Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.
Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.
We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.
Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.
Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.
There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic. — Kenneth Taylor, Why I am Not a Wittgensteinian
Accordingly, it's not well suited for metaphysical and epistemological problems, and it's confusing when applied in this way. — Metaphysician Undercover
There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus
There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. How the nature of the knowing subject affects knowledge is an area of considerable focus in medieval thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So it seems that no one in the forum is retaining anything at all. Have no one discussed the presocratics? They were the first to point out the "stuff" which makes up reality. Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff".It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus
Ironically, Pierce's semiotic triad, which is quite popular in continental philosophy, is pretty much the same as Augustine's in De Dialecta, and signs are a major focus in scholasticism, yet this view of past thought shows up in plenty of continental philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus
And Peirce violated the cardinal commandment of modernity: Thou shalt not learn from the Latins. He read even there, and what he found, more than any single influence, revolutionized his philosophy. From Scotus in particular, but also from Fonseca and the Conimbricenses, he picked up the trail of the sign. He was never able to follow it as far as the text of Poinsot. This would have been only a question of time, no doubt; but in 1914 Peirce's time ran out.
Nonetheless, what he picked up from the later Latins was more than enough to convince him that the way of signs, however buried in the underbrush it had become since the moderns made the mistake of going the way of ideas instead, was the road to the future. . . — John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, p. 613
This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus
Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff". — L'éléphant
There is no way that can be equated with naive realism. — Wayfarer
Can you cite any passages from Aristotle, Plato, or Parmenides or the scholastics that explicitly equate thinking with being? — Janus
In Thinking Being, Eric Perl articulates central ideas and arguments regarding the nature of reality in Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. He shows that, throughout this tradition, these ideas proceed from and return to the indissoluble togetherness of thought and being, first clearly expressed by Parmenides. The emphasis throughout is on continuity rather than opposition: Aristotle appears as a follower of Plato in identifying being as intelligible form, and Aquinas as a follower of Plotinus in locating the first principle “beyond being”. Hence Neoplatonism, itself a coherent development of Platonic thought, comes to be seen as the mainstream of classical philosophy. Perl’s book thus contributes to a revisionist understanding of the fundamental outlines of the western tradition in metaphysics. — abstract
It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus
SOCRATES: There is more than one point besides these, Theodorus, on which a conviction might be secured—at least so far as it is a matter of proving that not every man’s judgment is true. But so long as we keep within the limits of that immediate present experience of the individual which gives rise to perceptions and to perceptual judgments, it is more difficult to convict these latter of being untrue—but perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps it is not possible to convict them at all; perhaps those who profess that they are perfectly evident and are always knowledge may be saying what really is. And it may be that our Theaetetus was not far from the mark with his proposition that knowledge and perception are the same thing. We shall have to come to closer grips with the theory, as the speech on behalf of Protagoras required us to do. We shall have to consider and test this moving Being, and find whether it rings true or sounds as if it had some flaw in it. There is no small fight going on about it, anyway—and no shortage of fighting men. — Plato, Theaetetus, 179c-d, tr. Levett & Burnyeat
And how does that fix the view of realism? Or naive realism? They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality.I think it's arguable that material (whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be) was generally, and largely still is, understood to be the fundamental stuff that constitutes what exists. Think of Aristotle's hylomorphism. — Janus
They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality. — L'éléphant
If you take that passage to be explicitly equating thinking with being, then I would say your lack of reading comprehension skills is "off the charts". — Janus
I was addressing your "thesis" that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist. — Leontiskos
It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. — Janus
That is very far from saying "that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist". — Janus
It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus
Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1
Nothing seems less likely than that a scientist or mathematician reading me could be seriously influenced in his way of working. At best, I can hope to stimulate that a significant amount of crap will be written, and that this in turn might contribute to something good coming into being. — Wittgenstein, 1947
What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?… As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein… why is it SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1
I would put it that some people have particular interests in philosophy, and so take Wittgenstein as pointless or trivial — Antony Nickles
Maybe inadvertently, I think this helps make the point, as that is the reciprocal of how their interests are regarded by him. — Wayfarer
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