[lit-ideas] Re: The nothing noths
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 05:33:08 +0000
Speranza???!!!! Ke kazzo dici???
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The nothing noths
I know it was O. K. who raised the topic of the references, so I did check with
D. P. Henry and his treatment of the Heidegger
i. The Nothing noths.
Henry provides a symbolisation of the above, and notes that it's a logical
truth, or what I would prefer, a tautology. Henry is into mediaevalism, and not
really into Heidegger, and he does not quote from Ayer, or Grice, for that
matter. He would occasionally quote from Austin.
But notably, indeed, Henry is criticising Carnap's take, so I will concentrate
on the remaining of this post to comment on McEvoy's point about Carnap.
Henry seems to think that Carnap, and Whitehead/Russell for that matter have a
restricted view of what constitutes a language, and in their conception indeed
i. The Nothing noths.
comes out as a piece of nonsense.
Henry focuses on the 'the' of (i) and considers Russell's
ii. The king of France is bald.
Since we do allow for the use of 'the' when it comes to 'vacuous'
expressions, the same applies to Heidegger's (i).
Henry also then goes on to point out the uniqueness (or 'singularity', as Henry
prefers) of "Nothing", thus capitalised. It's not
iii. Nothing noths.
or
even as the subject header goes
iv. The nothing noths.
but what Heidegger's translator has, i.e.
i. The Nothing noths.
So basically, while mainly interested in mediaeval material, Henry goes on to
note that there is a way to defend Heidegger as
-- not having uttered any kind of nonsense
-- having uttered some logically true utterance
This is what Henry refers to as the 'metaphysical bearing'. He suggests that
according to the choice of the language one makes, one will have a metaphysical
bias towards this or towards that.
Now onto McEvoy's further references to Popper and Witters.
It should be pointed out that Henry does not GRANT that Heidegger would be
happy with HIS (i.e. Henry's) analysis. Henry suggests that there is indeed
more to "Nothing" than (i) and to evaluate Heidegger's claim (i) one may have
to explore further onto "Nothing".
In a message dated 2/19/2015 10:03:19 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I suggest it is a cul-de-sac to frame the discussion in terms of Heidegger vs.
Carnap [Heidegger vs. Wittgenstein or H vs. Popper would be more fruitful, for
example]."
From what follows, McEvoy's idea is that Carnap is into the 'unity of science',
and that the only possible language is the language of science.
KEYWORD: Scientism.
From the Henry discussion, I learn that Carnap (like most logical
'positivists') is intebted to Russell/Whitehead, so I'm not sure a validation
of _science_ per se is what we have to deal with. Rather is the choice of a
vehicle for formalisation, Henry seems to suggest.
McEvoy goes on:
"Carnap is too poor an enemy against which to pit Heidegger: Carnap's
strictures as to meaning are mistaken and they are mistaken even in relation to
the 'language of science' that Carnap wishes to take as the be-all and end-all
of "sense"."
Here McEvoy makes a distinction between
i. Carnap's conception of language in general.
ii. Carnap's conception of the language of science.
I would need to double-check here, but it seems Carnap's constrictions, or
'strictures', to use McEvoy's phrase, are Whitehead's and Russell's -- which
are indeed Grice's! (Vide Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the
vernacular").
I write "Whitehead's and Russell's" because we are referring to "PM" (or
Principia Mathematica for long) and Whitehead is the first author.
(OTOH Henry's choice of a language is NOT PM, but rather the Polish school he
learned from Geach -- and that J. L. Scherb also quotes.
McEvoy goes on:
"The fundamental flaws in Carnap's approach do not validate Heidegger's
metaphysics, of course: but we should not be misled that the fundamental
question with Heidegger's metaphysics is whether it is nonsense (as Carnap
contends) but whether it is mistaken or wrongheaded."
This is what Henry, being a mediaevalist, but having a GREAT sense of humour,
calls the 'quaestio subtilissima', or 'quæstio subtilissima', and how these
apparent sophismas have a 'metaphysical bearing'.
