Just finished studying pic related and On certainty...

Just finished studying pic related and On certainty. Where do I go next if I want to better understand contemporary philosophy (especially philosophy of language and mind)?

contemporary philosophy is characterized by the perpetration of the mistakes Witty warns against
read Quine for an alternative methodology, I guess

This. Wittgenstein himself (apparently) thought he zeroed in on the whole of philosophy after the Tractatus, and it seemed to be the same for when he wrote PI. And everyone else went completely the other way around regarding the use and limits of language; if you want to concern yourself with more than what language can do (regardless if you agree or not if it should even be done), just go for Deleuze or something.

if you want good overviews of contemporary work, get Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim and The Philosophy of Language by Martinich

if you want primary sources, it's mostly articles and not books that are important after Wittgenstein, but some important figures, in roughly chronological order, are: Carnap, Tarski, Quine, Anscombe, Ryle, Austin, Geach, Grice, Davidson, Kripke, D. Lewis, Stalnaker, Chalmers

much appreciated. Do you guys think that I would have to learn more about logic before approaching these guys? My background is still fairly limited

yes, if you want to understand contemporary philosophy of language (and, by extension, philosophy of mind), you need to understand at least first-order logic up to and including quantifiers. a bit of set theory and a bit of meta-theory (e.g. soundness and completeness proofs for first-order logic) would help too. if you read and understood the Tractatus, and its influences (Frege, Russell), you should already have some grounding in that stuff

there are some things you could learn from now though that don't require much logic. for instance, Austin's 'How to Do Things With Words' is a post-Wittgenstein classic that is minimal on formal methods

Don't forget Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.

>philosophy of language and mind

I would unironically advise you to go into phenomenology and then study Deleuze. Don't get stuck in the post-Wittgensteinian analytic-pragmatist box now. Better to complicate your understandings with new ur-grunden capable of new combinations and articulations than endlessly nuance the ones you already have, which is what the Great Commentary Tradition on Wittgenstein is now devoted to.

>Do you guys think that I would have to learn more about logic before approaching these guys?

Not at all.

Seriously, I study Wittgenstein, and there are two ways you can go about it. Be like the reams and reams of commentary coming out on him right now, as people begin to squeeze the last drops of blood out of the 2000s~ Neo-Wittgenstein craze, but only from shitty analytic perspectives that subtly don't even realise the revolutionary nature of Wittgenstein..

..or look at all of continental philosophy as a resource new real insights, new ways of seeing, aspects what ain't nobody ever seen before.

I'm having a blast reading Supersizing the Mind by Andy Clark.

Even if you ultimately reject his most radical stuff about the extended mind theory, I'm positive you will enjoy being up to date in some of the most amazing findings on neuroscience, AI and the science of perception, Clark is quite the interdisciplinary philosopher.

I recommend reading the short essay in the appendix first of all.

thanks user, sounds pretty interesting

THIS so much.

I want to add that how academia is right now going that route is the intellectually fruitful and also will leave you out of a job. Keep it a secret if philosophy is your profession.

who are some continental wittgensteinians?

Richard Rorty

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity will change your perspective, guaranteed

anyone ever read this? I tried reading it before I started with Wittgenstein and it made no sense.

Habermas and pretty much every single continental philosopher of language read the shit out of Wittgenstein.

this doesn't directly answer your question but Lee Braver has written on points of contact between the continental and analytic traditions and his book Groundless Grounds is about the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger (he has another one comparing continental philosophy in general to anti-realism in analytic philosophy, as developed by people influenced by Wittgenstein like Dummett, Wright and Putnam).

ricoeur, deleuze, derrida all worth reading

tugendhat is too analytic for my taste but good

it's good but you would benefit from reading more post-Wittgenstein philosophy of mind before reading it, things like Sellars (especially 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind') and Austin (especially 'Sense and Sensibilia'), and generally the debates over sense data, direct realism and representationalism about perception

>ricoeur, deleuze, derrida all worth reading

they are worth reading but they are not really wittgensteinians (maybe derrida at a stretch, given his debts to heidegger, but even then it's a big stretch).

Not OP, but this seems like a good thread to ask.

If I'm an American monolingual pleb, how hard is is it going to be to understand translations of Continental philosophers? Some say it's worthless to even bother.

Forget these analytics and just read Austin and Rorty.

it depends a lot on the particular works. some are notoriously difficult to get right in translation (heidegger, especially late heidegger, for example), whereas others are not so bad (deleuze, for instance, especially his earlier, more traditional works before his collaborations with guattari).

in no case, however, is it worthless. you can get a pretty good grasp of their thinking even in translation, but you will miss some nuance. you can make up some of the difference by reading multiple translations and commentaries, but that is a lot of work so it's up to you whether it is worth it

ricoeur cites wittgenstein all over the place, and derrida's intersubjective bricolage is a really good pinion to wittgenstein's intersubjective grammar

deleuze is mostly important for his critique of wittgenstein and analytics, which i think is an extremely important one and mostly right. they are still reifying language.

for fuck's sake, in a recent volume on "Phenomenology and Grammar" there are articles still fucking quibbling about nonsensical analytic positions on "how rule-following works," and the dude has to give this circuitous argument, using FORMAL LOGIC, to show that grammar is immanent in language, i.e., that a correct use of language is decided BY use, not by reference to some external "rule."

