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  • Types of faith. What variations are there?

    In that case, why assume a point of view above the arguments, where your judgements regarding others are given special regard?
  • Types of faith. What variations are there?

    Who made you the one who corrects?
  • Types of faith. What variations are there?

    If something is far enough beneath you, why bother with it?
  • Types of faith. What variations are there?

    If the matter is as inconsequential as you suggest, your insult is equally stupid.
  • Types of faith. What variations are there?

    You are using the claim for the purpose of your argument.
  • Types of faith. What variations are there?
    Are moderators observing this conversation?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The decision did not reverse the various statements of fact regarding what qualifies as an insurrection. It limited the rights of States to act upon such findings.
  • How to do nothing with Words.
    So how is believing that there is no society working out for you?baker

    Framing it that way reminds me of Margaret Thatcher's saying, "society does not exist, only people and their families do." How does one separate such a bold claim of bourgeois supremacy over the functions of the state from the pre-linguistic space where the Sovereign Individual runs its cattle unfettered by the demands others? After all, they use many of the same words.

    The word "right" is interesting because it expresses a direct or straight quality as an adjective: "Right on time", for instance. When the term is used as "rights of individuals", the use is all about the boundary between the prerogatives of a common interest and what an individual can preserve against such interests.

    The thesis of the OP borrows from that latter use to deny the existence of what gave context for it.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    Are you suggesting that the idea of a form of life is an elaboration of the earlier position?Jamal

    The article on Logical Atomism linked by Banno taught me enough about Wittgenstein's changing view of the former work to be unable to call the later work an elaboration. I don't want to (or could) shrink the analytic discussion that developed after Tractatus into a digestible snack.

    But the questions cited in Philosophical Investigations reflect the unwillingness to accept a "nexus of causality" as a given through logic. That is expressed in the Tractatus.

    The distinction between the 'saying' and what is 'shown' remains a feature throughout.

    The sense of the following is reiterated in Philosophical Investigations:

    Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced.
    Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it.
    From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language. Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
    The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
    ibid. 4.002

    The discussion immediately following PI 324 and 325 concerns the relationship between thought and language.

    On the basis of these ideas, I question Cometti's statement that the boundaries of "my world" have been transposed into the boundaries encountered in participating in a 'form of life'. The later work retains many of the conditions of the former. The formation of language through human activity has not replaced the vanishing point of a person's horizon:

    This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth. In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which only I understand) mean the limits of my world. — 5.62
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of nature.
    But of course, that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest.

    This distinction is made in the context of limits to establishing possibility apriori but is also a moment in Wittgenstein's ongoing argument against Russell attempts to establish universal rules about logic that can be recognized independently of their use. The theme of "saying" being necessarily connected to "showing" is expressed in:

    The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are.
    What lies in the application logic cannot anticipate.
    It is clear that logic may not collide with its application.
    But logic must have contact with its application.
    Therefore logic and its application may not overlap one another.
    ibid. 5.557

    The discomfort Russell expressed with this result would probably have been shared by Kant. In regard to your OP, I think there is a continuity here between the Tractatus and the later Wittgenstein:

    324. Would it be correct to say that it is a matter of induction, and that I am as certain that I shall be able to continue the series, as I am that this book will drop on the ground when I let it go; and that I should be no less astonished if I suddenly and for no obvious reason got stuck in working out the series, than I should be if the book remained hanging in the air instead of falling?—To that I will reply that we don't need any grounds for this certainty either. What could justify the certainty better than success?

    325. "The certainty that I shall be able to go on after I have had this experience—seen the formula, for instance,—is simply based on induction." What does this mean?—"The certainty that the fire will burn me is based on induction." Does that mean that I argue to myself: "Fire has always burned me, so it will happen now too?" Or is the previous experience the cause of my certainty, not its ground? Whether the earlier experience is the cause of the certainty depends on the system of hypotheses, of natural laws, in which we are considering the phenomenon of certainty.

