Absolute nothingness is impossible, but it would not be impossible if it were not for the existence of something.
Writing "absolute" in front of "nothing" only serves to obfuscate. — Banno
Nothingness is inconceivable by definition. — Tom Storm
Absolute nothingness... — Fooloso4
Austin, especially in Other Minds, addresses "real".
But is it a real one? When you ask if it is real, what are you sugesting? No, it's a fake; it's an illusion; it's a forgery; it's a phoney, a counterfeit, a mirage... What is real and what isn't is decided in each case by contrast; there is no single criteria. — Banno
How is my position objectionable? — Gregory
All you've succeeded in doing is making the grammatical point that if there is something then there is not nothing. — Banno
Because I care about philosophy, and would like to see it done well....what I am wondering is why do you feel the need? — Beverley
ButGrammar is the one thing that Platonism has nothing to do with. — Gregory
The problem wan't clear in my joke, it seems, so I'll add a bit of explanation. So "I have sand in my pocket" implies that there is a thing - the sand - in my pocket. "I have nothing in my pocket" has the same grammar. Does it imply that I have a thing - the nothing - in my pocket?Grammar, usually taken to consist of the rules of correct syntactic and semantic usage, becomes, in Wittgenstein’s hands, the wider—and more elusive—notion which captures the essence of language as a special rule-governed activity. — SEP
Einstein used it — frank
On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies? He talks about empty space. No mention of void in this English translation.General relativity is about gravity and acceleration. Special relativity starts with a thought experiment that shows that in a void, with one object stationary and one object moving at a constant speed, there's no fact of the matter about which one is actually stationary and which one is moving. — frank
There was before Newton.There's no void. — frank
For Wittgenstein, words don’t “mean things” just because of some magical quality they have.
Instead, words are tools which get their meaning from the context they’re used in. And the purpose we put them too. Meaning derives from this context. And, in particular, the context of what we want to do with them. In this situation, we decide to use this word for that purpose.
All philosophy, is in some crude sense, an argument about “what do you mean by the word X”? It’s about finding consistent and useful conceptual frameworks to try to make sense of the world.
What Wittgenstein reminds us is that many times when we get counter-intuitive results or insoluble problems in philosophy. It’s because we took words which got their meaning in one context “on holiday” to a different context where they don’t still have their original meaning given by the new context, but we expect them to be able to do useful work for us. Simply from some residual meaning they were carrying around with them.
But this is, for Wittgenstein, wrong. The word didn’t retain its original meaningfulness in the new context. And our belief that it did is now the cause of an insoluble problem. — Phil Jones
the words are not the point — Ø implies everything
Think about that. So the concept seven, the concept money, the concept chalk, the concept galaxy - these are all and each, experiences?Concepts are actual experiences... — Ø implies everything
But, I was just pointing out that it was just that: an opinion, not a fact. — Beverley
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