Wittgenstein

[x24-veggie !GJiNIxTl9k No.2241962]

Good afternoon /lit/. I'm really quite curious about the works of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein... I'm still fairly new to philosophy and literature, but my love for it is ever growing. I've read, so far, the dialogues of Plato save for his Republic, a good bit of Dostoyevsky, and some Nietzsche.

This man seems incredibly interesting to me as well. Where would you recommend I begin, /lit/? Shall I simply start with his Tractatus?

[Anonymous No.2241980]

Begin elsewhere. Wittgenstein is some pretty hefty stuff. Very interesting, but you won't get the full meaning going in without some background. Reading books on Semantics helps.

[Anonymous No.2241984]

Yes. Begin with Tractatus. You can benefit much from Wittgenstein by reading his works in chronological order. You'll find that he begins to redact some of the propositional inferences he makes early on in the Tractatus, but nevertheless, he is still interested in the same things.

Keep in mind when reading Tractatus that most critics refuse to believe it is actually a critique on propositional logic, that Wittgenstein is demonstrating the absurdity of philosophical investigations into "problems" which he never really identifies as problems to begin with.

Anyhow, it is quite easy to get bogged down in the logic. Just keep in mind the "high-level" reading of the Tractatus and you should be off to a good start!

[Anonymous No.2241990]

>>2241962

You should start by learning logic.

[Anonymous No.2242005]

i only read wittgenstein in a philosophy of language course and the work we did was heavy and analytical. learning logic would be good, and be prepared for some intricate stuff.

[Anonymous No.2242006]

>>2241990
Yes, if you are not at all familiar with propositional calculus and symbolic logic it will be very difficult to understand how Wittgenstein is critiquing it.

The text is not in prose, although some propositions, the most famous being the final seventh, are written in prose as high-level abstracted meaning from the logic.

But, yeah, it written mostly in symbol notation.

[Anonymous No.2242012]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

This article, and the bibliography and links in this article in particular, should get you started. You should seriously consider reading/taking introductions to philosophy of language, logic, and semantics as well as a general history of philosophy before you study.


ALSO, PEDANT MODE ENGAGE:
>great
If you haven't read a philosopher, and you're also unfamiliar with his idea and the discipline in general, don't assign a value. That's plain fallacious. How can you determine relative value if you aren't familiar with the field? Famous or infamous is legitimate from your position, great is not.

[Anonymous No.2242015]

>>2242012
See also, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction, which can be torrented somewhere.

[sandwiches No.2242085]

Check out any books by Oswald Hanfling on Wittgenstein if you're looking for secondary reading.

[Anonymous No.2242086]

Read Tractatus until your brain is full of fuck. Then go do something else for a while. After a bit, you can go back and read again, and you will get more out of it.

[Anonymous No.2242094]

Wittgenstein is one of my favorite people - he's right up there with Rimbaud, Tesla, Nietzsche... That being said I don't know what you should start with, other than the Tractatus. It's really tough, but it's actually not really as tough as people think it is; honestly, if you take it at face-value, in a sort of mystical sense, I think you will maybe gleam something from it. Reading it in a perfectly logical sense is so shitty partly because it isn't a perfect treatise logically...

Honestly, have you considered reading his biography? It might be a decent place to start...

The Tractatus is like poetry. It's beautiful.

[Anonymous No.2242271]

My teacher said that Wittgenstein's philosophy is a 'parasitic philosophy', meaning that its value as a philosophy lies in helping you to clarify philosophical misconceptions that you have, which, from what I gather after having read roughly half of his later book 'Philosophical Investigations' has to due with problems with definitions in language and the mystical quality that logicians attach to their art.

But anyways, the point is, in order to get much out of Wittgenstein you have to be some who actively gets himself into philosophical problems (such as that classic colour problem. the one that probably some people in high school discover where they are no longer sure if when two people use the word 'red' for example to describe a colour, they're actually seeing the same colour)

[Anonymous No.2242283]

no 2nd Wittgenstein guys?

the Tractatus is a good anecdotical event in philosophy but his real "work" was the Philosophical Investigations and everything he did from the 1930s until his death...

i've read some introductory books so far, i'm about to read Monk's biography and then i'll go with PI, Culture And Value and On Certainty.

