Was someone holding the bat, and did they swing it, or had the bat developed its own mobility? And if so, how?
Whatever you want; you can modify the story to suit physics or to fit psychology, or you can try to set out what we mean by cause, and try doing philosophy.
(It’d be nice to move beyond Aristotle occasionally.)
But if we only rely on conceptual analysis, and neglect causation, we only seek to describe what something is, and neglect why it is what it is
That’s much better - a start at analysing what it is to provide an explanation. You are beginning to do analytic philosophy.
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I don’t know why it means so much to me for you to say this. thanks
Cheers. But we didn’t work out what a cause is.
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let me sit on that for a bit and get back to you.
Do you want some reading?
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Thank you, I look forward to reading them
He also claimed that a good work of philosophy could be written consisting entirely of jokes, or words to that effect. Which brings to mind what my daemon Cicero once said-- that there’s nothing so absurd but some philosopher has already said it.
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Incidentally, I joined old PF soon after reading it (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius). I found it intellectually unsatisfying, which is when I realized I wanted to try getting into philosophy proper instead of just reading about the lives of philosophers.
EDIT: Great book though.
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Philosophy used to be mainly about the meaning of life, and other high-fallutin’ ideas like the good, the true, the beautiful and, yes, Truth with a capital T. You do find elements of that in Wittgenstein,or rather in some of his aphorisms, although I’ve only read smatterings. But analytical philosophy is overwhelmingly about the meaning of words (or combinations of them, e.g. proper sentences and propositions.) There have been many examples of long-running debates on this topic in which the question of whether the cat really is on the mat, or the cup really is yellow, will be brought forth on page XX with a flourish, as if something has been said.
As Kelly Ross puts it on The Friesian School website:
…the sterility and agnosticism of positivistic, scientistic, and merely analytic schools, characteristically, if not always originally, Anglo-American, which have frequently denied the possibility of knowledge in metaphysical or ethical matters, and sometimes the possibility of constructive philosophical knowledge at all, with, according to Karl Popper, a “concentration upon minutiae (upon ‘puzzles’) and especially upon the meanings of words; in brief … scholasticism.” As Allan Bloom said, “Professors of these schools [i.e. positivism and ordinary language analysis] simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students.” Students and the intellectually curious looking for some concern, any concern, about the truths of being and value, the content of wisdom, or some humane purpose, found instead what has aptly been called a “valley of bones.” Although continuing analytic philosophy sometimes appears as a small island of some sanity in a sea of increasing nonsense, as with John Searle, it retains almost all of its sterility, futility, and what could even be called a self-referential autism.
Obviously polemical but with some bones of truth. And if it’s any consolation he’s even more scrathing about PoMo.
The only analytical philosopher I really like is Thomas Nagel, because of his single-handed battle against the neo-Darwinian materialism which is practically the default weltanschuung of the Anglosphere philosophical world. I can probably think of a few others as well. And I’m an admirer of Frege’s implicit Platonism, not that he said much about it. But academic philosophy generally is a subject whose only subject is itself.
Plato ( in dialogue form) was pomo before pomo was (un)cool ?
If memory does not betray: Aristotle also wrote dialogues, but these were lost. We get the dry lecture notes that survived. So he’s the analytic guy in this analogy.
One is a great prose-poet, overflowing with metaphors and dangerously dialogical. The other gives us earnest textbook stuff.
Both are great, just to be clear.
I only came to realise the greatness of Plato aged about 50 odd. About 20 years ago now. It was an epiphany about the reality of number. Never left me.
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Yes, Plato is great. I also only cared about his work later. I found the dialogues too cute and indirect at first.
To stay on topic, I understand the OP’s frustration with analytic philosophy. At least there’s a stereotypical pose, which is basically the shadow of “pomo” or “Hegel/Heidegger” stuff.
But Brandom is a Hegelian, basically. Wittgenstein is a German-language philosopher ( not so far from Heidegger) who got adopted because (1) they needed some “profound” personality charisma and (2) his connection to Russel and Anglo institutions. Turing was in one of Wittgenstein’s classes.
Wittgenstein is a logical mystic in the TLP. His later work is all the more elusive for being presented in such a folksy fashion. Really Wittgenstein “shouldn’t fit,” but his personality was rich enough so that a mere chunk of it is already good enough. The logical positivists were of course an influence on AP, and they were/are pretty great, especially because (like Wittgenstein) they were “phenomenalists” — at least in my sense of the word.
On the number issue, I still say that a particular apple is just as “ideal” as a number, though richer in its sensory offering.
I used to read faces, divination a bit like palmistry, many years ago. This is the most haunted face I’ve ever seen.
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I’ve learned, from various people here, mainly Pierre Normand and EQV, and yourself, about ‘The Pittsburg School’. That is, Wilfred Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. I haven’t absorbed any of them, but I think they’re more interesting than the mid-20th c English philosophers because they have a neo-Kantian element which many of the ‘ordinary language’ types do not.
I am perpetually frustrated by Wittgenstein, because it seems to me, to understand any of him, you have to understand all of him, and there’s a lot there that simply doesn’t interest me. I’m naturally drawn to the mystical aphorisms at the end of TLP but much else of that text is totally beyond me.
And no, you can’t eat numbers.
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You also can’t eat the category apple. But you can eat numerals. For instance, you can eat three apples.
If you look into metamathematics and Hilbert and Curry, you find the use of vertical strokes for formal numerals | | |. But there’s nothing special about vertical strokes. You can “run” formal systems with apples or acorns or whatever. We also use basic arithmetic precisely to gather the right number of things.
But probably this deserves its own thread.
Does one ever understand all of a rich thinker ? I agree though that a certain big picture has to come somewhat into focus. I’d apply this to all the deep thinkers.
I think one of the reasons many hate analytic philosophy is that it is math/science/STEM/logic/left brained oriented and is not accessible to those not so inclined. I also think a reason that many hate continential philosophy is for the opposite reason in that it is found to be imprecise, vague, and overly subject to interpretation.
Generalizations obviously, but some truth to it.
The beauty of philosophy though is that it doesn’t matter, so you can’t be wrong in what you choose.