • What do we mean by 'religious faith'?
    • "Why must we do what is good?"
    • The Person of Jesus
    • "Two kinds of naivete"
  • The Connection Made by Faith: God₁ = God₂
    • God as the will to love
  • Where is the kingdom of God?
    • The world-picture of the historical Jesus cannot be ours
• "The Wonder World of the New Testament"
  • History [Historiography] and the New Testament: The Origin of Miracles
  • Conclusion

• The Essence of What-is

• Philosophy and Logic-of-language - Are the two coterminous (Wittgenstein notwithstanding)?
  • Propositions of more than one use
• What is the Essence of Man? (Plato versus Aristotle | Grammar or Metaphysics?)
  • Essence, Plato, Aristotle, the historical Socrates
  • Essence and grammar -- what does it mean?
  • What is the essence of the phenomenon 'games'?
  • Convention, reality or partially both?
  • What was Wittgenstein's interest in the phenomenon?
  • Can hypotheses about phenomena rather than concepts (definitions of words) be the proper subject of philosophy (Wittgenstein notwithstanding)?
• "Essence belongs to grammar" (Does it?)
  • "The essence of God"
  • Query: "Wittgenstein's second theory"
    • "Wittgenstein's first theory about what philosophy really is"
  • Does the essence of philosophy belong to grammar?
    • The illusion of wisdom seeking (Wittgenstein, Kant)
  • Hypotheses and Grammar
• "What is, is. And what is not, is not." (Parmenides)
  • Recursion circles

• Philosophy's Name

• Socratic Philosophy
  • The general form of a philosophical answer
• Needless homily ("discourse", "to converse with")
• Und so weiter (Are there philosophical theories? in Plato and Wittgenstein)
  • Thesis, nonsense, or grammar?
    • Are the concepts 'Form' and 'essence' equivalent?
• Wisdom without ...
• "The most important thing to bear in mind is that all fact is already theory" (To be a fact is to be a fact in particular world-picture)
  • Not to replace the facts of nature with a theory of nature (All theory is distortion of reality. The facts are the reality)
  • "The conceived facts"
• Propositions on Approval or Return (Socratic dialectic)
  • Criterion for deciding between "vague" and "nonsense" (Is the relationship more-or-less or absolute?)
  • What is the meaning of abstract art?
  • Pascal and the Questions without answers (The same light and darkness)
    • Rational + Irrational = Irrational

• Organizing Principles

• Absolute point of reference
  • The one way, or only many ways?
    • Does reality exist? (Will-o'-the-wisps)
    • "The one true ..."
• Ethics, Virtue, the natures of
  • Philosophical grammar
• Questions of Socrates and others
  • Philosophy in pictures
    • Fantasy pictures (Hegel, Marx)
    • Friedrich Engels {food and drink, religion}
• The owl of Socrates does not fly in the dark
  • Does reality exist? (Thales and Plato's shadows)
    • Network of Reference (fisherman's nets)

• The meaning « Das höchste wäre zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist »

• References on the site to Goethe's maxim about Facts

• Starlight - Messages from the Past?

• Introduction: Drury and "the danger of words"
• Andromeda millions of years ago ("the velocity of light")
  • "The Stars in the Night Sky are not Real"
  • "What is Light?"
    • Logic, metaphysics, natural sciences, and phenomena
  • We must learn to think philosophically
• Notes: "transparent white"

• Apollo and Philosophy

• Truth and Apollo
  • Apollo and Seeking to Know
  • Apollo and Limits
• Pythagoras and Apollo
• Precepts the Greeks ascribed to Apollo
• Ignorance and Philosophy

• Ancient Greek and Roman Historians

• Ionian skepticism and the birth of history
  • "Rational interpretation of myth"
  • Herodotus. Method and comparative mythology
    • Comparisons, myths, customs of peoples
  • Herodotus and the Persian Wars
• Thoroughgoing sophistic skepticism (Thucydides)
  • The Rationalist Historian, acknowledging neither oracles nor Providence
    • Realpolitik
      • "The moral lessons of history"
      • The statesman according to Thucydides (Machiavelli)
  • The method of the dramatist ("showing". Thucydides as historiographer)
  • Historiography as "myth-writing"
    • The role of the historian according to J.B. Bury
• Between Thucydides and Polybius
  • Birth of National History (pan-Hellenic history)
  • Origin of the idea of World History
  • Specialization and Antiquarianism
    • Polybius in contrast to Eratosthenes on Homeric geography
• Polybius, "the Greek Historian of the Rise of Rome"
  • Qualifications of an historian
    • Rules for writing history (Polybius on historiography)
  • Instructive and universal history
  • Speculative philosophy of history (cyclic development)
  • "Hypotheses" (Tyche, Fortune)
    • On religious belief
• The Roman historians
  • Personal morality versus Statecraft, the point of view of Tacitus in contrast to Thucydides
  • Stoicism's impulse to the writing of universal human history
    • Christianity and universal history writing
• The ancient way of thinking about history versus our way, Bury's view from more than one hundred years ago

• If everything speaks for, nothing against, the truth of a proposition

• "Everything speaks in its favor, nothing against it"
  • Are all events accidental - Is observed regularity mere illusion?
    • Induction and Prediction
  • Do we not know if the sun will rise tomorrow?
    • The word 'know' in the TLP
    • Possible ≠ There is reason to believe
    • The way philosophers think (namely, metaphysically)

• "Metaphysics was not taught at Harvard ..."

• Background: The lectures of Henry Veatch
• Philosophy at the Sorbonne in the early years of the 20th Century
• But why did Veatch blame Wittgenstein for that?
  • Wittgenstein's relation to Positivism
  • Wittgenstein and the Spirit of his Age
• Positivism and Meaning and Knowledge
  • Historical background: the word 'science'
  • Question: Voltaire's relation to positivism?
  • The methods of Plato and Socrates
    • Reason tethered to experience (Socrates)

• Count Eberhard's Hawthorn - Showing versus Saying

• Must philosophy be put into words?
  • Count Eberhard's Hawthorn
    • How Uhland's Poem might be Read
  • Saying and Showing
    • "Showing" versus Philosophy
    • What becomes of "showing" after the Tractatus?
      • By what methods is the TLP refuted by Wittgenstein?
    • "Showing" that is not nonsense
    • Wittgenstein's philosophy is fact bound, but it also explores "counter-factual facts"

• Albert Schweitzer and Ludwig Wittgenstein as Christians, in some sense

• The logical path to reverence for life
• Christians in some sense ... But in which sense?
  • Schweitzer, the Enlightenment, and Dogma
• Schweitzer's Religious World-view
  • "Meaningless Proceeding" (Relation with "the Absolute")

• The clockmaker of natural theology

• "The Argument from Design" (Strange clock, strange Clockmaker)
• Is function a matter of fact? ("Design", continued)
  • If function proves design, then what does it prove?
  • Dysfunction and the kingdom of God

• In partibus fidelium

• The neighborhood without borders
  • "The inadequacy of every previous religion of ethics" (Albert Schweitzer)

• "We may become angry and fall out with one another"

