Wittgenstein

am i an idiot for having no interest in the concerns of formal logic or for thinking that wittgenstein isn't a formal logician? i admitted i haven't read him, i had the impression he was tackling the larger metaphysical questions (quotes from tractatus that i've come across seemed like aphorisms from schopenhauer).

also what do you mean by 2nd wittgenstein?

i'm hardly your expert in this field, but not liking formal logic hardly makes you dumb (as of late, informal logic is getting quite a lot of attention, which is less rigid)
i think that from Wittgenstein his formal logic certain metaphysical implications follow, but that does not negate his status as a formal logician

by 2nd Wittgenstein i mean his "philosophical investigations" that are seen as a great departure from his earlier work - the tractus - since he either contradicts or leaves aside what he expounded in the aforementioned book

I wouldn't go so far as to say that you're an idiot for THAT, but I would refrain from making broad generalizations that serve no purpose but to close the book on a certain topic for yourself. Admitting a lack of interest seems much more fruitful to me.

The 2nd Wittgenstein refers to a turn that he took after rejecting the ideas in the tractatus which was supposed to be the last book of philosophy the world would need in his estimation. In oversimplification, he focused less on what concepts mean vs how they are /used/. As such, it is much less math-y.

lovely, thanks.

You don't need any logic at all to understand the Tractactus. Just read Frege's Function and Concept and you are ready to go.

No, you are actually correct in thinking Wittgenstein is post-logical, though mostly incorrect in thinking the Tractatus is metaphysical/Schopenhauer-esque (it's very "anti-metaphysical" in that classical respect of metaphysics). Although there is actually an element of that latter sort of thing in Wittgenstein. Newton Garver has a good book on it.

The logic part you are correct about though. The very first thing that I asked when I began to study Wittgenstein was whether I was supposed to know the whole history and texts of analytic philosophy, go start with Frege and Russell, etc., and the professor laughed and said absolutely not. The Philosophical Investigations is way closer to phenomenology, and to Derrida and Heidgger, than it is to the preconceptions of analytic philosophy. Way, way closer.

Your main aim should be to understand the Philosophical Investigations. There are some really fat clunky guides to reading it, by Hacker & Baker. But I didn't even find them necessary. Once you understand PI, you can appreciate the rest of Wittgenstein's "later" philosophy, and his middle stuff as well. Look for materials by the New Wittgenstein school (which still has its problems, but at least it isn't misreading him as a logician).

The Tractatus is more complicated. You should ignore it for a long time and then come back to it once you understand the later Wittgenstein. This is also universal advice given by most Wittgenstein professors. Trying to see the ways in which Wittgenstein was already rejecting logical positivism in the Tractatus is interesting, but 1000x harder if you don't already understand his mature philosophy, and there is much less consensus about it to guide you. Just stick to the PI.

I hate to say this, but: Don't listen to the other people talking about analytic philosophy. There is a strong tradition of analytics thinking Wittgenstein is still within their tent, when really he was all about setting that on fire and showing how dumb it was to begin with. Anyone talking about "informal logic" at this point should be laughed at. They are attempting to preserve the project of logic, long after its embarrassing death, by adding more and more layers of exceptions and special meta-rules to it to account for its failures, like someone adding more and more doodads to a perpetual motion machine without realizing that perpetual motion is a failure A PRIORI and that's why their fucking machine doesn't work. Wittgenstein was the latter point of view.

Ignore almost fucking everybody in this thread. The other people you were just replying to, they are leading you down a very deep hole of several generations of logicians pathetically trying to add special qualifiers to logic to make it work again, a very deep hole that involves reading absolute horseshit that is STILL FUCKING TALKING about whether "beliefs" are "statements" that have "truth values," as if the mature Wittgenstein was still in dialogue with this nonsense, with Frege's program of a philosophical logic. When you actually understand Wittgenstein, and then you read that shit, it's like reading Islamic neo-Platonist exegesis of the Quran. It's just like, what? What are you even doing? It's utterly amazing to me that it still exists. There can be no philosophical or general logic. EVER. That's the whole point.