    Is our confidence justified?—What people accept as a justification— is shewn by how they think and live.
    — Philosophical Investigations, 324

    With the older and newer expressions placed side by side, Cometti can be seen to be missing the mark when stating:

    In the later Wittgenstein the notion of "forms of life" takes the place of the Tractarian doctrine of the boundary between what can and cannot be said, which determines in turn the "limits of my world". My world takes on the limits of my form of life.Jean-Pierre Cometti, 'Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the question of expression'

    Wittgenstein is observing the same limits of 5.557 in both works. The use of "form of life" is not a replacement of a previous schema.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    How do you suppose that this passage says anything whatsoever about what cannot be said? How could "recognizing our condition" produce any conclusions about "what cannot be said"?Metaphysician Undercover

    That passage is the result of what cannot be said. It was arrived at by all the previous steps in the argument. Recognizing our condition is how we approach first principles. You are using that approach when you accuse Wittgenstein of excluding a premise to treat it as a discovered conclusion at the end.

    Those are limits of what can be "pictured" in Wittgenstein's schema. The problem is that it is very obvious that language provides us with a whole lot more creativity than just a basic capacity to draw some simple pictures. Therefore this provides us with no information concerning what can or cannot be said.Metaphysician Undercover

    That is a complete misunderstanding of the argument. No text even remotely makes the statement that language is being depicted as a basic capacity to draw some simple pictures.

    There is another completely distinct category of empirical reality which concerns the activities of objects. And a "picture" does not ever capture the activity.Metaphysician Undercover

    The development of the structure of representation has been built up since the description of thought in the second proposition. The role of "objects" in the argument is not referring to a world including a totality of things as you describe. This ties back to the beginning at 1.1 "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." The argument here is not dealing with what a picture can capture. Nothing in the text suggest that is the case. I am getting the impression that the argument has no existence for you because you have written it off as a fallacy from the beginning.

    Hume stated this position, the foundation of induction is psychological rather than logical. But Hume's efforts to prove this (inductive) principle logically only serve to demonstrate the falsity of it.Metaphysician Undercover

    Wittgenstein is not trying to prove Hume's principle. Wittgenstein's statement is:

    "There are natural laws.
    But that can clearly not be said: it shows itself."

    This goes to express the recognition that the limits of explanation are not the limit of what can be experienced through the use of a method. To that end, the argument is a deeper acceptance of transcendence than what Kant expressed.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    What appears to happen in the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein discovers the reality that the primary premise is false, that a large part of the world consists of what is other than fact. But instead of recognizing that language has naturally developed to speak of this other part of the world in ways other than truth-apt propositions, he makes the faulty conclusion that we cannot speak about this part of the world.Metaphysician Undercover

    Your use of "fact" and its place (or absence of place) in the world has nothing to do with Wittgenstein's argument. What cannot be said is found through recognizing our condition:

    6.4312 The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
    (It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.)
    — ibid.

    The dimensions of this condition are found through the structure of our representations. The argument of what can be said or not is the description of that structure. That is where the limits of what can and what cannot be done are laid out. The method is the linking of these "cannots."

    2.16 In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures.
    2.161 In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all.
    2.17 What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner rightly or falsely is its form of representation.
    2.171 The picture can represent every reality whose form it has.
    The spatial picture, everything spatial, the coloured, everything coloured, etc.
    2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth.
    2.173 The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of representation), therefore the picture represents its object rightly or falsely.
    2.174 But the picture cannot place itself outside of its form of representation.

    2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.
    2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false.
    2.225 There is no picture which is apriori true.
    3 The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

    3.22 In the proposition the name represents the object.
    3.221 Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak
    of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.
    3.262 What does not get expressed in the sign is shown by its application. What the signs conceal, their application declares.

    4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs. My fundamental thought is that the logical constants do not represent. That the logic of the facts cannot be represented.
    — ibid.

    With these limits established, the arguments can observe differences between logic and the world we talk about:

    5.556 There cannot be a hierarchy of the forms of the elementary propositions. Only that which we ourselves construct can we foresee.

    5.5561 Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The boundary appears again in the totality of elementary propositions.
    The hierarchies are and must be independent of reality.
    — ibid.

    From this point, what cannot be explained is distinguished from the explanations given through natural science referred to in 6.4312:

    6.36 If there were a law of causality, it might run: There are natural laws.
    But that can clearly not be said: it shows itself.

