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Stuart W. Mirsky (Stuart W. Mirsky is the principal author of this blog).
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Sean Wilson's Blog:


Ludwig Wittgenstein:

 For me, Scalia was a terrible judge. And he was terrible because his decisions relied upon intellectual behaviors that were dominant in history at least one century prior to his time on the bench. He used an a-priori format, syllogistic reasoning, formalism, and took positions about ...
... pretty good stuff here. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/?_r=1 But here is my only complaint. Characterizing Wittgenstein's negative attitudes about the field of philosophy, Horwich writes: " There are no startling discoveries to be made ... 'from the armchair' through some blend of intuition, pure reason and ...
... open access special edition published. Looks promising. Anna Boncompagni is one of the authors.
This looks interesting. The way they have framed the issue looks very good. The question is whether the idea of connoisseurship will even enter the picture at all (as it should). The book I am working on now will expand upon this idea. Why do I ...
I am seeking feedback on the enclosed proposal. I wonder if people think it looks like a viable project? Would the thesis of such a book interest you? Basically, the book is a bit personal: it's based upon an intellectual transformation that I went through and ...
... new set of lectures was posted today. It's on Wittgenstein and Philosophy. Will have the final set of lectures, called Wittgenstein on Intelligence, up tomorrow (hopefully). Moore & His Hands Form of Life False Problems Example: Free Will Senses of Knowledge On Definitions Gettier & Banality Alternative Lexicons On ...
... a lecture containing Wittgensteinian approaches to language. Specifically covers precision-talking, names, jargon, family resemblance, senses of talking -- you name it, it's there. http://ludwig.squarespace.com/cond6/
In this lecture, we see Wittgenstein shed the Tractarian orientation and adopt something that he would later call "the new thinking." http://ludwig.squarespace.com/cond5/
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Italian economist Piero Sraffa is credited with causing Wittgenstein to adopt an "anthropological perspective" toward language. One of conversations between the two involved Sraffa's using a "Neapolitan gesture." This video shows how gestures of this sort lack a picture-reality correspondence, which caused Wittgenstein to abandon the ...
Not enough attention is given to Wittgenstein shunning his immense inheritance. What is interesting is that he did this as a young man and showed no indication throughout life to have ever regretted it. It would be one thing to see someone in their later years ...
... new lecture uploaded on Wittgenstein in transition. Has some clips from A.J. Ayer on Logical Positivism. But, overall, nothing too special here: just a hand-waiving lecture. http://ludwig.squarespace.com/cond4/2014/2/20/01-logical-positivism.html
Wittgenstein's example of philosophical scholarship shews an arrogant and radical ideology hiding inside. Wittgenstein wasn't a worker bee slaving for a literature community. He wasn't a member of the "club." He understood that a "company man" could never be a great thinker. Today, however, the academy ...
... just finished putting my newest version of the Tractatus lecture online. Some audio clips are old, however, because my batteries died in the middle of one session. Still, it is pieced together (reconstructed) accurately. http://ludwig.squarespace.com/cond3/2014/1/29/01-the-genesis-of.html
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things," Wittgenstein proclaims in the Tractatus. In this video, this idea is explained. Specifically, the idea of a thought being a picture of a possible state of affairs, for which the proposition claims to be true or ...
There is an old thread on this subject which has been revived on Duncan Richter's blog. You might want to have a look: http://languagegoesonholiday.blogspot.com/2012/11/did-wittgenstein-believe-in-god.html
I've never seen this before. I wonder if anyone can comment on when it was taken? Or the circumstances? He sort of reminds me of Elvis in this one. Click the picture to see where it came from.
A lecture that looks at Bertrand Russell, the analytic movement that he and Gottlob Frege nurtured, and the role that early Ludwig Wittgenstein played. The lecture takes us from Wittgenstein's first year at Cambridge, when he was captured by Russell's analytic patriotism, through to his departure ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/the-stereotypes-about-math-that-hold-americans-back/281303/ ... article seems to support the idea that traditional and formalistic approaches to mathematics were themselves an unnecessary dressing. If true, an interesting idea: one that has resonance with the notion that meaning is more important than analysis and that "getting it" is something different ...
(sent to analytic re: whether misplaying in a "language game" is a matter of breaching an implied customary rule for communication. Here's the quick answer: the idea is too anthropologic and needs something ideational) ... I am so happy you brought this up. Because this is exactly what ...
    
