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Stuart W. Mirsky
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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 Valuing (3)

4:44PM

The Mechanism of Moral Belief - Part I (Valuing)

IF VALUING is just the activity we must be capable of in order to reason about, and so interact with, things in the world (i.e., the capacity to arrange our options in some preferential order by sorting them in ways that allow for selectional differentiation), then moral valuing will involve applying this kind of activity to phenomena of the type we count as morally relevant, namely, to actions. To the extent moral judgments are about actions then (i.e., about distinguishing them along some preferential grid – just as we distinguish other referents in other valuing cases), what will be needed, in moral terms, is a way of determining the relevant markers that constitute a sorting standard suitable for actions.

Of course, not all evaluations of actions are about moral claims since every action we take in the course of deliberation expresses some underlying valuation and actions may be valued and evaluated in terms of those, too. That is, we often value actions for their role in these other types of valuation by considering them in terms of how, and to what extent, they serve as a means for securing other valued ends. Actions may thus be viewed either from a non-moral or a moral perspective.

Valuing as Giving Reasons

When we concern ourselves with the value of things which are objects of our behavior, our behavior expresses that value and is itself valued to the degree its performance is likely to realize the objective(s) in question. But what’s meant by valuing things in this sense?

I may call a scoop of ice cream, or a book, “good” and by this only mean that the ice cream is suitable for eating because it has a taste I consider desirable (and think you will, too), or that the book is one you should have on your shelf, read on your summer vacation or just shell out some cash for at your local book store. If pressed, I may offer still other reasons to back up these. The ice cream is good for you or will introduce you to a new flavor or the book is well written, will give you pleasure, you have something to learn from it, etc. If, when pressed, I can’t say why I think the ice cream is worth eating or the book worth reading my judgment of goodness in such cases must be suspect, for my use of “good” serves in such cases as a proxy for these other, more detailed statements I can make . . .

Click to read more ...

4:35PM

Empathy and Reasons

This is a very preliminary draft which I expect will require a lot of revision. It's also longer than my usual offerings here which aren't especially short in general anyway. I also diverge here from the typical Wittgensteinian path I usually follow and verge, dangerously, on a kind of existentialist incoherence. I hope to fix that in a later iteration. But for now I've decided to put this up on the list anyway . . . in case anyone here shares my interest in trying to understand and explain how moral valuing works.

Wittgenstein pointed out that the search for justifications, for reasons, ultimately comes to an end. We can only dig so deeply and then, as he put it, our spade is turned. We can go no further. But valuing is a reason-giving game since in making any ascription of value we do so with reasons in mind. Not to have reasons leaves us without a basis for valuing the thing at all – in which case, even if our spade is turned at some point, it cannot be turned here, within the valuing game itself, or that game must collapse. Without the reasons we give others and ourselves – which reflect comparisons of different things, of different options, of different possibilities – value cannot be ascribed. Reasons are the explanations we give ourselves and others when called upon to justify what we do. . . .

Click to read more ...

2:27PM

Motives Matter

Why moral valuing is a different sort of animal than its familial relatives

The term “moral” finds its meaning in a variety of uses which is just what we would expect since Wittgenstein first suggested that the meanings of our words lie in the uses we make of them and noted that a family resemblance relationship tends to characterize the way the different uses of a term connect with one another. There is not, generally, one particular use that best reflects or explains the meaning of our terms but a range of them which we learn in the course of doing the business of language. The moral idea is no different.

As a sub-class of the broader notion of valuing, it requires further analysis though if we want to understand its particular role in language and in our lives.

We value all sorts of things in the course of our lives, from objects to situations to people to goals. Not all valuing, however, is about what seems good or bad to us, better or best. There are also truth values (the positions we assign to claims on a scale justifying their acceptance or rejection as expressions of knowledge) for to value anything is just to set it on a scale or range which relates it to other things placed on the scale. Measuring is to engage in valuing, too, as is the assignment of content to markings or sounds which we take as signifiers (symbols representing something else). The kind of valuing we are doing, in every case, is dependent on what’s being valued and for what purpose.

. . . In the case of moral valuing, however, the issue seems to be to assess the action itself and not the objective which it is aimed at attaining. That is, we are less concerned with the objective(s) of the actions in the moral case than we are with the action itself. What is there about actions that stands apart then from the effects they are intended to bring about?

Click to read more ...