    6.363 The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

    6.3631 This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.
    — ibid.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    But the idea that language consists of truth-apt propositions was derived from the faulty premise, that the world consists of facts.Metaphysician Undercover

    That assertion does not appear in the text.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    Aristotle proposed that we allow a violation of the law of excluded middle to accommodate becoming. Others have proposed that becoming violates the law of non-contradiction. In any case, this aspect of "the world" cannot be understood as consisting of facts. But this does not mean that we cannot speak about, or even understand this aspect.Metaphysician Undercover

    How does that idea connect with what Wittgenstein says? Do any particular passages bring that issue into the conversation for you?
  • Currently Reading

    They made a film out of it?! That would be like making a movie out of Metamorphosis.
  • Currently Reading
    I read Saramago's Blindness many years ago. Scared the crap out of me.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    I recommend reading the introduction written by Bertrand Russell to get a sense of the "world" as a boundary rather than as a "thing."

    I don't agree with Russell's framing of many issues, but he does reflect the distance from the "totality of facts" given in the descriptions:

    More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr Wittgenstein's attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure. It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact, but the structure cannot itself be put into words, since it is a structure of words, as well as of the facts to which they refer. Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy.ibid. page 18
  • Beautiful Things
    OK, should there be a shadow to the right of the station?BC

    Given the angle of the other shadows, yes, there should be a bit of darkness to the right. There is no shadow of the fence either but that could be written off as the platform being too high. If one looks at the angle taken from the height of objects to the shadow cast, the cowboy's angle is greater than the others. And what is with the lantern casting a more washed-out shadow than the others?

    I think there is an Escher thing underway along with the Hopper vibe.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition

    Aristotle certainly put the active principle above the elements being acted upon. I am not aware of any passage that expresses a ratio of the sort Perl is putting forth.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    What if one does not know the facts well enough to speak about them?
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    For those of us watching at home, are you referring to:

    The world is the totality of facts, not of things.Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1.1
  • Beautiful Things

    Interesting image. The angle of the shadows changes for different objects. The light source is lower when striking the cowboy. The infrastructure visible to the left of the station is absent to the left of it. The station does not cast a shadow beyond the platform on the right.

    I like how the cowboy is a Marlboro Man gone to seed when zoomed in upon.
  • How to do nothing with Words.
    The Greeks had a word for those who consistently engaged in fallacy, and it wasn’t “philosopher”.NOS4A2

    You are referring, presumably, to the Sophists. Aristotle did criticize their use of logical fallacy but also their misapplication of theory and account to the subject being investigated. Thus observations like the following:

    We must therefore be content if, in dealing with subjects and starting from premises thus uncertain, we succeed in presenting a broad outline of the truth: when our subjects and our premises are merely generalities, it is enough if we arrive at generally valid conclusions. Accordingly we may ask the student also to accept the various views we put forward in the same spirit; for it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b

    In the case of your thesis, the subject is unavailable to the reader, a Chesire Cat, grinning derisively from a branch above.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    Thanks for asking.

    I should have said more. Kant would like to confirm the "thinking" as what humans do but does not place that on the level of experience that cannot be denied. The world is built upon our 'outward sense' and the simultaneity of events where other beings exist (if we see them that way). That is a bit of a pickle. The leverage of personal experience is used in one way but not another.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    I was not aware of "Mendelssohn's materialism." Will check it out.

    While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective “I”’s can’t be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed it’s no more than an intellectual conception.Mww

    Or at least the conception is posterior to the intuitions which Kant confirms are active in each person. Sort of taking half of Descartes' certainty at the expense of the other.
  • How May Esoteric Thinking and Traditions be Understood and Evaluated Philosophically?

    My life has mixed up those different kinds of action where I do not know where one begins and the other ends.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    This goes in a lot of different directions. As a point of departure, how Descartes expresses it as a matter of moving from a center outwards is different from Kant. Kant is asking for something like:

    if something thinks then by definition it must exist.Janus
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    I don't see the judgement as an empirical oneJanus

    Just to be clear, are you addressing Kant's statement in that regard? Where he stated it was such a thing?
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    I read the passage to mean that we have no way to confirm the judgment, a neat reversal of the special province of the "I" granted by Descartes.

