Ludwig wittgenstein

Biography

• 26 April 1889- 29 April 1951• Was a homosexual, 3 of his brothers

committed suicide• His work is usually divided between his

early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and his later period, articulated in the Investigations.

• May have suffered from autism or schizoid personality disorder

• Went to the same school as Hitler

Biography

• Was ¾ Jewish, but he famously compared the Jewish people to a Beule (boil or tumour) on Austrian society

• Loss of faith- unable to believe what a Christian ought to believe

Tractactus

• Written to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science

7 Propositions

1.The world is everything that is the case..

2.What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

3.The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

4.The thought is the significant proposition.

5.Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.

(An elementary proposition is a truth function of itself.)

6.The general form of truth-function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)].

7.Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

Proposition 1

• The world is the totality of Facts

Propositions 2 & 3

• Things are made up of Objects

• Objects make up the world

Propositions 4 & 5

• Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.

• Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in "philosophical propositions", but rather in the clarification of propositions.

Proposition 6

In the beginning of 6. Wittgenstein postulates the essential form of all sentences. He uses the notation , where

• P stands for all atomic propositions,

ξ · stands for any subset of propositions, and

·N(ξ) stands for the negation of all propositions making up ξ • What proposition 6. really says is that any logical sentence

can be derived from a series of nand (a binary operation in logic) operations on the totality of atomic propositions.

Philosophical Investigations

• He puts forth the view that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems

• He contradicts or discards much of that which was argued in his earlier work, the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus

• Wittgenstein begins the book with a quotation from St. Augustine: "the individual words in language name objects--sentences are combinations of such names.--In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."

• Makes his point through giving reader expirements

• Points out reliance on indirect communication

Continuation: Beliefs

• He begins talking of the will, life after death, and God. In his examination of these issues he argues that all discussion of them is a misuse of logic. Specifically, since logical language can only reflect the world, any discussion of the mystical, that which lies outside of the metaphysical subject's world, is meaningless. This suggests that many of the traditional domains of philosophy, e.g. ethics and metaphysics, cannot in fact be discussed meaningfully.

Famous Quotations

• A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

• I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

• A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

• Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

• Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

• Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Library MetaphorThe library metaphor, and the pos si bil ity of progress in philosophy:

“Imag ine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be many ways of sort ing them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up sev eral books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indi cate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arrang ing the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that there fore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvi ous that hav ing put together books which belong together was a def i nite achieve ment, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the great est achieve ments in phi los o phy could only be com pared with tak ing up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on dif fer ent shelves; noth ing more being final about their posi tions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the dif fi culty of the task might well think in such a case that noth ing at all had been achieved. — The dif fi culty in phi los o phy is to say no more than we know. E.g. to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.”

Metaphors continued

The progress of Philosophy: The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know, putting two books side by side in the right order, even if they are not in their final places

• Also used the metaphor of God as a great human being whose grace we try to win

Bibliography

• http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/Metaphor.htm

• http://www.ashokkarra.com/2007/05/meaning-knowing-and-metaphor-on-a-section-from-wittgensteins-blue-book/

• http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/wittgenstein.html

• http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/1513/1/bouchard.pdf

• http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/ludwig_wittgenstein.html