• Fool and Heretic
  • Is common ground sometimes impossible (Wittgenstein) or always possible (Socrates)?
• Clarification never ends, not if philosophy is a working on one's own understanding
  • The wisdom of Socrates, that man is not wise (although he thinks he is)
  • Socrates and Wittgenstein
• Orphaned Queries
  • Philosophy as straightening up a messy room, i.e. clarifying or revising concepts, which in philosophy appear a muddle
• Judgment or Mercy (an unwanted aside)
  • "The Silence of God"
    • What the God of Christianity is not
    • Neither fable, myth, nor edifying story
  • The spirit of the Lord versus the spirit of this world
    • The Good for Man
    • "But if you can believe that God became man ..."
    • "And write with confidence, in the beginning was the ..."
    • Nature and Good and Evil
    • Man and donkey alike
  • A science of religion

• Greek Bread-Baking Bells

• Allusion to The Clouds in Plato's Apology

• Meaning and Verification

• "The Meaning is the Method of Verification"
  • "Either it snowed or it did not snow" (Russell)
  • Grammatical Abstractions
    • "A proposition can be significantly negated"

• Passeri ("sparrows")

• The Classical Greek imagination
  • An Ideal of Perfection
• Europe's Classical inheritance
  • The Primitive imagination
• The collapse of civilization
• The kind of definition is the kind of language game

• Art and Philosophy

• "What is tolerance?"
  • Understanding versus Agreement
• But is silencing speech also silencing thought?

• Criticism of Schweitzer's view of Spinoza's ethics

• "Whatever is Natural is Rightful" (Spinoza on Nature)

Table of Contents for Philosophical Notes

There are sixty-two pages of notes. But these notes are uneven in quality. Some notes are not thought all the way through, some are preliminary, most need to be revised, many others discarded.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe. (CV p. 27) Every worthwhile idea carries a lot of cheap ones in its train. (ib. p. 58)

These notes mostly supplement or continue the discussions found in the main pages of this site (which are listed above, at the top of this page in the Table of Contents. Some are also briefly described on the homepage).

62. Conceptual Limits | Forms of Expression

• Our Father and the Kingdom of God
  • The Limit of God
  • "Bound by the laws of nature"
  • Summary Conclusions
    • The merciful Samaritan (Luke 10.30-37) - "Who is my neighbor?"
• The Good, the Useful, Borderless Concepts
  • Forms of Expression, and Meaning
    • "The heart has its reasons" (Pascal)
• Forms of life, bird's and man's
  • Thought-forms
    • "Sancte Socrates" (Erasmus)
    • "A Christian is anyone who lives according to the Word" (Justin Martyr)
    • Absurd Comparisons
• The displacement of the "God as a working-hypothesis" to answer man's questions about the natural world (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
  • First impressions and expectations (quite often) are mistaken impressions and false expectations
  • Or maybe this would be a Summary of Bonhoeffer's thought
    • Grotius: Law that is valid "even if there were no God"
  • "God as a working-hypothesis"
    • An example of Bonhoeffer's project of reinterpretation

61. The Crucible of Doubt (Dostoyevsky)

• Dostoyevsky and the Question of the existence of God
  • "Autonomous Language-games"
    • Augustine about the language of the Trinity
      • The image of the Trinity
  • What does the existence of the view sub specie aeterni prove? (Dostoyevsky and "everything is permissible")
  • The Lord's Prayer
    • Schweitzer and "Redemption through Jesus Christ"
• "Glory to God also in me"
• "The importance of the philosophical act"

60. Is there a science of time?

• What then is a cow? (Wittgenstein then and later)
  • The relationship between the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations ("The possibility of philosophy is not to construct theories about reality, but to clarify thinking")
    • In the view of Rush Rhees (1905-1989)

• Reminders about Similes
  • Games of Deductive Logic
  • Is there a science of time?
    • If the word 'noun' is defined as 'the name of a person, place or thing', that is a semantic rather than syntactic definition

• "Is a word's meaning really nothing more than its use in the language?"
  • Why does Chaerephon ask?
  • Is anything logically necessary to love and pray to God, e.g. must the word 'God' be a name?

59. Philosophy in the Sleep-deprived Mind

• Notes for the Desk Drawer
  • Descartes and Socrates, their different Methods and Enquiries
  • Self-control and Ethics
    • But why, if Virtue is knowledge?
  • Miscellaneous Interlude
    • "Reverence for Life"
  • Relations between the Earlier and Later Wittgenstein
• 'A riddle without an answer'
• More notes unintendedly only for myself
  • Hipparchia of Maroneia (ca. 300 B.C.)
  • Grammar and Language Queries (More)
    • Symptoms versus criteria, causes and grammar
  • Induction in definition and ethics (Socrates and Plato)
  • Metaphysics and "wonder"

58. Socrates - Care of the Soul

• Can man become good through Socratic "care of the soul"?
  • Care of the ethical aspect of oneself
  • My brother has wronged me
• Ethics is practical
  • Who can teach ethics?
    • The forgiveness of ignorance
    • But what does that mean - 'to forgive'?
• Socratic philosophy contrasted with Christianity: wrong-doing is ignorance contrasted with the forgiveness of sins
  • "Philosophy cannot improve your life"
    • The garden, and the soul (Voltaire, Socrates)

57. Is Reason not the Excellence most Proper to Man?

• The Three Parts of Philosophy
  • Has reason the power to change men's lives?
• Definitions are explanations of meaning, but they can also be tools
• The School of Pythagoras, for children who think they go to school to teach rather than be taught
  • The school of skepticism (Sextus Empiricus)

56. Reason in Ethics, Authority in Historiography

• Ethics is rational or it is not philosophical
  • Kant and conscience
    • Whom you worship in ignorance. Saving souls. (Francis Xavier)
      • "A Christian is one who ..."
  • Historically conditioned foundations(Hume)
  • The Kingdom of God that is not: the kingdom that is "without"
    • "This not brother for me" (Who is my brother? "Thinking of others")
• Comparative Religion and History (Historiography)
  • The irresponsible use of probability-words
    • Why 'may' must never become 'is'
  • History (Historiography) is Authority-Laden
    • Albert Schweitzer as an historian
      • We must always set criteria for a correct answer - But are all criteria philosophically justifiable?
  • Monotheism and tolerance

55. Topics in critical-historical theology

• Peasants and Artisans (The historical Jesus)
  • Did the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels exist?
    • "Offensive to the moral and religious sense"
      • An answer to a community's question
      • The end of nationalism
    • "And if anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak as well"
    • "The Uniqueness of Jesus"
    • The many different ways the Gospels are viewed
  • Historical Precedent - William Wrede
    • "Scientific theology" (Hypothesis-formation in historiography)
    • Is there a part of speech 'religious proposition'?
  • Did Jesus believe himself to be the Messiah?
    • 'Messiah' and 'Christ'
  • Schweitzer's view of Historiography: Jesus, historicity and religion
    • About Paulinism and the Fourth Gospel

54. What Wittgenstein Did Not Banish

• One Sentence Summaries
  • Die Wunder sind geblieben (The wondrous remained)
    • "L. Wittgenstein" (Times obituary, 29 April 1951)
• Language and the Birth of Religion
• Socrates at the Neighbor's Porch

53. "I wish to be in all things reasonable"

• The subjective element in reason
  • Why reason is necessarily limited
    • The meaning of a text (The TLP made simple)
      • "Wittgenstein did not remember" (Ramsey to Moore)
  • "Seeing as" in contrast to "Seeing as if"
    • Stoicism in Shakespeare's Hamlet (and in Paradise Lost)
  • Is Ethics Rational? (Further discussion of an unanswered question)
    • Synonyms for not-knowing but pretending to (The notion of "intuition")
    • When psychology is superstition
  • Seeing what is not there (but is there)