    So, no, not an argument for the opposite proposition.
  • How May Esoteric Thinking and Traditions be Understood and Evaluated Philosophically?

    Well, the tiny units I introduced is also a caution regarding assessment. I was agreeing with Pantagruel that trying to learn a discipline required working with its language. But my acceptance is thoroughly bound with the skepticism I have expressed previously about mapping territories.

    I harmonize with the way Marcus Aurelius spoke of his teachers and influences. He just lays them out there and lets the reader find their own.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    "...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
    It seems that this is the sort of thing that Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant.
    Banno

    It is true that Kant took it as a given that concepts formed through reason were demonstrations of a universal activity. Wittgenstein's view of what is built through interaction would have puzzled him.

    But Kant did approach the insufficiency of Descartes' isolation. In the passage I quoted above, there is:

    * The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it),CPR, Kant, B421

    The parallel the OP draws between the different views of limits is at least two examples of relative humility measured against what can be established as universals.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant


    The mention of Hegel prompts me to ask about the role of time. Kant was very particular about how that as an element of experience. Wittgenstein is ahistorical in laying out the conditions of what can be said about the world as a whole or experience as Kant treated the matter. But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    You have framed this in an interesting way. I understand the doubt that the passage was self-referential. If the observation is accepted as sincere, the meaning is different. That would be working within conditions rather than rising above them.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    The lack of an underlying logical structure is the position Wittgenstein moved on toward in the Philosophical Investigations, with "family resemblance"Metaphysician Undercover

    How is an appeal to "family resemblance" a negation of logical structure? What structure are you referring to?
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant

    I read Wittgenstein to be saying he is still doing philosophy at that juncture. This is a balancing point for many different interpretations. The matter seems to revolve around different methods of reduction. If the activity is no longer "philosophy", what is it?

    Maybe you could say more about the implication that philosophy has been abandoned..
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    So language, and the various language-games, would trump logic or structure.J

    How do you see the 'relativizing' of separate language games as a rejection of logic and structure? That goes against the grain of passages like the following:

    "When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this."
    (PI 194)

    Arguing for the limits to our explanations are not the denial of an existing order.

    Do you know of an instance of Habermas bringing the charge of performative contradiction against Wittgenstein?
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    What Kant has to say in the paralogisms is about “rational psychology” and the indeterminacy of the “I”. It is certainly a consequence of the transcendental perspective but I can’t quite see its specific relevance.Jamal

    As a criticism of Descartes, the quoted section shows how Descartes presumed a private experience to be able to stand for what can be said of all humans. Kant was willing to approach 'Reason' as that kind of universal but not the individuals using it. As a consequence, a different psychology is needed.

    Nor do I. Actually though, I don’t know what you mean.Jamal

    I was objecting to your expression of "the human form of life" on the basis of such a proposition being more explanatory than Wittgenstein intended.
  • Wittgenstein’s creative sublimation of Kant
    The transcendental perspective concerns the necessary conditions for the human experience of the world and defines the limits of this experience and the knowledge of objects therein; and from this perspective, the world around us, what is real in experience, is limited accordingly: the limits of my experience mean the limits of my world.Jamal

    On Kant's side, the "limit of experience" is not so much trying get beyond a particular domain, like a dog straining against a tether, but a problem of perceiving the self, particularly a self in the world:

    From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *

    * The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty.
    CPR, Kant, B421

    On the Wittgenstein side, I do not read the "form of life" as a replacement for what could not be explained by Kant. It seems to me that Wittgenstein avoided expressing the idea as 'essential' as this:

    The language games that constitute the lives of human beings thereby constitute the human "form of life," because human beings are linguistic to the core.Jamal
  • I Don't Agree With All Philosophies

    Is there anything you disagree with? That is the starting point of many philosophies.

    Given the possibility of being wrong, can anything be established at all? That has been a philosophical question for some time now.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Gold Sneakers and a large amount of money to spend.

    Apologies to Steely Dan.