But you can spend fifty years reading all that shit, and it will only take you farther AWAY from understanding Wittgenstein. It's a very well-represented dead-end, and it will subtly infect your brain with exactly the conceptual errors Wittgenstein was seeking to clear up, by making you think of language as a machine that can be formalized, making you think of language as bearing or containing cores of "truth" that are obscured or deployed in certain "modalities," and if only we could add yet another doodad to it, yet another mental gymnastic that really "accounts" for those modalities, we could recover the "truth function" of statements and speak transparently about meaning.

Again: Wittgenstein is far closer to the radically immanent, , dialogical, intersubjective philosophies of continental philosophy like Jurgen Habermas, Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Cassirer, Jacques Derrida, Hans Georg Gadamer, etc., in that he immanentizes all communication of "meaning" -- the possibility of Understanding or Reason (Verstand), of commnunicating or referencing "truth," etc. -- to language use, to what is sometimes called "disclosure." The correct way to understand this move is NOT to spend a decade reading about whether "belief statements" are "intentional acts" or not, and whether "intentional acts" contain "intersubstitutable truth values." Jesus god no. It's to do what Heidegger said when he said that we must stop doing "philosophy" and start THINKING. Thinking is much harder than doing philosophy, and it is buried beneath thousands of years of attempts to do philosophy, attempts to systematize Reason by somehow standing outside language and legislating it metalinguistically. There is no metalinguistic domain.

tldr: Ignore Frege (who has one of the most confused ontologies of logos and truth of all time, and whose tacit premises change multiple times over the course of his work). Wittgenstein was blowing Frege the fuck out. Ignore symbolic logic. It's a dead paradigm, and you do not need to know any of it to read PI.

I probably won't help you much (the other guys above me probably told you the essentiels), but I just finished reading the TLP and I didn't understand most of it. I think you definitively need some basics of formal logic and mathematics to understand his work.

I still enjoyed it tho, the very tiny bits I could understand opened a whole new layer for me. I think I'm more interested by continental philosophy (I'm not even sure I understand the difference lol) but it's still a great read. Really puts a lot in perspective.

Could anyone with a sufficient knowledge in philosophy and logic tell me what Wittgenstein eventually refuted in his later works? Is it the basic axioms or the logical reasoning that follows these axioms?
Also, if I didn't understand most of the TLP, will I gain something by reading On Certainty? Godard quotes it in some of his films and it seemed really interesting...

>When you actually understand Wittgenstein, and then you read that shit, it's like reading Islamic neo-Platonist exegesis of the Quran. It's just like, what? What are you even doing?
wat
>Wittgenstein is far closer to the radically immanent, , dialogical, intersubjective philosophies of continental philosophy
double wat

If you're so smart summarize Wittgenstein in 20 words.

Describing language as "containing" truth is misleading, if by "containing" you mean anything like: When we speak, we make use of words whose truth, or whose test of truth, exists somehow outside our speaking. Language is not a medium in which bits of truth ("words" and their "meanings") are somehow suspended, and which then needs to be dissected so that the the words can be recovered or "signified" transparently. The medium, the act of communicating a word and its meaning, IS the word, is its truth. There is no extra-human essence or form (eidos) of what the word "really means," that can either be determined or regulated using some kind of formal register (logic).

Symbols can never refer transparently to words, precisely because the words only exist in use, and ALL use is interpretation - both by the speaker and by the hearer. When the speaker deploys a word that he "knows" (knows its truth, its meaning), he is implicitly saying, in a way, "Do you see what I mean by using this word?" And likewise, the ONLY test of a speaker's "true" or "correct" use of an utterance is whether his interlocutor's response implies, "Yes, I see what you mean by that," or "You used that correctly," by being able to continue to communicate in return. If he says, "No, I can't see what you mean at all" - a situation which Wittgenstein addresses directly by pushing it to extremes in things like On Certainty, and in the examples of what it means to follow a rule, or to "correctly" discern and follow a pattern, in the Philosophical Investigations - then there is NO WAY TO SEE WHO IS RIGHT, other than continued dialogue. It is perfectly possible to imagine a total failure to communicate, where the only possible outcome is a mutual "I do not understand what you mean." The only other possibility is violent coercion - there is no appeal to a metalinguistic criterion of truth.

