When philosophers use a word—”knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. You say to me: “You understand this expression, don’t you? Well then—I am using it in the sense you are familiar with.”— As if the sense were an atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 116-117
Since English isn’t Sound and like 90% of English words simply don’t have real definitions, I’m not sure I want to tangle with this guy’s work. It’s either going to be tenuous logic with an exploration in equivocation, or a baffling/impressive display of linguistics. Which was it?
I’ve heard German is bad too. Probably In the very same philosophy of logic class where I heard the name Wittgenstein and was told about his work but which I have completely failed to retain any memory of.
Philosophical Investigations is closer to the latter. (There’s a big difference between Late and Early Wittgenstein—basically two completely different authors)
There is also a fair bit of continuity between the two—he retains one of the main theses of his earlier work: that much of our confusion about so called ‘philosophical problems’ is caused by people abusing language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 116-117
Since English isn’t Sound and like 90% of English words simply don’t have real definitions, I’m not sure I want to tangle with this guy’s work. It’s either going to be tenuous logic with an exploration in equivocation, or a baffling/impressive display of linguistics. Which was it?
Well he did write it in German.
I’ve heard German is bad too. Probably In the very same philosophy of logic class where I heard the name Wittgenstein and was told about his work but which I have completely failed to retain any memory of.
Philosophical Investigations is closer to the latter. (There’s a big difference between Late and Early Wittgenstein—basically two completely different authors)
There is also a fair bit of continuity between the two—he retains one of the main theses of his earlier work: that much of our confusion about so called ‘philosophical problems’ is caused by people abusing language.