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Duncan Richter's Blog:

The review is here. Thankfully, even though it does mention me, it doesn't say anything bad about my contribution. (Perhaps tactfully, it says almost nothing at all about it.) Here's a taste of the review: This volume is a valuable addition to this growing literature, with a lucid ...
These are all just coincidences, I suppose, but there are some striking similarities between some of Wittgenstein's acts and ideas and elements of War and Peace. Here are three. The Tractatus contains seven main propositions, which are to be overcome in order to see the ...
One of my favorite authors on why fiction is not a distraction from reality. Here's a taste: The night time dream is chaotic and can be genuinely frightening. The dream we call life is filled with joy and suffering, but for many people a lot more ...
It seems paradoxical to write the question, "Does writing exist?" but what I mean is: is there some thing called writing that someone can be good or bad at, teach, or simply do? According to John Warner, we know how to teach writing. But what is ...
This Guardian essay on neoliberalism is frustrating in some ways (too cloudy at key points, and too prone to ad hominem insults), but it's interesting, and brings out the importance of Friedrich von Hayek, whose work probably ought to be engaged with more just because it ...
Moving to this country was the the first time I ever flew in a plane. I landed in Charlottesville, where I lived for five years. I still live just over an hour's drive from there, and go there quite often to eat a meal, do some ...
This looks interesting, in terms of both content and the decision to publish free and online. The title is Pictorial Truth: Essays on Wittgenstein, Realism, and Conservatism, and it's by Kristóf Nyíri. He writes: I am really curious how the scholarly world will react e.g. to ...
My friend Chris Gavaler has co-written a piece with Nathaniel Goldberg on Trump and bullshit for Philosophy Now. If you're interested in this subject then, obviously, you might want to read it. Their conclusion is that a sample of Trump's speech is "beyond bullshit." Here's ...
I talked a bit about Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle here and here. This is the last post I intend to write about it, and it's about the part of the book I like the most. Near the end, Mulhall refers to "the sheer wild particularity ...
[What follows is little more than a bunch of quotes strung together. But they are good quotes.] The desirability of seeing what is under our noses and thereby becoming free is a bit of a theme in 19th century European thought. Here's Father ...
Perhaps this isn't worth a blog post, but it's not as if I've been posting much otherwise. Sometimes it's better to have low standards. So here goes. Two things strike me as not just true but obviously true about any increase in the legal minimum ...
This paper needs quite a bit of work, but for anyone interested here is an only very slightly (so far) revised version of the paper I presented at the conference on Peter Winch last weekend in London.
If you're interested in Peter Winch on understanding others, you might be interested in this documentary. Perhaps it's well known, but I only just found it: And here's one on Evans-Pritchard: I haven't watched either one yet, so can't guarantee their quality.
A new issue (Vol 6 No 1 (2017)) is available here.
Some questions that you might want to ask Stephen Mulhall when you read his new book: if talk about God is nonsense, why bother?if talk about God has a use, mustn't it thereby have a meaning after all?if you accept that nonsense is nonsense, that there ...
Just in case anyone's interested, I've revised this paper. The new version is here.
Are there any bad ones? These are the best, and only, three I know: "Woody Allen" by Allo Darlin', "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes" by Le Tigre, and "Roman P" by Psychic TV. The videos aren't very exciting, but the performances are ...
This site looks great. It is designed to be a teaching resource for people who teach philosophy but want to diverge from the usual texts and topics taught. So if you want to teach some Asian philosophy, for instance, this site will (it is not yet complete) ...
I'm enjoying Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle very much. Here he is on religious language: ...insofar as God is the source of all that is, possessing in his being all the perfections he causes, then everything in creation is a potential source of imagery for the ...
Matthew Yglesias has an interesting essay on Trump and bullshit at Vox, but I think he goes too far in his attempt to explain what's going on. Here's an example: When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s ...

