[C] [Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein and Theories
- From: "J" <jpdemouy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:49:20 -0000
AB,
There is much in what you say with which I'd agree. Just a few comments...
> It isn't good for business, that's clear, it
> makes all philosophers unemployed!
I actually believe that your vaccination metaphor shows a role for philosophers
that is both a contribution to human welfare and human understanding and is
consistent with Wittgenstein's insights.
Politics being what they are though, many philosophers would rather identify
themselves with stupidities like so-called "cognitive science", doing
"important" work.
> 1. Both aim to show something instead of saying
> it;
Could you elaborate on where you find something like a saying/showing
distinction in the later work?
The closest analogy that comes to my mind is "that understanding which consists
in 'seeing connexions'." (PI 122), ut this doesn't seem to entail any
suggestion that such connections are ineffable.
>
> 2. Both perspectives risk to be
> self-contraddictory;
Any text can be taken to be self-contradictory but as Sean and I have
discussed, there are specific ways that the later work could easily be taken to
be self-refuting. He and I have somewhat different accounts of why this is not
the case. In any case, this is not the sort of clear paradox we find in the
_Tractatus_.
Perhaps you have something else in mind? Or a different take on the rejection
of theses and theories?
> 4. In Tractatus, the end is to see the world rightly;
> in the Investigations, what we get is, again, a vision, but
> this vision is intended to let us go back to our original
> and spontaneous life, in a pragmatic perspective that we
> can't find in the Tractatus.
I think I know what you mean here. Something like a return to the ordinary, a
"healthy understanding". I hesitate at "pragmatic" because of the
philosophical baggage that word carries (likely more so in the US!), but if you
simply mean something like "attuned to our practices", then that's right.
JPDeMouy
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