[Anonymous No.2242296]

>>2242094
>Wittgenstein is one of my favorite people - he's right up there with Rimbaud, Tesla, Nietzsche
White, dead and male?

[Anonymous No.2242318]

>>2242296
>hurr we can only read books by living black or latino lesbians for the next hundred years or we'll never end this awful oppression!

OP: Why read someone who wrote pure nonsense and then advanced his philosophy to the point where he didn't know the difference between a duck and a rabbit? Wittgenstein is for sci-fi fans with schizophrenia.

[Anonymous No.2242323]

Oh, and if you've read the Thaetetus (sp?) from Socrates, Wittgenstein's addresses the logical atomism (that everything must be reducible to primary elements) that Socrates talks about there too.

His book has drawings in it too. There's one of a duck rabbit and he likes his little matrices too, which in some versions are coloured. He's not as bombastic stylistically as Nietzsche, but I suppose he's also a destructive philosopher. Some of his metaphors and examples are cool as well. I remember for one he talked about guy hanging himself...and another a guy who walked out his front door and fell into a bottomless abyss. Wittgenstein was depressed....I suppose another thing he has in common with Nietzsche is that they generally eschew technical philosophical terms.

[Anonymous No.2242332]

>>2242318
What was his philosophy?

[Anonymous No.2242333]

Read Kierkegaard in his stead or also.

[Anonymous No.2242336]

>>2242323
also, he was gay

[Anonymous No.2242339]

>>2242336
N. wasn't gay

he even proposed marriage to somebody once

[Anonymous No.2242340]

>>2242332

That he was out of his mind, but you couldn't prove that it wasn't you who were out of your mind instead, so he could define things however he wanted while trashing other philosophers for carelessly misusing language.

[Anonymous No.2242342]

I would highly recommend this: http://www.logicomix.com/en/

It's more about Russell than Wittgenstein, but it is an excellent comic and an excellent introduction to their thought.

[Anonymous No.2242343]

>>2242340
thats a pretty good philosophy

[Anonymous No.2242347]

>>2242339
no, wittgenstein

[hakas !u/t2Vf0FFs No.2242362]

>>2242347
proof?

[Anonymous No.2242368]

>>2242340

Wow. Have you ever even read Wittgenstein?

Anyways, his philosophy, if you can even call it that, I would refer to it more as an anti-philosophy, is one of common sense and should be mundane and uncontroversial.

[Anonymous No.2242374]

>>2242368

Several of his books and some criticism.

[Anonymous No.2242373]

I read somewhere something like "Wittgenstein's work was not philosophy, it was a battle against insanity and suicide".

Deleuze hated him.

I think he is something like a Dadaist in philosophy. (his late work).
He gave a complete revolutionary conception of philosophy that just ended philosophy as everyone knew it.

[Anonymous No.2242383]

You have to understand the man before you read his philosophy. Most interpreters go straight for the phil of language in his books and forget to look at the most important part of his philosophy: that which isn't said.

He refused the most important parts because he did philosophy as a poet writes a poem. "The lesson in a poem is overstated, if the intellectual points are nakedly exposed, not clothed by the heart."

The bits on logic and language are an accident of his aspieness.

[Anonymous No.2242386]

>>2242383

You have to understand the man before you read his philosophy. Most interpreters go straight for the phil of language in his books and forget to look at the most important part of his philosophy: that which isn't said.

He refused to write the most important parts because he did philosophy as a poet writes a poem. "The lesson in a poem is overstated, if the intellectual points are nakedly exposed, not clothed by the heart."

The bits on logic and language are an accident of his aspieness.

[Anonymous No.2242406]

>>2242374

Then I don't understand how you can make the statements you've made, unless you're trolling, which I'm beginning to suspect you are, since Wittegenstein never said that you can 'define things however you want'...he may not disagree that you could do that, but he would add that what you're saying would be nonsense to everyone else because it simply doesn't follow the generally accepted rules of their language(s).

[Anonymous No.2242408]

>>2242406
>since Wittegenstein never said that you can 'define things however you want'

You're right, he says you can't do that. I said he does it himself anyway.