Entries in Value (7)

1:40PM

Logic and Value

Some preliminary thoughts on the nature of valuation as a human activity and how that fits with the rules of logic which we find embedded within the practice of language:

Language and Thought

Language consists of various things we do with sounds and symbols. A main part of language involves the use of naming and descriptive terms (words and phrases) to stand for the things we can discern (by observation and/or thought), as well as those operators (in words or phrases) by which we can combine the naming and descriptive terms in informative ways.

Language also includes various signaling practices (exclamations, gestures, expressions employed for evocative or invocative purposes) but these are not "about" terms (referential) and so can be set aside for the moment.

The purpose of any language is to inform, that is to convey information in order to communicate with other speakers.

The methods of combination applied to naming and descriptive terms, as represented by the non-naming and descriptive operators, constitute the logic (the basic and distinct rules) of any language.

But the rules of logic are themselves used, in any given language, according to other rules of practice, which are distinctive to each particular language, and to relevant contexts, in order to generate informative statements in any given language. That is, grammatical differences mask logical similarities from language to language and even within the same language.

Unlike the rules of linguistic practice (grammar), which are, to a large extent, contingent because they are governed by historical experiences of the speaker, by habits formed and preserved, and by physical possibility, the rules of logic, although manifested through the rules of practice (grammar) in many different ways, have a universal character, i.e., they are common to all languages so that the same thoughts can generally be expressed in them in various languages.

The study of any language consists of discovering how the practical rules of that language make use of, and manifest, the logical possibilities (the range of possible combinations of naming and descriptive terms) in the given language.

The study of logic, on the other hand . . .

Click to read more ...

3:06PM

An Inventory of Value Approaches re: Moral Questions

Have been thinking a lot recently about the range of "theories" that have been current at one time or another in the history of philosophical inquiry into moral claims and of human claims about behavioral goodness in general. While it's hard to capture everything, I have compiled what seems to me a fairly exhaustive list of different moral "theories" which include some twenty possibilities. Of course I'm sure this isn't exhaustive and there are probably many nuances I have not adequately captured. Moreover, there are some strong similarities among some of the categories which suggests room for disagreement about which qualifies as which. I've tried in what follows to sort them as cleanly as I can and to identify a few of the main thinkers associated with each (where there are such associations to be made)

In the final analysis, I think it can be helpful to look at the range of possibilities and see what fits where and who and what may have been left out:

The Scope of Moral Accounts

Naturalistic Accounts (What we call "good" is some feature or phenomenon of the natural world.)

Ancient

The Greeks broke ground by offering a variety of explanations which sought to go beyond the priestly and social admonitions of their particular culture, including that which we mean by our uses of the word “good.” The good, they proposed, was variously:

1) Whatever counts as the fullest exercise of man’s unique capabilities . . .

Click to read more ...

3:55PM

Toward a Comprehensive Account of Value Discourse

Still working my way through Hall, on the 12th chapter now and have reached a point, I think, where I have enough of a sense of where he is headed with his analysis to make some comments:

Hall builds his account of valuing, and moral valuing specifically, on the notion that valuing just is emotion and that it occurs in parallel (though intermixed with) occurrences of perception (perceiving). He proposes that there are parallel linguistic forms within what he calls our conventional language (ordinary language governed by a convention-based grammar) which reflect or express the underlying elements (emotion and perception), with each having its own distinct logic, also occurring in rough parallel. Thus he argues that the polarities of truth and falsity represent the dichotomies intrinsic to perceptive/descriptive language, as represented by the truth tables of logic, while a favorable/non-favorable/indifferent trichotomy characterizes emotional language. Both forms of language, he proposes, in keeping with their underlying (natural) basis, i.e., reflecting the two ways we relate to the world around us, have semantic content. That is, they refer to entities outside themselves. This referential trait, he holds, is an expression of the fundamentally intentional nature of both.

For Hall, then, the solution to the problem posed by Hume's is/ought dichotomy is to demonstrate that Hume missed the linguistic/semantic character of value claims and to show that oughts and is's are interconnected because of their parallel reliance on the intentionality of the language user. . . .

