You've mistaken my position, and that of the Logical Positivists for that matter. The claim, that this bulk of philosophical statements are meaningless, is not made on the grounds of having looked for some meaningful statements and found none. Were it made on those grounds you could justifiably say "well you haven't looked here, or you haven't understood the meaning here" and make the claim that we should read Nietzsche (or do so again, but more charitably). But that's not the argument that's being made. The argument is that philosophy, simply by virtue of it's means of investigation, cannot say anything meaningful in that way.
It is exactly the same argument. Logicial Positivsm accuses philosophical works of being meaningless, on the grounds that it doesn't meet the verification principle. Thus, Logicial Positivsm assumes criteria regarding meaning, and subsequently simply employs it. Everything that doesn't meet the verification principle, is meaningless.
You are doing the same. You assume criteria regarding meaning, and reject Nietzsche on the grounds that he doesn't meet your criteria (and to make things worse, all this without actually reading him). It is closed-minded. You have decided in advance what you assume to be meaningful, and subsequently only employ that assumption. The closed-mindedness of Logicial Positivsm is exactly the same as your Scientism.
As I said to Agustino, you do not need to know anything about the pronouncements of ballroom dancing judges to know that it doesn't have anything meaningful to say about ethics.
Do you honestly think comparing the capacity of ballroom dancing judges to say something meaningful regarding ethics, with philosophy, the discipline that has
invented contemplation on ethics, is a useful comparison?
So Logical Positivists (or rather their descendants) are making the claim that the methods of philosophical investigation are such that in most contexts it can yield no meaningful statements. You feel quite at liberty to dismiss that proposition in derogatory terms despite that fact that you admit to not having read any of the arguments which support it, and yet you demand that anyone making the proposition not only read all the arguments against it, but all the results of the investigations which took place under the presumption that the proposition is false
Couple of points here:
(1) Not sure why you attribute this to me, but I have not said I did not read any of the arguments which support Logical Positivism. To be precise, I have invested time into Carnap and Schlick, so we could go into their arguments supporting Logical Positivism if you like.
(2) Nietzsche did not presume that Logical Positivism is false. Logical Positivism emerged around 1920. Nietzsche died in 1900.
(3) I am not
assuming Logical Positivism is false, I
understand that it is false. One of the key principles of Logical Positivsm was the analytic/synthetic gap. If you read ¨Two Dogmas of Empiricism¨ by Quine, you see that the distinction is untenable.
And I am sorry to say, but the fact you are not aware that since Quine, Logical Positivism is untenable, only shows how you have a big opinion on something you have invested little time in. Its what you read and learn in any first year bachelor of philosophy.
If the claim is that a text must only be meaningful to someone, in order to be taken seriously,
Philosophy is a academic discipline. Which text must be taken seriously is not only decided by the individual (i.e. you want to take Harry Potter seriously), you are also bound to the language game (in a Wittgensteinian sense) of the discipline. You presume there are only two kinds of critera: subjective and objective. I want to introduce Wittgenstein here, but I am afraid you are unaware of how, at least in acadamic philosophy, Wittgenstein replaced the subjective objective distinction when it comes to meaning, and that I will become trapped in explaining Wittgenstein and its current hold on philosophy to you.