52. Confusion, conceptual and real

• Virtue, Bad Habits, Instinct, Self-control (Logic is the tool of Philosophy, but it is only a tool. The topic of this section is Ethics)
  • "The stubborn man within"
  • Another obstacle to the life of good - Uncertainty
  • Another obstacle to the life of good - The Irrational
• Ideals, ideas and old age
  • Wittgenstein's metaphor of language as an ancient city
    • We define words, not "concepts"
  • Ideals that are lived are not lost
  • There are gifts, but education must also be wanted
• General Definitions. Examples. Having the confidence that one knows.
  • Are applications of a word justified by "family resemblances"? In which sense of 'justify'?
    • The absence of a general definition is the usual case, not the exception
  • General definitions versus examples
  • Stories that are myths [didactic], stories that are history [historiography], and stories that are told for both reasons
  • Nonsense also is not a matter of form

51. Different Standards versus Different Definitions, Socrates, Practical Wisdom

• Grammatical standards versus Definitions of 'grammar'
  • Comparisons like Definitions ('geometric lines')
• Socrates' method and why?
  • Plato and Wittgenstein
• Examples of Practical (rather than philosophical) Wisdom
  • The Spider and the Fly
  • Self-control, wisdom, and the irrational
• "Fragments make you think"

50. Silencing Reason

• Which philosophy is a "frightful waste of time"?
• Cats and Catness (Medieval Philosophy)
• Time and God
  • "Defining Knowledge"
    • Philosophy defines words, not things
  • Geometric Points? Not yet again ...
    • Procrustean Grammar
    • But if the word 'geometric point' is not the name of an object, then how shall the word 'geometric point' be defined?
• Historical Theology (Historiography) versus Theology
  • The preservation of doctrine, the a priori rejection of Albert Schweitzer's work
    • "Spiritual knowledge" of Jesus and the historical Jesus
    • Reason versus Belief-In
    • Using "catch-words" to evade a problem
  • The loss of Jesus' kingdom of God

49. Gifts from the Greeks

• Distinctions with and without Differences
• Forms of Life: "If a lion could talk", it would not understand us.
  • "If a human being could talk ..." (Humor versus esprit)
• "Fragments make you think"
  • The Puzzle of Eddington. The Silence of Wittgenstein.
• Replies to philosophical queries
  • Wisdom to the Greek Philosophers
    • Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries
    • Rhetorical Questions
    • "Complex questions"

48. Grammatical Investigations

• Time as a possible Form of life
  • Noticing the Absence of a Concept
    • Acquiring a new concept - Learning to keep track of time
• "My material is far away from me"
  • "How can you know what their problems were, or what they had to do about them?"
    • The Gospel in Brief (1883)
  • Character and Truth
    • Concepts like fisherman's nets
• Quests, questions, and "Questioning everything"
  • Geometry - why can't we draw a point?
  • What Socratic ignorance is Not
  • Is the word 'theory' an important word?
  • Socrates and Apollo's riddle
• The grammars of 'soul' and 'God'

47. Freedom from Authority, Freedom from Dogma

• Plato and the historical Socrates
  • The Undue Weight of Authority
    • What is "spirit"?
      • "Disembodied soul"
    • The spell of "Apostolic Authority"
      • "And when they agreed with this also"
    • Sheltering behind an authority
• Leibniz and saving pantheism
  • Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss
• Short Remarks and Philosophical Queries
• What manner of thinker was Albert Schweitzer?
  • What does it mean, to be an "ethical personality"?

46. Reverence for Truth

• Wittgenstein and Logic, Concepts and Rules
• The "phenomenon of thought" versus the concept 'thought'
  • "Defining a phenomenon"
    • Phenomena, Concepts, Definition, and Limit
• Aristotle and the Principle of Contradiction
  • "True by definition"
  • Why study philosophy's past?
• What is the future of Christianity without the Medieval World-picture?
  • Religion in the eyes of Anthropology versus Historiography ("Historical Theology")
  • "Would he take his coat? I would not ask that."
    • Marian devotion (Maximilian Kolbe)
    • But finally, what are we calling 'prayer'?
• The meaning of 'definition' in Geometry

45. You need not lose these hours

• "Dirty-blonde hair" (The Sandman)
  • Goethe, fable of woman
  • Byron, fables about women
  • Beauty and the Art of Pleasing (Pandora)
  • Der Sandmann - der ironische Zug
• The Way Back Down the Garden Path
  • On the contrary, examples are definitions
  • "The high seas of language"
  • Are "words about whose meaning we are at variance" the names of things whose nature is not clear to us?
  • The limits of my words as the limits of what I can know
    • A radically conventional view of language meaning, or not
  • Plato's grammatical model of measuring in ethics
  • Wittgenstein, Plato, and general definitions
• "World-Negation"
  • Albert Schweitzer's account of Socrates

44. The Indefiniteness of God

• "Wittgenstein was a very singular man ..." (Russell)
  • "Nothing is too absurd ..." (Cicero)
• Senses of 'to understand' (language and human experience)
• Defining God: saying "what God is" versus describing our use of the word 'God'
  • "To believe that God is the father is not easy"
  • The Golden Calf
• Preconceptions and Misperceptions (and Puzzlement)
  • The Protean grammar of the word 'God'
  • The faith Schweitzer taught to both Africans and Europeans
  • Schweitzer - a Religious Thinker
  • "The Indefiniteness of God"
  • "My ways are not your ways"
    • Suffering and Providence (levels of religious understanding)
      • Possible only in the first person
    • The God of Stoicism ("pictures" of God)
• Religion is turned aside from the world (Karl Barth)
  • Oskar Kraus' view of Albert Schweitzer's ethical mysticism
• Loss of common ground
  • More from that philosophical letter ("Platonicity")
• Putting one's hand in the fire ... (Virtue is knowledge)
  • Anger and the Philosophical way of life
  • Alcohol and philosophy (the life of thought)
• Mysticism and Ethics

43. Defining 'Piety'

• Definition by Related Concepts and by Short Stories
  • 'Piety' in Protestantism
    • Philipp Jakob Spener (Pietism)
      • "Christianity is both introspective and active"
    • Albert Schweitzer's view of J.S. Bach
      • Protestant sacred music - the chorale
  • 'Piety' without an explicit religious connection
  • About 'Piety' and 'Reverence', the concepts
• Definition in the Euthyphro ('piety', 'holiness')
  • Definition in Xenophon
• Emotion and Ethics
  • "Logic and the heart" (Schweitzer)
• "From bad companions you learn bad habits"

42. From a Provincial Monk to his Friend in the Capital

• Certainty in Ethics
  • Is Albert Schweitzer's ethics rational? (Werner Picht)
    • "The non-rational conclusion of thought"
    • "Compassion is the foundation of ethics"
      • If compassion is the excellence proper and unique to man, then life in accord with that excellence is the good for man
  • Wittgenstein and Ethics
• Mysticism or reason: Is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" a guide to how man should live his life?
  • Ethics as exhortation rather than argument (Wittgenstein)
  • Wittgenstein and presumptuous ignorance (Bach's Fugues)
• What makes someone into a philosopher? (Albert Schweitzer)
• Philosophical Replies to Philosophical Queries
  • Wittgenstein, definition, comparison, metaphysics
  • Physical and logical atoms
    • But particles of what?
    • What is matter?
  • Is time discrete or continuous?
  • Eddington's one table
  • Wittgenstein and the concept 'infinity'
  • Wittgenstein's second "real definition" of logic
• The Limit of Sense
  • "The peace that surpasses all understanding"