Click to read more ...

11:53AM

Empathy

Finding reasons to do good

Empathy, the recognition of the experience of others, as if we ourselves were experiencing it, begins with similarities of behaviors . . ., similarities sufficient to convince us that we are in the presence of another mind, behaviors which we seem to be “programmed” to recognize and react to. It’s a species tool, one may say, for enabling a certain level of interaction with others of our kind – and, sometimes, beyond our kind . . .

To the extent empathy is just one of a variety of characteristics and behavioral traits that we happen to inherit from our progenitors, it’s not a given that we all have it, or that we all have it to the same degree. Genes have been known to misfire or even drop out of individual members of a species and so the expressions of them are lost. To the extent empathy, which enables us to identify with others – to put ourselves in their shoes and so feel their pains and joys as if they were our own – is just an inherited trait, it cannot be praised nor, its absence, condemned.

Yet much of what we think of as moral behavior hangs on empathy, on not doing to another what we would not have done to us or, put another and slightly more parochial way, of treating our neighbors as ourselves . . .

Click to read more ...

9:37AM

The Value of Persons

The distinguishing characteristics of attributions of moral value and why adherence to a traditional interpretation of Wittgenstein on the private/public language distinction may not be enough.

An inquiry into the nature of moral judgments is not about whether this or that individual (or action) is moral but about whether there is anything at all that warrants being called moral and, if so, what is it and why? Particular moral codes or standards may or may not be moral at all in fact, and actual moral codes may be in conflict with one another, at least as regards particular and often critical issues so the point of a philosophical inquiry into moral questions cannot be to discover who or what is morally good but to discover what, if anything, moral goodness is. If moral judgments are an exercise in assessing a certain kind of value, suitable for a certain sort of thing, then they will be seen to be a sub-class of a more general category of value judgment. What distinguishes the sub-class we call moral is what we want to make clear.

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4:47PM

The Curiosity of Moral Claims

Are there reasons to be good?

. . . Moral valuing is about nothing less than valuing or disvaluing particular behaviors, either in isolation or as part of a continuum of activity we may undertake. And moral questions look like questions concerning what we should or should not do under certain circumstances . . . questions which go beyond the issue of what pleases us at this, or some future, moment. If it were just a matter of doing what pleases us, then, indeed, no action we can imagine could qualify as moral under the usual interpretation of that word. If we do what we do for our own benefit, for our advancement, for our pleasure, etc., then however moral a particular action may look to an outsider, lacking access to our motives, we would not as observers, if given sufficient information about the true motives behind it to recognize it as self-interested, agree that it was morally done.

Setting aside for the moment the notion that even actions unmotivated by a moral decision may have a good effect and may thus be deemed praiseworthy at some level, the realization that one chose the action in question for a non-moral, perhaps even an immoral, reason would fatally undermine its apparent praiseworthiness to any moral observer . . .

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11:14AM

Value and Moral Choice

Begins to consider the basis and justifications for making moral claims and relates this to the role of valuing and the nature of lawmaking itself.

Valuing is that added step we take concerning our needs, desires, preferences and so forth, when we arrange the possible things we can acquire or do along a hierarchy of choice. It’s an aspect of the reasoning process. Without the ability to differentiate and prioritize in this way, we could not act based on reasons but could, at best, be reactive, impetuous creatures only, choosing this or that in accord with the moment’s stimuli. And so it is with most of our animal brethren. But as you go up the evolutionary hierarchy, as you get to the point where an entity can think about its world and imagine a future, while remembering a past in relation to its present, the capacity to engage in this kind of thinking, to set values and act on them, becomes possible.

Can a dog value its food? Or its owner? Or the time allotted to it in the local park to run free in the open air? It seems difficult to imagine a creature with no more than a dog's capabilities valuing anything at all. It can certainly want those things and behave accordingly. But, to the extent it cannot think of them conceptually, cannot hold an idea of them in the abstract in its head, it seems odd to say that it it is valuing them.

And yet there is no great difference between a dog’s desire or need for its food, or for open air play, and our own . . .

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