Philosophy Now Forum

uwot wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 9:20 am Thanks Sam26.

You're welcome.

It seems to me this question - which has emerged from discussion of my post 'Is morality objective or subjective?' - is the crux in the disagreement between objectivists and subjectivists. An objection to moral subjectivism is that, if moral values and judgements are matters of opinion, we can't kn...

After writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy for a few years, and in 1920 he became an elementary school teacher in Austria until he resigned in 1926. There is evidence that this period of time had an affect on his thinking. Apparently he taught children reading...

Post 11 (Final post of summary, as incomplete as it is.) To conclude this basic summary of the Tractatus is to conclude that philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. Philosophy is above or below the natural sciences, but not beside them (T. 4.111). This follows from 4.11, "The totality of...

Post 10 We know that Wittgenstein thought that all propositions were truth-functions of elementary propositions. Therefore, if a proposition X is analyzed into elementary propositions p and q, and they are connected by the truth-functional connective and, then the truth-value of X is determined by p...

Post 9 As we've said the other central idea presented in the Tractatus is the truth-function theory. It goes hand-in-hand with the picture theory. "A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions (T. 5)." Therefore, if you are given all elementary propositions, then you can co...

In the Notebooks Wittgenstein says the following: "In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally (Nb, p. 7)." This idea apparently occurred to Wittgenstein when he observed or read about a model of a car accident that was used in a Paris court of law, that is, they u...

Post 8 In previous posts I talked about names being the simplest component of elementary propositions, and that names referred to objects, and objects make up atomic facts. The question came up about how we could make sense of a proposition if there were no corresponding objects, and thus, no corres...

Post 7 More on what can and cannot be said according to the Tractatus. You can think of it this way. First, you have the world, and that includes all that we can talk about sensibly. Next you have what’s beyond the limit of the world, and that’s what cannot be spoken of, the mystical. Language is a ...

Post 6 I want to give credit to K. T. Fann (Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy), because I’m using his book as a guide through this, along with, of course, the Tractatus. The question arises, what are names? Wittgenstein does not mean names like chair, cat, or Socrates. His idea is that a name ...

I already have much of this written out, and I should be able to complete it in about 10 posts (roughly).

Post 5 Language “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose picture the proposition is (Nb, p. 39).” Out of this idea springs Wittgenstein’s picture and truth-function theories of language. These theories will answer t...

Post 4 Wittgenstein saw logic as something sublime in the Tractatus. “For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth—a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.—For logical investigations explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom o...

Post 3 Logic seems fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thinking, however, how logic fits into his thinking in both his early and later thinking is a bit different, but not always. A difference can be seen, for example, in his thinking about propositions. Propositions are a mirror image of the world in the...

Post 2 One of the common misunderstandings of Wittgenstein’s later writings is that he rejected the Tractatus. And while it’s true that Wittgenstein did reject some of his earlier premises (e.g., that there was a one-to-one correspondence between names and simple objects in the world – more on what ...