[Anonymous No.2242423]

>>2242420
EDIT: The way that language is actually USED by pepole

[Anonymous No.2242420]

>>2242408

Please provide examples from his work then of him doing such. And I don't mean your 'summaries' of it. I am having an extremely hard time understanding you because you aren't speaking clearly, but rather are making sweeping generalizations, which isn't so much of an issue if I can see where they're coming from, but these are like they're coming from an alien who doesn't speak English. I've thus far gotten through the first half of his PHilosophical Investigations and he hasn't actually posited defintions of anything at all or advanced any theses whatsoever. What he has done has been completely...well...kind of obvious in the sense that he says the meaning of language depends on the way that it is actually by people.

[Anonymous No.2242421]

>>2242408
>I myself still find my way of philosophizing new, & it keeps striking me so afresh, & that is why I have to repeat myself so often. It will have become part of the flesh & blood of a new generation & it will find the repetitions boring. For me they are necessary.--This method consists essentially in leaving the question of truth and asking about sense instead.

>I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. Can one take Breuer & Freud as an example of Jewish reproductive thinking?-- What I invent are new comparisons.

>Nothing we do can be defended definitively. But only by reference to something else that is established.

>Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its
properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and
more complicated structure. And even clarity is only a means to this end & not an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, transparency, is an end in itself. I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me.So I am aiming at something different than are the scientists & my thoughts move differently than do theirs.

>Work on philosophy--like work in architecture in many respects--is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)

[Anonymous No.2242424]

> this thread

worse than youtube comments

[Anonymous No.2242428]

>>2242424
i'm a young aspiring rapper who hates justin bieber, thumbs up for christians being dumb

(nice post number btw)

[Anonymous No.2242441]

>>2242421

So is this the evidence for your position?

Sorry....it's difficult for me to tell who's posting what when most everyone is anonymous.

[Anonymous No.2242442]

>>2242421

One day I'm going to write a really good paper about architecture in Wittgenstein and I'm going to earn all of the PhDs for it.

[Anonymous No.2242443]

>>2242386
>The bits on logic and language are an accident of his aspieness

I wouldn't call it an accident but that is somewhat true.

Like Bourdieu said about Foucault: "there's a lot of gays but only one Foucault. He took his personal and existential problems and made them scientific ones".

>>2242408
Maybe not "however you want" but certainly that definition of things can take any form. That's one of the arguments that make people take him as a relativist.

[Anonymous No.2242449]

>>2242443

This argument makes sense to me, since Wittgenstein believed there were standards of correctness in language games. Most people, presently, if they looked at a sign post on a trail, would know that it's a thing that points and they'd know what direction it's pointing in, but that's because that knowledge was they gleaned from their training in language with other people.

[Anonymous No.2242451]

>>2242441

Those are quotes by Wittgenstein being as blatant has he can be about how he goes about doing philosophy. His philosophical constructions serve the purpose of making things clear. He does not care if they are true in the traditional sense, so a criticism of his nonsense (in the Tractarian sense) misses the point of his work.

Wittgenstein must rightly be described as an Aesthete or Ironist before he can be understood as a logical atomist or ordinary language philosopher.

[Anonymous No.2242454]

>>2242449

And not because there is something essential about sign posts that dictate that they must point in a direction.

[Anonymous No.2242508]

...

[Anonymous No.2242514]

>>2242508
>...

i don't know that language game, but i'm sure it is inside my form of life.

[Anonymous No.2242519]

>Related Search: Simone de Beauvoir

why?

[Anonymous No.2242520]

>>2242519
both liked cocks

[Anonymous No.2242537]

>>2242520
Witty looks more asexual than gay to me...

[Anonymous No.2242541]

>>2242537
He was either gay or bisexual, there are accounts of him being with men.

[Anonymous No.2242543]

>>2242537

He had a couple of gay relationships in his life.

[Anonymous No.2242544]

>>2242537
Just because you can't imagine anyone wanting to fuck him doesn't mean he's asexual.

[Anonymous No.2242560]

lol jewish and gay, I can't understand why they weren't best friends with Hitler.

[Anonymous No.2242575]

>>2242560

But the family was cool with Hitler.