41. Colonialism, Albert Schweitzer, and Racism

• "The child of nature"
  • Primitive man is not inwardly free
  • The Setting, the Background
  • "A standard bearer of civilisation"
    • The Gospel and the Indigenes
      • The religion of primitive man
  • The Philosophical Mind, or, The Transcendence of Specific Time and Space
    • Harsh words ... in context
    • Bertrand Russell's words when Schweitzer died
    • Civilization, Education and Colonialism

[Three lines of thought came together | Economic independence and health]

40. In the beginning ... there was no plan

• The Deed versus the Word
  • The ethical riddle of the natural world
    • "So that the blind pangs even of beasts ..."
• Albert Schweitzer's demarcation of the philosopher's quest
  • Schweitzer's view of Late Stoicism
  • Man's philosophy must determine his way of life
• Russell, Voltaire, Maths and Tautologies
  • Does Bertrand Russell resemble Socrates?
    • "Communism meant the end of all freedom" (Russell's judgment)
    • Russell's aristocratic ideal (Enlightenment France)
  • There are many, many meanings of 'meaning'
  • Socrates, Protagoras, Opinion
    • Socrates' response to Apollo's riddle
    • Protagoras and geometry's tangent
  • Is philosophy merely "a matter of opinion"?
    • Plato and two myths of the absolute
    • The trouble with the form of expression 'philosophical opinion' is the notion mistakenly inferred from it

39. Each day grow older, and learn something new

• Short Queries and Replies
  • Naturalizing a Myth
• "The law is what God commands"
• Remarks written in the margin
  • A Second Reformation
  • Ways of Life versus Forms of Life - Degrees of Choice
    • Olya's Way of Life
    • The Feline Form of Life
    • The MAD Way of Life
    • Hezbollah and the Presbyterian pastor in Beirut, Lebanon
    • "Who was then a gentleman?"
  • Foreword and Afterword

38. Did Socrates define words or things?

• Did Socrates have a logic of language?
• "We are taught to imagine objects that we never see ..."
  • The relation between syntax and meaning
• A Picture World of Reasoned Mythology (Metaphysics)
  • Plotinus and "plain nonsense"
• Causality and Time-Travel
  • What, then, is time not real?
  • An Animal that uses Language (Aristotle's "definition of man")
  • "Potential Energy" (For Philosophy of Science)
• The concept 'God' wobbles (For Philosophy of Religion)
  • Polytheism, monotheism, and evil
• Density in philosophy
  • If philosophy is a river, it is a river of cataracts (Bruckner)
  • Pretensions ("Know thyself!")
    • "Cobbler, stick to thy last"
  • "The Bird's-eye View"
  • Character or Intelligence

37. The Basic Criticism of Wittgenstein's logic of language

• Fundamental Puzzlement ("name of a phenomenon")
  • Names of objects
  • Names of phenomena
  • Concepts define phenomena, not phenomena concepts
  • Defining phenomena (real definition)
    • Learning is based on its foundation (step by step)
  • Is philosophy nothing but grammatical investigations?
    • Two examples of that method, unresolved
    • Horrific words: 'abstraction', 'abstract term', 'abstract object'
• Fundamental Criticism of Wittgenstein's logic of language
• Remarks for Nowhere or Somewhere Else
  • "The limits of my language ..." (But what does it mean?)
    • Taken out of context, misunderstood
  • Nutshells of Seven Towers
  • Language meaning in the absence of meaning

36. Abstract Chessmen, Philosophical Jargon, Geometric Points

• Standards and Definitions
  • Philosophy and Jargon
    • To speak in ordinary comprehensible language
  • Reading Philosophy in Translation
• Is the chess-king a chess-king?
  • Can you play chess without the king?
• Geometric Points, again and again
  • Grammatical Jokes
    • Zero dimensional, an object without extension
    • Through the Looking-Glass
    • A 'point' is 'a unique address in the plane'
      • Philosophy and the teacher of geometry
      • Points invisible
      • Words that are not geometry's jargon
      • Geometry and the "wounded understanding"
    • What is Jabberwocky without Humpty Dumpty's explanations of language meaning (Who defines undefined terms?)
      • A misleading form of expression, because the "undefined terms" are defined, although not by geometers
        • This way ... because the other way is mistaken
      • Points, arrows, locations
      • What is geometry about?
    • Philosophical Grammar is questions about logical possibility, not about real possibility
      • "Words that name the same thing"
      • The Consequences of an inappropriate form of expression
• The Socrates of Plato: Seeking a Universal Standard for Ethics

35. Three Conceptions of Philosophy

• Preface. Wittgenstein. Schweitzer. Socrates.
  • Logic and Ethics (Socrates)
  • Schweitzer and World-view
  • Relationship between these three conceptions
  • Some Historical Aims in Philosophy
• (1) Is Philosophy a Mistake?
  • "Don't stop thinking"
  • Wittgenstein's Achievement
  • Pro et Contra Wittgenstein
    • "Metaphysics does not distinguish verbal from real definitions"
      • "The starry sky above, and the moral law within"
    • "That philosophical problems should completely disappear"
    • "Life is Problematic" (The riddle does exist)
      • Original thoughts, eleven years earlier
        • "The murky background"
        • "Without sorrow"
    • Promethean Rebellion
    • An account of what Wittgenstein knows (The Socratic standard)
      • "The deepest problems are really no problems"
      • Ethics as religion rather than philosophy
    • Why is unclarity sought?
      • Does Wittgenstein's sidestep of Plato's puzzle find the correct conception?
      • Logic-philosophy and hypotheses
    • Classical philosophy and Wittgenstein
  • The question about meaning replaces the question of truth and falsity
    • Wittgenstein's later method in philosophy (Sense rather than truth)
  • And judgment is replaced by description
    • But to describe language is to describe facts
  • Meaning versus impressions of meaning
• (2) Schweitzer - Philosophy as "World-view" Formation
  • Schweitzer and World-view
  • Weltanschauung (Schweitzer, Wittgenstein)
• (3) Socrates versus Wittgenstein
  • The three four lines of thought that have formed my own thinking
    • Can philosophy be taught?
    • Aeschines, companion of Socrates in love of learning

34. Socrates, Guilty in Law, Equity, Owls, Essence and Frogs

• "Essence Belongs to Grammar"
  • Are some concepts forced on us?
• The Owl and the Egg
• About the Ancient Greeks
  • Things [Ideas] the Greeks Created [Invented]
  • Freedom in Athens
  • But did Pericles make the Athenians better?
• Aristophanes - the Poet [Aeschylus] versus Socrates [Euripides]
  • Poetic wisdom or Socrates?
  • "Socrates was Guilty in Law"
  • 'Equity' and 'Law' are Different Concepts
  • Traditional Views about Socrates
  • Aristophanes' The Frogs (Society is built on complacency, not on skepticism and doubt)
    • To reason out the How and Why (Euripides)
  • Who shall best advise the city?
    • "Taking the Measure of Poetry"
    • "Who knows if death be life, and life be death?" (Euripides)

