Posted by alexandra_k on September 13, 2004, at 18:59:22
In reply to great joke, can you tell me about Wittgenstein?, posted by Jai Narayan on September 12, 2004, at 8:38:15
>Who is this Wittgenstein? He sounds interesting. I have been away from any formal schooling.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is (arguably) the most brilliant philosopher of last century. He is revered in analytic philosophy for a couple of things....
(1) Logical Postitivism was the leading world view (Bertrand Russell and Gotlob Frege). The form of the world was thought to be mirrored in the form of language / thought. There are 'simples' which are the tiniest units of meaning / sense and they join together to create propositions, and propositions represent the world as being a certain way which is either mirrored in a state of affairs.... anyway, it gets complicated, but he took this world view as far as he could go when he was stuck in the trenches (fighting for the Nazi's as a Jew, regrettably..).
(2) Then, years later he wrote the 'Philosophical Investigations' which was severely critical of his earlier atomism. He tears apart philosophy conceived as a search for necessary and sufficient conditions (the practice of conceptual analysis so loved in the 70's yeech). Famous arguements against the possibility of a 'private language' (though hard to actuallly find in the text), and on 'rule following' in the head.
Feminists and post-modernists love him too, and he's written a lot else besides, but all I know of him is those two works.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:389257
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040907/msgs/390439.html