[lit-ideas] Re: Thai King Dies
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 17:20:02 +0000 (UTC)
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take
eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal
life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way
in which our visual field has no limits.>
If we didn't know this was Wittgenstein and so strained to make sense of this
so it was valid, we would surely find it slippery in the extreme. We 'do
experience our death' often enough: though while we are alive we don't
experience being dead, we may experience 'dying' (right up to the point of
being dead) - and if we experience being dead, we may even experience the
crossover from life to death. It is wrong that "eternal life" arises from
living in the present - it arises from living eternally. Lastly, our visual
field has limits - this points up the inescapable sense in which our life has
its limits, and living in the present doesn't allow us to escape them
Of course, given his past record, JLS may have made some of this quotation up -
in which case, apologies to W (though you may be too dead to experience the
apology).
As a tangent: why does Wittgenstein have such appeal to a certain kind of
English Catholic - Anscombe, McGuinness etc? There must a way it fits with
their 'theology' and this may provide some insight into interpreting passages
like the quoted one.
DL
From: "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, 14 October 2016, 18:00
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Thai King Dies
McEvoy writes:
i. Thai King Dies
and comments: "This [to wit, (i)] is trending above someone's Nobel Prize for
Literature."
The trending may be Wittgensteinian in nature.
H. P. Grice, the Oxford philosopher, once overheard J. L. Austin, the Oxford
philosopher, say to P. F. Strawson, the Oxford philosopher:
ii. Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man.
The implicature is that both Witters and Moore should not necessarily be liked
by folks like Austin, the Oxford philosopher. But given a choice, the extra
implicature goes, Moore wins.
I say the trending is Wittgensteinian (and thus anti-Oxonian) in that, in TLP
6.431, Witters writes
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take
eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal
life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way
in which our visual field has no limits.
Therefore, while we may expect some publishing house (Yale University Press,
say) to come up with
ii. The life and times of a Thai king.
or
iii. The life and opinions of a Thai king.
iv. The life and death of a Thai king.
sounds suspicious (or, if McEvoy prefers, 'invites a suspicious implicature').
Interestingly, McEvoy uses the 'historical present' ('dies') rather than the
tense usually preferred by The Telegraph ("dead"). The New York Times also
prefers the past tense:
v. The king died on Thursday in Bangkok.
Barbara Crossett, for the New York Times, writes. She expands, as a serious
journalist, on what Popper may have 'the evidential basis':
vi. The royal palace said the king died at Siriraj Hospital but gave no further
details.
In case you are wondering, Crossett's implicature here is double:
(a) 'the royal palace' has become what Grice calls a "Griceian utterer". A
palace does not strictly SAY (or implicate), but Crossett is using a trope.
(b) It's not like Crossett wants to know what ROOM the king died in. Rather
the, alla Popper, the cause. Or not, of course.
Speranza
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