33. Virtue is Knowledge - 'I say I know, but I think I know something else'

• Moral virtue in Plato's Meno
  • The good for man, according to the Greeks
• The irrational and ethics
  • Is vice caused by the body alone or are there other causes?
    • Rational ignorance
• Virtue also requires watchfulness
• Vice is presumptuous ignorance
  • Noble instincts
  • "Virtue is happiness"
• Virtue is Knowledge (It only appears contrary-wise because "I say I know what is good, but I believe I know that something else is". If our way of living shows what we believe)
  • "The will" - a questionable tool of thought
    • Ghost-words (Ghost objects)
  • Wisdom is a virtue: Wisdom is knowledge, and Virtue is wisdom, and therefore Virtue is knowledge (Xenophon)
    • "Knowledge is virtue"
  • "I don't believe it, although I say I know it"
  • In the Garden of Gethsemane ("strength of will")
• Albert Schweitzer's own Christianity
  • The Effect of Reading Nietzsche
    • Bultmann and Bonhoeffer
• Awaiting an insight, a philosophical Gestalt shift

32. Philosophy in contrast to Wittgenstein's Logic of Language

• "And we'll grant you all the rest"
  • Drury, "Letters to a Student of Philosophy"
  • A logic or a theory of meaning?
    • Can "the riddle of existence" both exist and not exist?
      • The hippopotamus that is not in the room
  • Verification and Meaning
    • "Forms of life" is and is not a theory
  • Is there a "scientific table"? (Eddington)
  • Relative and Absolute Perspectives
• And we'll grant John Locke all the rest
• Ethics and Aesthetics (Shaftesbury)
• Empirical Psychology
• Wisdom that is not Philosophy? (Confucius)

31. Wittgenstein versus Philosophy

• Wittgenstein and pantheism - Conceptual preliminaries
• Wittgenstein's world-view (Rejection of)
  • Spinoza's pantheism: his world-view (nature-philosophy and consequent ethics)
  • Being cured of -- or by philosophy?
  • Wittgenstein's God
    • Plato and the Good (Second Letter)
    • "The essence of the world" after the TLP (Drury's letter to Rhees)
  • "Lost in the Wilderness"
• Ethics and Self-Control
• Not what -- but whom you mean
  • A Muddled Concept
  • Not this picture nor an hypothesis (The world with or without God)
• The Good and God

30. Wittgenstein's Master Question

• Socrates and the Professional Philosophers (Sophists)
  • It is not a "stupid" prejudice
    • Thinking that the meaning of a word can be discovered through introspection was not a stupid way of thinking.
  • Friedrich Waismann and "visions" in philosophy
    • Then why give your life to philosophy?
    • Puzzled by why Socrates was "a great philosopher" (Wittgenstein to M. O'C. Drury)
  • "The tyranny of language" (Frege)
  • "Round squares must exist or I could not even deny that they exist"
• Wittgenstein and concepts as a net thrown over reality
  • Wittgenstein's net simile
    • "All meaning is use"
  • Wittgenstein and "philosophy does not explain"
  • Definition by synonym
  • Language twofold: Authority and Convention
    • Our deeply-rooted picture of language meaning
    • Surface versus Depth Grammar
  • "A Real Definition of Philosophy"
  • Wittgenstein's letter to Sraffa (March 1935)
  • What are we calling 'logic'? ("The art of reasoning")
    • "Logical Synthesis"
  • "What applies to the part also applies to the whole", a false grammatical analogy (fallacy)
    • Realism versus Idealism
      • Percepts and concepts ("Concepts without percepts are empty")
• Aims in Philosophy: Russell versus Socrates
• Counting Vanishing Sheep (Philosophy of Mathematics)
  • The Metaphor of the Museum Visitor
• Contradictions and Psychology (Short remarks to philosophical questions)
  • Are contradictions false or senseless?
  • Wittgenstein's Master Question

29. When is nonsense not nonsense?

• The limit of science is testable-hypothesis formation
• Categories of Meaning {Classification}
  • Event versus Event-meaning
    • Poor in Categories (Nietzsche)
• A third conception of the essence of the good
• When is nonsense not nonsense?
  • "Language that conveys meaning ..." But what does that mean -- "conveys"?
  • "A simile of one word"
  • Wittgenstein: "the problem of life vanishes"
• Logic and Meaning (their relationship)
  • Geometry and ill-serving similes
  • "Natural Signs"
  • "All philosophy is a critique of language" (whether intentional or not)

28. Who are Wittgenstein's philosophers?

• When Wittgenstein says 'philosophers' - What does he mean?
  • Wittgenstein's Shift from asking about truth to asking about meaning
    • Ask about the meaning of the proposition rather than whether it is true or false
  • The meaning of 'geometric point' (For Philosophy of Geometry)
  • Lines and dimensions
  • Human Imagination and the Birth of Philosophy
• Protagoras of Abdera (Greek Sophist-Philosopher)
  • Protagoras in Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers
• "Conventional truth and falsity"
  • Relative and Absolute Truth, the traditional question of philosophy
  • 'Faith in God' - What does it mean? (For Philosophy of Religion)
  • "Doubt on a deeper level"
• Inventing a sense for the text
  • Who decides the meaning of a text?
• "Foundational Propositions" (Chart of relation to grammar and verification)
  • Issac Newton: "... true, or very nearly true"
• Does 'I believe this' mean 'This is the way I live'?
  • What does it mean to say that a bee believes something? (Bees and beekeepers' smoke)
• The Acceptance without understanding of the Scientific World-view by Non-scientists
  • "From God-reliance to Self-reliance"
  • Ethics and Weltanschauung
• Synthetic a priori ("Empirical impossibility")

27. Is an unexamined life - worth living?

• In what way might an unexamined life be worthy of a human being?
  • The highest standard of judgment
  • Before you try to answer a question ...
  • The good for a thing is the existence that accords with its undebased nature
    • Not to think oneself wise when one is not
    • Aristotle's "definition of man"
      • A life ruled by instinct is an eternal childhood
• Turning reason against reason
  • "It cannot be proved that man's nature determines what is the good for man" (Hume)
    • If a question of fact is not being disputed here, then what is?
  • Does the test of experience refute the proposition that an unexamined life is not worth living?
  • "Socrates' ethics is also called empiricism"
• Missions and quests in philosophy
  • Why study philosophy?
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Socrates' mission as a philosopher
  • "The riddle does not exist"
    • "A riddle which nobody can solve"
    • Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and nonsense (Where are the limits of what can be done with language?)
  • "The Facts in Plain View"
• More about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the TLP's eccentric definitions of the words 'nonsense' and 'objects')
  • Query: definition of "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
    • Reality according to the TLP
      • Solipsism, or Only I exist
      • What belongs to Grammar
    • Wittgenstein: what philosophy is?
    • But why "my" world? Why not just "the" world?
      • Misunderstanding 'alone I understand'
    • "The world" is a subset of reality (and my world is a subset of the world)
    • Piecing together a philosopher's picture puzzle is not philosophy
      • "Which alone I understand"
        • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.62, tr. Ogden
    • Language, "the world", and knowledge of Reality
• "The slayers of metaphysics"
  • Immanuel Kant
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Three Kinds of definition: synonymous, ostensive, and play-acted
  • Behaviorism and language meaning
  • The requirement of an essential definition
  • Coincidental agreement in way of life
    • Why an essential definition is sought
• Philosophical Queries and Replies
  • "If a lion could talk ..." (but birds do talk, and we don't understand them)
    • Acquainted with another's inner life (soul)

26. Undefined in Philosophy and in Mathematics

• The Meaning of 'Undefined' and Mathematics (Waismann)
  • Query: the undefined object in geometry with no dimensions
  • Another "negative definition" of 'point'
• "Is Zero a Number?"
• The Origin of Vagueness - and of Clarity
  • An "unformulated definition"
• "We believe in the Uniformity of Nature"
• The Philosophical Mind
  • "Religious Hypotheses - Subjective Hypotheses"
  • Why does the concept 'God' exist?
    • Heaven and Hell
      • "How we would expect God to be"
  • Three Forms of Captivity
• Meaning is also shown by a statement's implications
  • "May Statements" in Psychology
  • "Unanswerable Questions" - "Unquestionable Answers"
  • Pictures of abstract objects (Queries and Remarks)
• What defines a game?