If they have a metaphysical bearing, it may mean that indeed, they should not
be treated as nonsense, but as metaphysical claims with pretensions of truth
and even logical truth and validity.
Henry criticises Carnap for not _seeing_ that.
McEvoy concludes his post:
"On the fundamental issue of whether there is any metaphysical reality beyond
that expressible in scientific terms, we might say H is fundamentally right and
C fundamentally wrong (and on this issue W and P are with H)."
I think Henry and Grice are with Martin Heidegger, too. After all, Grice said
that Heidegger was the greatest living philosopher.
I'm less sure about Whitehead and Russell. They were perhaps not philosophers
when they wrote "Principia Mathematica". I BELIEVE their affiliations at
Cambridge at that time were with the Department of Mathematics!
(Whitehead became a philosopher when he went to Harvard!)
But in any case, I don't think Whitehead and Russell were particularly
interesting in either defending or debunking metaphysics!
Grice WAS, interested in DEFENDING it, seeing that Oxford, unlike Cambridge,
has a full CHAIR -- the Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy.
And surely, as the Oxonian adage goes, if there is the Waynflete Professor of
Metaphysical Philosophy, surely there is Metaphysical Philosophy.
McEvoy goes on:
"This leaves entirely open that H is fundamentally wrong in his attempts to
metaphysise that reality."
Well, it's fascinating, I find, that it was Gilbert Ryle, who later became the
[insert number]th Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford was
the first (in Oxford) to find geniality in Martin Heidegger's "Being and
Time". Even before the thing was published in English (cfr. Benedeto Croce,
'traduttore traditore') he cared to review the German thing ("Sein und Zeit")
for _Mind_.
Heidegger's metaphysics may be called 'nihilistic' as far as 'The Nothing
noths' claim goes. Or not?
In logic, logicians speak of the
~
or tilde, which is negation.
"The Nothing noths" seems to involve negation -- although not necessarily for
Henry, who relying on some Polish notation of some sort, seems to get away
with a formalisation of Heidegger's claim that does NOT rely on
~
or its truth-tables.
So while KEYWORD: NIHILISM applies more to Sartre and his "le néant néantisant"
as a description of conscience, the place of (i) The nothing noths, or 'The
Nothing noths', if you must, in Heidegger's metaphysical system may be
trickier to validate or even characterise!?
Cheers,
Speranza
ps. The agenda of the explication project is set by a German pre-war
debate between Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger about allegedly meaningless
metaphysical statements such as "The Nothing noths" ("Das Nichts nichtet").
Within the mainstream of 20th century analytical philosophy this statement,
"The Nothing noths" has come to be regarded as obvious metaphysical
nonsense. As we all know, this led to an unfortunate confrontation between
analytical and continental philosophy. Despite the fact that this former
judgement had been corrected in a short remark by the Mancunian philosopher
Desmond Paul Henry in the 1960s, which he repeated more explicitly in the
1980s, this unnecessary conflict still seems to exist.
Unfortunately Henry's remark didn't find its way to a greater audience,
perhaps because Henry didn't prove his claim in a canonical way, perhaps
because it contains an ambiguity, which may give rise to criticism. However,
the required disambiguation together with the missing proofs can and will be
given here within Lesniewski's ontology. Following Ludger Honnefelder we can
call the Lesniewski systems, which were developed roughly at the same time
(1913-1939), the third beginning of metaphysics. They will provide the still
missing bridge between Carnap and Heidegger, which can be regarded as an
ontological supplement to and a partial correction of Michael Friedman's
brilliant background study on Heidegger, Carnap and Cassirer. The
hermeneutical conclusion to be drawn is that reconciliation between the two
types of philosophy is not only possible along Cassirer's ideas, but also
along the lines of broadly logical form. In other words: there IS a more
fundamental
way for reconciliation. The hermeneutical outcome is as follows: one can
make use of precise logic tools in a more general way than Carnap himself
without declaring at least some central statements of Heidegger's
Fundamentalontologie to be pure nonsense."
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