tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post4145013690001934777..comments2023-05-13T07:41:26.217-05:00Comments on SOH-Dan: A Better Sort of Reader: the ethicalDaniel Lindquisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-91876131061444938372011-06-09T17:53:40.536-05:002011-06-09T17:53:40.536-05:00"in the TLP "ethics" surely has a b..."in the TLP "ethics" surely has a broader (or narrower, depending on how you look at it) scope – thus the link with aesthetics and the mystical in that context. Did anyone say anything about this?"<br /><br />Have you read Conant's "What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not?" It's really good on this point. The Donatelli piece it's building on, "The Problem of the Higher in the Tractatus", is also really good. There's a lot of interesting things to be gotten out of trying to say what "ethics is transcendental" is getting at. (And remember that the parenthetical remark that "ethics and aesthetics are one" is a remark on this.) I don't think much came out in the discussions that wasn't already in Conant's paper, though; the ethics-aesthetics connection in early Wittgenstein remains underdeveloped, I think. Probably because you basically only get the October 7 1916 Notebook passage to really wrestle with.<br /><br />"This is fine (and of course a welcome corrective to the idea that PI trumps TLP so forget about the latter), but one does wait for the other shoe to drop. Was anything helpful said in this regard?"<br /><br />I actually don't think the other shoe does drop, at this point in Wittgenstein's thought. In the later philosophy Wittgenstein just gets more explicit and articulate about "anti-theoretical" ideas he already had by the time of writing TLP. He does shift his method of writing philosophy in a major way, but it's still in the service of the same sort of activity. Where the latter philosophy tries to only say things that everyone agrees with, the early philosophy tried to just not say anything. Conant referred to this as Wittgenstein's desire to be "methodologically impeccable", and said this was why Wittgenstein doesn't speculate much on how/why we fall into the confusions that we do in philosophy. Conant thought that Cavell gives us a story here that Wittgenstein probably would've agreed with, but he couldn't tell it himself, since it is speculative and disputable in a way that Wittgenstein didn't want his philosophy to be.<br /><br />But in general, the conference was pretty tightly focused on TLP and the early 30s. I suspect it's because those are the areas where Wittgenstein actually mentions "the ethical" and "the unsayable". You have texts to work with. Ethics in the later philosophy is much more esoteric.<br /><br />I want to point out that in my second post on Monk's paper, I think the account of what's wrong with 6.53 I present is something that would work as well with the later as the early Wittgenstein. The early Wittgenstein does have more to his story, about how a <i>Begriffschrift</i> is supposed to be useful for philosophy, but I skipped it because 1) I didn't need to get into it to show how 6.53 falls apart from within the <i>Tractatus</i> 2) I wanted to see how much of a PI-type view I could get just by mining Tractarian propositions 3) the role the <i>Begriffschrift</i> is supposed to play is neither simple nor clear 4) it's not even a fully usable <i>Begriffschrift</i>, since things like how to eliminate the identity sign are only sketched, not worked out in detail and 5) it's something Wittgenstein later abandons as a failure. So there is a big part of the story that I just skipped over in that post.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-79397328148438832652011-06-09T17:52:57.090-05:002011-06-09T17:52:57.090-05:00Bernard Suits was the philosophy of sport guy. Col...Bernard Suits was the philosophy of sport guy. Collin McGinn assigned his book in a class on "meta-philosophy".<br /><br />I doubt there is a "right" way to put the anti-essentialist/anti-Platonist point. I've come to think the label too vague to be of much use. (An upcoming post about Monk's paper should touch on a related matter -- Joachim Schulte said some very good things about the distinction between "left" and "right" Wittgensteinians, and the value of philosophical labels generally, none of which I had appreciated before.) But I don't think there's any disagreement of substance between us here, just one of sloganeering.<br /><br />I was reading Foucault's <a href="http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm" rel="nofollow">"Theatrum Philosophicum"</a> (which is a review of two of Deleuze's books) the other day, and quite liked this passage: "Overturn Platonism: what philosophy has not tried? If we defined philosophy at the limit as any attempt, regardless of its source, to reverse Platonism, then philosophy begins with Aristotle; or better yet, it begins with Plato himself, with the conclusion of the Sophist where it is impossible to distinguish Socrates from the crafty imitator; or it begins with the Sophists who were extremely vocal about the rise of Platonism and who ridiculed its future greatness with their perpetual play on words." -- and this is from 1970. Better to not put too much weight on such a title.<br /><br />But then of course LW himself said things like this (in a 1931 letter to Schlick): "I cannot characterize my standpoint better than by saying that it is opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues." So... yeah. One shouldn't downplay the anti-essentialism.<br /><br />"I even wonder if the problem is "using a theory to explain it," which might depend on one's conception of "explanation" (or "theory" for that matter!)."<br /><br />Well, there's another quote from the same time period, that Monk also quoted: "Is value a particular state of mind? Or a form attaching to some data or other of consciousness? I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation." And there's the famous anecdote about a discussion of the Euthyphro with Schlick, where Wittgenstein said that "the good is what the gods command" is actually the profounder view -- because it doesn't even pretend to have an explanation for why piety is good. And in this post I did mean to be more spelling out LW's views than defending them; I am unsettled as to what to say about ethics at present. But I do think Wittgenstein (at least early Wittgenstein) has different objections to "theories" in philosophy and "theories" in ethics. I think that (very early -- think "Notes on Logic") Wittgenstein did think that philosophy was theoretical, but I don't think he ever thought this about ethics.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-83402824180355881232011-06-09T16:51:59.495-05:002011-06-09T16:51:59.495-05:00Thanks for these reports. I wish I had been there...Thanks for these reports. I wish I had been there! I do have a few questions though.<br /><br />I agree that "essence" here is untroubling, but I wonder if yours is the way to put it. I continue to find it helpful to think of W as "anti-essentialist," given the contemporary resonance of that term as something like "anti-platonist." In <i>this</i> sense he is indeed opposed to "essences," and believes that you when you think you've found one you are always wrong. It's the same point about "definitions" that people were not getting in that kerfuffle about the "definition of games" that some guy had found – and thus took himself to have refuted W (you remember that, I forget the guy's name now: Sands was it? something like that). I even wonder if the problem is "using a theory to explain it," which might depend on one's conception of "explanation" (or "theory" for that matter!).<br /><br />I also wonder about the scope of "ethics" here. It sounds like the discussion was about ethics as an account of, or identical with, morality; but in the TLP "ethics" surely has a broader (or narrower, depending on how you look at it) scope – thus the link with aesthetics and the mystical in that context. Did anyone say anything about this?<br /><br />Thirdly, I see that your discussion here of W's attitude toward "theses" and "theories" is centered on the TLP remarks. This is fine (and of course a welcome corrective to the idea that PI trumps TLP so forget about the latter), but one does wait for the other shoe to drop. Was anything helpful said in this regard?Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com