25. Monstrous Gods

• "They at least had God", not the God of the philosophers, however
  • The God of Nature versus the Ethical God
  • The image of God in man - To whom must it be rendered?
    • Objective law versus thoughtful lawlessness
    • God and the Meter Stick
  • The Serpent in the Garden
  • "God the Father" (The Honorary Consul)
    • Belief in God per se
      • Wittgenstein and the Irrational
      • Monstrous Gods (Why the concept 'God'?)
  • Sub specie aeterni

24. Goethe - Unity of Life and Thought

• Albert Schweitzer's view of Goethe
  • "Goethe's world-view based on nature-philosophy"
  • "A Unity of Life and Thought"
    • Natural Grace
• Logic Questions. Metaphors.
  • Similes and Common Names

23. Is Time not Real?

• Rejecting the grammar that tries to force itself on us: "Time is not real"
  • The level of metaphysics
  • Time as an idle Gestalt shift
• Types of Ostensive Definitions
  • The experience is not the (grammatical) meaning
  • General definition of 'ostensive'
  • The Limits of Definition
• Philosophy of Civilization
  • The Harm done by Schooling
• Existence and Perception (Bishop Berkeley and Dr Johnson)
  • Sense data are blind percepts
  • The meaning of 'nonsense words' (not of 'nonsense')
  • The relation between existence and perception
  • "It may have been" - "It could have been"
  • Is a 'scientific theory' fact-proof?

22. Is There a Real Definition of Logic?

• Historical Nominalism
  • George Berkeley's "nominalism"
• The laws of logic as laws of thought
  • Laws of physics versus laws of nature
  • Aristotle on contradiction, the "most incontestable of all thoughts"
  • Is logic the natural science of sound reasoning?
• Critical introduction to Nominalism: What is philosophy?
• Nominal versus Real Definitions (Old remarks)
  • Historical background of the distinction (Aristotle)
    • "Dimly grasped but apprehended by intuition" (What is Man? What is Socrates? And which exists?)
      • Grammar is a public event
    • If you define a thing at all, you must define it "in function of some universal characteristics possessed by the whole class"
    • Seeking knowledge of the world versus Seeking a clear view of our concepts
  • What then is Logic?
    • The word 'logic' as jargon
    • Is there no essence of logic?
      • But if words do not have fixed meanings ...
  • Realism versus Nominalism
    • Transubstantiation (Aristotle, substance, accident)
      • Which things have substance, and which do not?
    • Logic from a Metaphysical Point of View
  • "The existence of concepts"
  • Is regarding words as names of objects the origin of all philosophical confusion?
• Fact versus Theory in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein
  • Metaphysics and word magic ("meaning in itself")
    • "What makes you think that a grammatical joke is deep?" (PI § 111)
  • Family resemblances is not a theory but a metaphor
• Why are we not afraid?
  • Irrational Fears
  • "The Uniformity of Nature"
    • "A light that shines in the darkness of fear" (Being freed from superstition)

21. Philosophy begins in Wonder

• "Philosophy begins in wonder", in being perplexed (Plato)
  • "Wonder" and philosophy in Aristotle
  • Socrates as a special case of philosophy beginning in wonder
  • Generalization and Presumption
    • Perplexed by death
  • Metaphysics and Curiosity
    • Philosophy begins in "mistakes in language"
    • Philosophy begins at the age of reason when the impulse to form one's own worldview begins
    • Philosophy, chaos and order
    • Philosophy and the Birth of Learning
  • Perplexity and semantic grammar
    • "Philosophy begins in the things human beings say"
  • Samuel Johnson
• Cause and Correlation
  • Statistics - Generalities (Max Frisch)
  • Facts Replaced by Theories

20. Sign, Symbol, and Grammar - Earlier and Later Wittgenstein

• WI versus WII, or, "the Earlier and Later Wittgenstein"
• "Sign", "Symbol", "Rules of Grammar"
  • 'sign' versus 'symbol'
  • "Ideal language", "Reform of language"
  • The word 'nonsense' in the TLP
• "Must there be a reason?" versus "Can there be a reason?"
• Moore and the skeptic, as anyone can see -- afterwards
  • Objective versus Subjective Meaning, or, Logic versus "Whatever seems correct"
  • "Why are they called undefined terms when we can in fact define them?" (Geometry)
    • Zero-dimensional Nonsense
    • Which definition of 'definition' does Geometry use?
    • Mathematicians as Philosophers

19. The ethical God and the God of Nature (Originally "The God of ethics versus the God of Nature")

• "... we have no time to give to philosophy" (Phaedo 66b-d)
• Is religious language meaningless?
• If "the meaning is the use in the language" - Propositions versus hypotheses
• The Religion of Jesus
  • Can God command that what is not good be done?
    • Saint Anselm and the essence of God (Perfection)
    • Omnipotence versus Benevolence
    • God and the forces of nature in the Religion of Jesus

18. Philosophy and Wisdom

• The Wise Men of Greece
  • Abraham and Socrates
  • Inscribed inside the temple of Apollo at Delphi
    • "Nothing too much"
  • Who were the Seven Sages?
  • "Proverbial wisdom, a preliminary phase of Greek philosophy" (Plato)
    • But is it philosophy?
• Confucius, Wisdom and Philosophy
  • Confucius: "Your duty is at the bottom of a well."
  • Education is to listen, not question
  • "What is know?" (Confucian humor)
  • Why did people abandon Stoicism's "simple kind of philosophizing"?
  • Poetry versus Reason
    • Distances in time: Abraham, Socrates, Descartes
• Mo Tzu, Chinese philosopher?