The miracle of language is that it works not just in spite of this, but practically because of it. A beautiful example from Colin Lyas (paraphrasing from memory): Suppose at some point in history, when the word "vibrant" had only ever been applied to color, two men were talking and one of them said to the other, "It is a very vibrant day." You feel that you "see what he means," here, and he obviously did too, if he said it. But it's easy to imagine the other guy saying, "I just can't see what you mean. Vibrant applies to color. How can a day be vibrant?" That's the beauty of language: it develops by NOT being stable, by not being merely a house for stable truth-units. The trick of understanding this scenario is to understand that the first guy wasn't self-consciously making up a new use of an old word. He was using what he felt the word's meaning "really was," just as much as the other guy was interpreting the use of the word using his own sense of what it "really was." That is the kind of "certainty" that On Certainty is about - because that's the only kind of certainty there ever can be.

Start with the greeks

Stop turning to the plebs here for advice

philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Tractatus-seminar-2012-syllabus.pdf

I have only read early WIttgenstein so I can't really comment, but that last paragraph sounds surprisingly heideggerian.

Good post, btw

Also, this is roughly what Heidegger and Derrida are trying to talk about when they do all that pretentious shit with Being being crossed out, with "presence (the presencing of an essence)" only ever being possible as "absence of a presence," with the Abgrund (abyss, as in Nietzsche's use) being the Ab-grund, the unfathomable ground that only recedes when one tries to seek its _terra firma_, a bedrock of reason that can allow certainty without interpretation. There is no escape from interpretation.

Gadamer:
>Understanding is a ‘language event’ founded upon a ‘silent agreement’ between participants in a conversation. This silent agreement, built up of conversational aspects held in common, is what makes social solidarity possible and shows that the methods of science are an inappropriate starting point for our self-understanding.

Wittgenstein:
>Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!
"Don't think, but look!" Wait, this seems a lot like Heidegger..

> and I would annoy the piss out of many of them by constantly asking
>Wait, this seems a lot like Heidegger..
I wonder why.
Did you pass?

Language systems are fallible, look and understand instead.

Wittgenstein didn't have formal training in Philosophy. The only philosophers he studied in depth were Schopenhauer, Russell, and maybe Frege and related peeps.

he liked stirner and weininger

So you would recommend one to just jump into PI?

b8
TLP, PI, On Certainty.

It's not b8. I can confirm it too.

Kill yourself

Cheers. Really appreciated the detailed post regarding Wittgenstein; it is sometimes hard to make anything of him since there's so much conflating opinions surrounding the guy.

What are the main critiques (if there are any) in regards to his philosophy? Or did he finalize philosophy entirely by rejecting it (in a way)? Also, the other philosophers you mentioned, i.e. Derrida, Heiddeger, how do they build on the understanding that language in itself an agreement between to participants?

So what

OP asked what to read to understand Wittgenstein. Since a lot of Wittgenstein is simply indirect references to some Schopenhauer passage he would be fine simply reading S.

>the other philosophers you mentioned, i.e. Derrida, Heiddeger, how do they build on the understanding that language in itself an agreement between to participants?
A whole world can be built. In fact, THE world is built.

>Wait, this seems a lot like Heidegger.
Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Heidegger: Language is the House of Being. In its home human beings dwell.
Cue Richard Rorty calling these important developments in early 20th century philosophy, both continental and analytic, The Linguistic Turn. In the case of pragmatism you have Peirce inventing pragmatism and semiotics, so the Linguistic Turn is already there from day zero.

>In the case of pragmatism you have Peirce inventing pragmatism and semiotics, so the Linguistic Turn is already there from day zero.
Is this b8, m8?

Read A New List of Categories.

I have. Are you drunk?

No, I just think there is a giant hole in your history of philosophy.

Worry about passing philosophy 101 first. It happens that when you don't have a clear understanding of each philosopher you start seeing similarities where there are none.

/thread, really

There's a really good chart about "how to Wittgenstein" that suggests a pretty good reading order and editions, I'll see if I can find it for you.
(but it sorta advocates that you don't actually need that much background and I agree)

What did you read of CS Peirce that suggests you I would be b8ing?

A lot. And it's not what I read from Peirce, but what is the linguistic turn. Just don't fool yourself making 50 years connections in between arguments.