there are CAREER WITTGENSTEINIANS who need to write articles about this and argue about it. they literally hypostatize wittgenstein's rules into ethereal magical language-orbs.

analytics need to have the platonism beaten out of them with hammers. they just can't get their simplistic metaphysics out of their fucking heads, and they keep doing meta-meta-meta-turns to the linguistic turn to pretend they've covered all the gaps in their thinking, and missing everything as a result. i'd rather be pissed on by bums than read rorty. rorty is for pseuds. so is kripke.

wtf i hate analytics now

not sure why you are getting so angry, i'm just making a small point: citing wittgenstein and criticizing wittgenstein doesn't make you a wittgensteinian, otherwise almost all philosophers of the past half century are wittgensteinians, which is absurd. i otherwise agree that the thinkers you mentioned are worthwhile and that analytic philosophy has its problems (as does continental philosophy and all philosophy, really)

>citing wittgenstein and criticizing wittgenstein doesn't make you a wittgensteinian

arguing virtually the same things as wittgenstein from different grounds is a good critical intersection

>not sure why you are getting so angry

because you're a retard who should be killed

>has its problems (as does continental philosophy and all philosophy, really)

stop equivocating you effeminate pussy!

I think that the hardest part of continentals is that they expect you to have read a lot of their same books (and know the history their living in). While a lot of american philosophers tend to think that "their logic" should be enough to get the debate.

The problem with analytics is that they are a conservative coterie (in many ways continentals too but in other ways).

So they always start from the presupposition that whatever system they are studying works as it is supposed to work.

The quip by Quine about scientists needing epistemologists as much as birds need ornitologists is an indication of this: science works fine by itself.
Except when it doesn't, and now they are freaking out about the replication crisis.

Similarly with language, their start is "language works, we clearly see every day that meaning gets across between players, hence meaning clearly exists prior to the distortions of language".
But the truth is far from that, truth is that language manages despite everything, and its successes are also failures in many way.

Language is a coin spinning, if you don't see how precarious it is you mistake it for an orb, if you stop it outside its use to study it all you see is a flat coin on a table. But if you flip it knowing that it has no foundations, you see this phenomenon for what it is: a fragile equilibrium.

Can you explain further when you say language fails? This makes no sense to me right now. How is it that the language fails instead of the people's understanding? I know next to nothing but I can't see why understanding and language need to be dependent

Pleb

Well there are two ways you can go about it:

1) Going through examples of how language tricks us
2) Showing how attempts to theorize language leads us to complications
3) Describe structural problems with language

Let's go with some brief examples:

1) It is a well known trick of languages coming from sanskrit that of reifying concepts. Everything is managed like an object. So when you think of a sentence "the cat is red" and you try to connect words with their meaning you know what cat is, you know what red is, but what is 'is'. And some people like aristotle start thinking that there is an object that is "Being in itself".

2) Take a sentence like "the snow is white". You understand it, but then you are asked to say what is the meaning of it and you go well it mean that: the snow is white. And you realize that you just repeated the original sentence. So you think ah I'll just say it in another language and you go "in italian you say: 'la neve e` bianca'". But if someone asks you again what that means all you can do is just show them more signs and nothing in sight seems to delineate meaning as something that is separated from its expression. Then you start thinking: maybe meaning is just the collection of all the sentences in every language that can be said to be synonimical. But then you feel that something about the relationship between language and the world has been severed. And you keep going deeper and deeper that way, where communicative success is the conveyance of meaning but you are struggling to describe what that meaning is and how we can actually check that it has been conveyed properly.

3) Language is a very tricky practice. For example a lot of how we convey meaning assumes that we are in person interacting. And yet we can write it down and convey the meaning while we are not there. But then when we found one of these messages left and the author is not there a lot of problems come in trying to interpret those texts. To the point that few wonder, including myself, if we can understand the initial intention of the author once they can't interact and correct us anymore.

Language is a technology, a sign cannot hope to mean anything without interpretation.

>I know next to nothing
duh

Austin and Rorty are analytics, pseud
learn to genealogy

>How is it that the language fails instead of the people's understanding?

The trick of the last few philosophical revolutions has been to say that understanding "thinks in" language, or that language and understanding are the same thing, or at least very closely intertwined, so that language is not something "out there" that only formally represents internal psychic essences that we want to communicate. We are "in" language, language is "in" us.

Every act of communication is therefore always a translation, reliant on other terms that must themselves be translated. Whether a person "understands" you is always uncertain until he says he gets what you mean. But even if he says he gets what you mean, you can't be sure what they really "got." So language is a lumpy thing, always turning itself over and extending itself, learning new ways to mean things and forgetting old ones.

haha how did you manage to propound radical translation in one sentence and naive mentalism (the idea idea) in the next?!

it's almost as if you've never read Wittgenstein, Quine, or Davidson

I'm not drawing from Quine, though I kinda like Quine, sometimes. I came across W&O after reading Wittgenstein and a lot of Germans though, so he seems like a few generations late and an arid version of what everyone else already knows.

No interest in Davidson whatsoever though. That's too far down the analytic rabbit hole for me to bother.

As for mentalism, I like pragmatism, phenomenology, and descriptive psychology, so, obviously William James, and so I have no problems with talking about mental "contents" and how they interact with language. I don't think Wittgenstein did either. I think Hacking has a good essay in one of his books about Wittgenstein as beginning in the social without necessarily discounting or denying the mental. (Why would he?)

This post reminds me of what was talking about.