17. Metaphysicians let the words speak to them

• Empiricism versus Rationalism (Wittgenstein's account)
  • The models of Mathematics and Natural Science
  • Metaphysics without ethics (The applicability of Wittgenstein's project in philosophy)
• "Empirical Possibility"
  • "Metaphysics obliterates the distinction" (Z § 458)
  • Confucius and Socrates
  • Philosophy and Theory
  • "Logic" and "Grammar", and Jargon
    • Children's riddles and Philosophy (Kings and metersticks)
      • The riddle of curiosity
      • Shadows of grammar riddles
• Is Philosophy about First but not Last Questions?
  • Laying a foundation versus tidying a room
  • Solutions to the Riddle of Existence
  • Does Religion belong to "the childhood of mankind"?
    • Can one feel that God himself is not implicated in evil?
  • But surely this does not belong to humanity's childhood (The religious sense of existence)
    • Reason in Mystery
    • The eternal questions as a pattern or way of life

16. What did Wittgenstein Want from Philosophy?

• "The logic of our language is misunderstood"
  • "Theories of language"
  • Wittgenstein's logic as a life rope. And as a broom.
  • Verbal and Real Definitions of concepts
    • Air Pressure: definitions in natural science
  • "Love is not a feeling" - Wittgenstein's remark is Logic of Language
    • Zettel § 504
• Is there "a Metaphysical Use" of Language?
  • Pictures versus Meaning
  • Of what value is a word's "original home"?
    • A 'logic of language' is objective
    • "Community of Ideas"
      • The Gospel of love, doctrine, and Catholic faith
      • The concerns of a particular community versus the foundations of all communities
      • Law and "any reasonable man"
    • Does a ruler have a length?
    • Must the human appendix have once upon a time been functional?
    • Examples of metaphysical propositions
  • What do we mean by 'parable'?
• What remains to philosophy?
  • What is Philosophical Integrity? ("For the gods are / see everywhere")
  • What I know (or think I know) about Mathematics

15. Is the Solar System Real?

• "Lying beneath our hands and before our eyes"
• Is the Solar System Real?
  • Must a Scientific Theory be Falsifiable?
    • Is "survival of the fittest" Falsifiable?
    • Is "natural selection" Falsifiable?
  • And if a species is immutable?
• The Relation between signs and ideas
  • Is Philosophy Unimportant?
    • Mathematics is independent of Philosophy

14. Why Question Everything?

• Question everything (The project of philosophy)
  • "But what did that mean, everything?" To the very foundations of one's life and thought
  • "Test all things; keep what is good" (Paul the Apostle)
  • Socrates, the philosopher (Method, truth, standard)
    • Apollo and the Two Tests
    • The Sophists versus Socrates
    • Asking versus telling
  • "Suspect everything" (Descartes in literature)
  • Why question everything? Why doubt all things?
    • To doubt is to exist (Augustine)
    • Descartes' method in philosophy
  • Socrates and Descartes contrasted

• Socratic Wisdom
  • Socrates' paradox
  • Background to the Socratic Method
    • Socrates' inductive method of definition (in Plato, Aristotle)
  • "I know I am not wise"
    • Chaerephon's Delphic story is attested by both Plato and Xenophon
  • Marcus Cato's view of Socrates
  • Voltaire's view of Socrates
    • Socrates' daemon ("familiar sign")
    • The Athenian indictment against Socrates
      • "Dare to know" (Kant)
    • "Was Voltaire a philosopher?"
  • Stoicism under Rome
    • "The elementary questions man must ask"
  • The historical Socrates as philosophy

13. Russell's sense of the word 'grammar'

• "Logic is the study of everything subject to rules"
• Wittgenstein, Russell, 'grammar', and 'the same sense'
  • Must logic be objective?
  • Russell's "philosophical grammar"
• Logic, metaphysics, "misdirections" (Logic is the language of metaphysics)
  • Using examples to explain the meaning of the word 'logic'
  • What would the world be like without Philosophy?
    • Wittgenstein and the "last word"
      • Wittgenstein and the end of philosophy
• Theory-making in Philosophy
• Elizabeth Anscombe's grave
  • "I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope they do" (Wittgenstein to Drury)
• John Wisdom's grave
• "Go the bloody hard way!" (The duty of mankind)
  • There are many levels of culture (Engelmann)
  • "Please go the bloody rough way!" (Wittgenstein to Rhees)
  • The renunciation of vanity
  • The words 'ethics' and 'morals', a distinction without a difference

12. Socrates and Wittgenstein

• Wittgenstein and Socrates - The Origins of their Philosophical Quests Contrasted
  • Wittgenstein's incomprehension of Socrates
    • "The logic of our language is misunderstood"
    • Between Socrates and Plato. Who was Socrates?
    • Between Socrates and Plato (Who was Socrates?)
  • What philosophy is? "That is a philosophical question" (But is it?)
    • Concepts "too vague by far"
    • Mathematics and Metaphysics (opposites)
  • "Philosophy as Ignorance or Nonsense"
    • "Conceptual investigations are idle" (Russell)
    • Of Cats and Men
    • Dissimilarities, but also similarities
    • Philosophy of Ockham
    • Meaning, public, objective, Wittgenstein, Socrates
      • The account books of language
  • What do we mean by 'conceived as'?
    • "A concept is a set of rules and a set of rules is a game"
  • Philosophy, not entirely an unrequited love
  • More things in Heaven and earth
    • "An unjust world is a meaningless world"
  • The Vox populi ("Assimilating Wittgenstein")
    • As if philosophy could ever have "lots of friends"
    • Philosophers come and go, but philosophy is always philosophy
• Rules, the subject of logic. And Games.
  • The logic of comparison
  • Aristotle's ethics and logic tautologies
• The word 'God', what is its use in the language?

11. Criticism of Meaning as Use

• Words and Things. Are all words the names of real things?
  • "Theaetetus-flies"
  • Define the question before you try to answer it
    • The correct interpretation versus various possible interpretations
  • Grammar without Rules
  • The Limits of the Method of Language Games
  • Criticism of "Meaning is Use"
• The Philosophers of Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment
  • "What philosophy is?"
• "The Language of Percepts" is Concepts
  • Umbrella versus Essence
  • Moral Concepts
  • Among my teachers in Philosophy
    • The philosophers from whom I have most learned
    • The Winter Seed
  • "The Lord is kind, and his goodness is everlasting"
  • Unphilosophical Remarks
    • Why do we pretend to have reasons?
    • Belief is measured by willingness to take risks (Ramsey)
• Eduard Zeller's Account of Socrates
  • Knowledge of the Good
• The Irrational, and Rationality Gone Mad
  • Rationalism as madness
• Ways of Life, and Philosophy as Definition
  • Metaphysics and thought-experiments
  • "Language and thought"
  • Socrates' Philosophy of Definitions

10. Philosophy and Death

• What are we calling 'Reality'?
  • Why Study Philosophy then?
  • Aristotle - Is death to be feared?
  • "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal." (Philosophy as a point of view & a way of life)
    • Things more important than death
    • Death's implication for Socrates
      • The foundations of Socrates' ethics
      • Socrates and self-control (temperance, self-discipline)
• Philosophy and oblivion-seeking
  • The body, according to Plato - But is that its only role?
    • Analogy to a Shadow
    • "The Reality behind Reality"
    • On the other hand ...
  • The Thing in Itself: Reality beyond the Individual
    • Shadows versus Reality
  • Ethics, Metaphysics, and Reality
• Infinal Acts
  • Life becomes burdensome
    • The Why of existence
• Appearance and Reality - "On a deeper level"
  • More than the appearance of death?
    • Implicit agreement in language conventions
  • "Life Forms" and Concept-formation
  • Plato and the Body and Logic [Grammar]
• About death, lasting remarks

9. Why Philosophy Cannot be Easy

• Concepts and Abstractions
• Why Philosophy cannot be Easy
  • Query: Wittgenstein easy
  • Showing every step in the line of thought
  • "Weaknesses of Wittgenstein's language games"
• Religion and "primitive language games" (Origins)
  • Prayer as a "language game"
  • Description versus Judgment
    • "My new way of philosophizing" (Wittgenstein)
  • Philosophy criticises its own foundations
• The Logic of Natural Language Versus Formal Logic
• How to say the whole thing in a few words?
  • What can be worthwhile about the site?
    • Lichtenberg, age, apostle
• "General Linguistics-Semantics"
  • Sowing Ideas (Philosophy beneath the Snow)

8. Is it Possible to Doubt Everything?

• "Question Everything" (Descartes)
  • Absolute skepticism as a "picture"
    • The eternal questions without answers as a "way of life"
  • Is it possible to doubt everything? - The Limits of Investigation
• What do we mean by 'understand'?