(i'm the guy you were replying to)

thanks so much for this, i really appreciate it when the learned anons take the time to write out informative posts. i had suspected this about wittgenstein. some of my friends who are into formal logic like to lump him in with people like Searle and Quine and it always bothered me.

It's good that you read a lot. Because I cannot help but notice that I cannot for the life of me find a single scholar that disagrees with Peirce's opus being part of or some manner of precursor to the Linguistic Turn. How many more posts do you think you have to make before you finally expose this b8, and cover it with tar and feathers for the pleasure of the readers of this thread? Or should we rather acknowledge your insignificance for what it is?

If you wish to understand TLP, the single, best guide is G.E.M. Anscombe's "An Introduction..."

Name one scholar and quote it directly.

Here's Bernstein @ Pragmatic Turn. I see you refuse to answer my quesiton, so here's another: when will you convince me you're not a fucking joke?

"With some justification we can say that "the linguistic turn"..."
>with some justification
Please, extend the quote to the justification.

Is this b8, m8?

>I cannot for the life of me find a single scholar that disagrees with Peirce's opus being part of or some manner of precursor to the Linguistic Turn.
>Posts one.
>Quote doesn't show any connection whatsoever, only wishful thinking.
I still wonder if it's b8.
Check here: peirce.iupui.edu/
Please, look for scholars that agree that Peirce contributed to an idea that was born from people who never read him.

The idea of a Linguistic Turn came from Rorty. Rorty did read Peirce. Are you drunk?

Ok, so it is b8.
You got me for one second, I thought you were really retard.

>without realizing that perpetual motion is a failure A PRIORI
Cause and effect is a process that can only be understood via opservation and discovery, it is by definition impossible to determine the impossibility of such a machine via a priori inquiry.

Why would you read poor man's nietzsche-heidegger-derrida?

Better to read Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Agamben instead.

I'm one of the people this post is telling me to ignore. These paragraphs "get it" in the wider sense, so if OP chooses to ignore me that's grand. Looking back, it does look like I'm one of those people who lumps him in with the other analytic philosophers, which puts me to great shame as I never intended to do that.

When I read the Tractatus personally it was after going through a big structuralism and later a Heidegger binge I found it fun to read with knowledge of the turn Wittgenstein took later. I kept picturing the Wittgenstein from PI shaking his head. Curiously I did feel there were seeds there for what would come later.

I'm convinced now that the tractatus isn't the right place to start (since I fucking didn't) and i won't make that same mistake again if anyone else asks, but I still think it's valuable to at least do some reading about it before going into later Wittgenstein, at least to know the context its being written in.

Tsk tsk tsk

Agree completely. Have no idea why Wittgenstein is raved about. Stick with these three and you'll be far more enriched.

>mathematics is about formulas
retard

>I'm one of the people this post is telling me to ignore. These paragraphs "get it" in the wider sense, so if OP chooses to ignore me that's grand. Looking back, it does look like I'm one of those people who lumps him in with the other analytic philosophers, which puts me to great shame as I never intended to do that.

desu I never intended to sperg out that much about Wittgenstein, I intended the original post to be half-jokingly polemical like typical Veeky Forums fare, mildly trolling the analytics (who I assumed would respond by calling me a total retard) and not something that people would take super seriously. I realized later in hindsight that because I ended up effortposting instead, it makes my original dickishness seem more seriousness.

I have a lot of (begrudging) respect for analytics and I didn't mean to be an actual cunt or be cruelly dismissive to anybody.

If you are going to bait like that, you have to include Kierkegaard, who is probably THE most influential person for his later period.

user called you a retard

lmao this cuck still believes in causality in current year

>retrocausillity

You should read the Tractatus and Philosphical Investigations for the best overview of his thought. Everything else was collected and put together after his death through the judgment of his friends.
Other than that, you should read Monk's The Duty of Genius. It's a great biography of Wittgenstein.
Before you read him make sure you have a background of understanding for Russell and Frege. Secondary literature should be fine for those two unless you're really into them for some reason. Understanding them is necessary for a context of Wittgenstein's writings though.

>things """cause""" other things
explain to me how that works, retard

>he thinks causality is a matter of belief

imagine being this stupid.

this is what neoliberals actually believe

This is bullshit, don't listen to him
The logical parts are just a fraction of its philosophical content