7. How did Wittgenstein see himself?

• "Biblical versus Greek" [For Philosophy of Religion]
  • "The Good is whatever God orders" (Wittgenstein's religion and submission to the will of God)
    • Origin of the Concept 'Mind' (The "mind-body" distinction)
      • History of the concept 'mind'
• Showing rather than saying the "deeper meaning" (For Play-acted rules of grammar)
• Faith and Rationality
  • But how does one think of God?
  • Reverence where it's due (But is it due?)
  • The "Meaning of the Facts" versus the Facts Themselves
  • Nationalism as Religion
    • A Metaphor for Nationalism
  • Einstein, the artisan (Apology 22d-e), and the Atomic Bomb
    • There are limits to what I can do to defend what is good, and I must accept those limits (Lichtenberg)
    • "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy ..." (Philosophy is criticism)
      • "Wittgenstein's view of Western Civilization" (according to Rush Rhees)
    • Tribal Exclusions - From Two Directions
    • The Straw Man (The scarecrow, the man who is not there)
    • "Me and my people" (Another Example)
      • Pragmatism's definition of 'believe'
• Science (Archeological and Genetic Research) and Ethics
  • "Wittgenstein and Race"
    • Wittgenstein and the Enlightenment
    • 'Race' - What does it mean?
    • What was Wittgenstein asserting about himself?

6. Knowing and Saying

• The Philosophy of Socrates: must we be able to "give an account of what we know"? (explain and defend in cross-questioning what we know to others)
  • If there is to be knowledge (Socrates), and if language meaning is to be objective (Wittgenstein)
  • To know = To have thought the thing through (to be able to state the reasons for and against)
  • Absolute Preconception (Plato and Heraclitus)
  • Is there a particular definition of the word 'know' that should be used in philosophy?
    • Is there a particular definition of the word 'meaning' that should be used in philosophy?
  • Knowing by touch rather than by sight
  • Abstraction, Clarinets and Games
  • "Is the meaning of a word justifiable?"
• Does Augustine know what time is?
  • What would it be like for everyone to be mistaken?
• Language, knowledge, Socrates
  • Aristotle, imagery and thought
• Plato's Meno and "grammatical reminders"
  • The Socrates with questions and not the Socrates with answers (History and Plato)
• Is there no general definition of 'to measure'?
  • "To give an account"
  • "Well, I have a general idea of it"

5. Ethics and Values

• Ethics and Nature-Philosophy
  • World-view and Wandering through Life
    • Schweitzer's use of language
  • Human and Non-human Values (What is amoral cannot teach man morality)
    • Rebellion versus Acceptance (Western man)
      • But Christianity's God ≠ Nature, and it is Nature we are at war with
    • Reverence for Life (Albert Schweitzer)
      • "The brotherhood (fellowship) of those who bear the mark of pain"
      • Reverence also for plant life
      • "A village of the kingdom of God"
      • Relation to St. Francis of Assisi
  • Ethics versus Values
    • Ethics has no foundation
    • Prudence before revising moral values
  • The Foundations of Ethics
    • A foundation does not stand on the same level as other propositions
• Canine versus Human "Forms of Life"
• "Dysfunctional Evolution"

4. Why don't we speak of negative numerals?

• Whole and Negative Numbers
  • Worshiping negative numbers
  • Negative Numerals, Words and "Word-als"
    • What are numbers?
    • Words and "wordals"
• Children are encouraged, and like, to use their imaginations
• Equivalent-word definitions
  • Definition in Mathematics
• "Empiricism" and "Rationalism"
  • The two halfs of knowledge seeking
  • Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• For "What philosophy is?"
  • Metaphors and Philosophical clarity
  • Aeneas and the golden bough
  • Unburied Souls
• What do we call academic 'scholarship'?
  • "Review of the literature"
• Knowledge by Any Other Name
  • Contradiction is not the only god in logic. It is not even a god in logic.

3. Classification of Metaphysical Statements

• Wittgenstein's view of Metaphysics, continued
  • The Endless Afternoon of Metaphysics
  • Blaise Pascal's view of Metaphysics
  • Metaphysics and magic
• Sources for Wittgenstein's definition of 'sign'
  • Convention to indicate a sign with quotation marks
    • G.E. Moore's distinction between a sign and its sense
• "Perhaps only genius can understand genius" (Robert Schumann)
  • Through whose eyes shall we see Wittgenstein?
• The Reductionism of the Physicists
• What Philosophy is? (continued)
  • "A book to teach you how to think"
  • What is a Philosopher?
  • The Old School
    • Moore, Russell, Explanations of meaning
  • "Physical Theories" versus Hypotheses (Galileo and the Holy Office)
• "With the idea, now is always"

2. Did Wittgenstein have a Philosophy of Language?

• Philosophy of Language versus Logic of Language (a limited interest in language)
  • Did Wittgenstein have a theory of grammar?
  • Did Wittgenstein have a philosophy of language?
    • Wittgenstein's Break with the Speculative Tradition in Philosophy
      • Meaning in the TLP versus Meaning in the Philosophical Investigations
    • Contrast to J. L. Austin
  • The anthropologist's view of language: Wittgenstein imposed his game metaphor on what he observed
    • More Features of Games
  • "Language is nothing but names of things"
    • Definition of 'noun'
• Wittgensteinian ("A philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas")
  • Jargon and Wittgenstein
  • "When you are playing ping-pong, you mustn't use a tennis racket"
    • Bach's dedication of his work, and Wittgenstein

1. The Point of View of Grammar and Sense and Nonsense

• Wittgenstein defined a point of view
  • Are philosophy's problems without solutions?
  • Is Metaphysics Nonsense?
    • Idealism, Realism, and physical objects
  • Science versus Metaphysics
• "Sense data" and Seeing-As [For Malcolm's view of G.E. Moore]
• Does Mathematics consist Entirely of Rules?
• What is the difference between a scientific and a metaphysical theory?
• 'Beauty' and Karamazov [For Wittgenstein's Aesthetics]
• What Philosophy is? [For Notes about C.D. Broad and Wittgenstein]
  • What am I calling philosophy? (Limits of interest)
• "Time isn't real" [For The meaning of 'meaning' in Wittgenstein's logic of language]
  • "Is economics a science?"
• Do you know what is said if you do not know why it is said?
• "Biblical" versus "Greek" - Wittgenstein's view of the Good
  • "Here I do not use reason"
    • On "Spirituality"
• Picturing a world where 2 + 2 = 5
  • Between mathematical and empirical propositions (Poverty in categories. Achilles and the tortoise)

• Quotations and comments removed from "Care of the Soul"

• Care of the soul, the religious way
• Jesus, an imperious ruler (Schweitzer)
  • "Jesus remains what he was"
  • "Once freed from history" (one possible view of this)
    • Subject to natural reason alone
• "As we have forgiven those who have wronged us"
  • The silent saints
  • Know thy own wrong-doing
  • Christianity and Stoicism
  • As, not more than
  • The Mind of Job
• What do we mean by the word 'forgive'?