It is very wrong to portray [philosophy] as inaccessible to children, with a surly, frowning, and terrifying face. Who has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing more gay, more lusty, more sprightly, and I might almost say more frolicsome. She preaches nothing but merry-making and a good time. A sad and dejected look shows that she does not dwell there.
Category Archives: Philosophy
What is Your Aim in Philosophy?
I think I may say without exaggeration, that my whole philosophical career has been devoted to the production–I dislike using this physical term–of currents whereby life can be reborn in regions of the mind which have yielded to apathy and are exposed to decomposition. Gabriel Marcel
To choose a starting point in philosophizing is to choose a way it ends. And vice versa. This doesn’t mean that I always know what way for it to end I have chosen; I may not know and may have to work it out. But I will have chosen a way for it to end, and I cannnot reject that way for it to end and retain my starting point. If I reject the way of ending I have chosen, then I must start over. It is also possible that I can choose a way philosophizing ends without knowing what starting point I have thereby chosen. I may have to start several times before I work out the right starting point for the way I have chosen for it to end. There is no way-of-ending-neutral but otherwise compulsory starting point for philosophizing.
Augustine on the Danger
Confronting all those who travel in any way to the region of the happy life there is a huge mountain, which is set in front of the harbor [of wisdom]…What other mountain does reason maintain should be feared by those who are approaching and entering upon philosophy than the proud enthusiasm for empty glory? (The Happy Life)
Quod Erat Faciendum: Philosophical Investigations and Confessions
I am currently at work on a new essay on Resolute Readings of TLP. I am coming at the topic sideways, as it were, beginning with a debate over PI between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle.
With that on my mind, I had a brief but useful conversation with my friends Reshef and Dafi Agam-Segal. We were talking about PI and about Wittgenstein’s comment to his students that he did not want to make them believe anything they did not believe, but rather to do something they would not do. It occurred to me then that perhaps a useful way of understanding Wittgenstein’s work, PI included, would be to take it to be punctuated by QEFs (quod erat faciendum: which was to have been done) rather than by QEDs.
Since I have mentioned Augustine here recently, I will note that I think this distinction applies, albeit somewhat differently, to Confessions too. Augustine said of Cicero’s Hortensius that it “changed his way of feeling”. That phrase describes the work of Confessions–to change the reader’s way of feeling, to encourage Christian inwardness to flower: “Be it granted, be it fulfilled, be it opened.”
A Bit of Parmenidean Dialogue
from a class handout…
[Lights up on conjoined twins, center stage.]
Clov: The things that are cannot be Many.
Hamm: Oh, yeah? Why?
Clov: ‘Cause for them to be Many, they’d have to be like and unlike.
Hamm: No. Wait. What?
Clov: If they are Many, they’d couldn’t all be like, ‘cause then they’d be One, not Many. Or, if they were all like, but not One, then some’d have to be unlike, otherwise they’d all be One.
Hamm: One what?
Clov: Shut up. So, they can’t all be unlike either, ‘cause then they’d be One, not Many. Or, if they were all unlike, but not One, then some’d have to be like, otherwise, they’d all be One.
Hamm: One what?
Clov: Look, let It go. So, if things are Many, they’d have to be like and unlike. But that won’t work.
Hamm: Won’t work? Why not? Wait.
Clov: Listen. If some were like and others unlike, would the first be like or unlike the second? If they’re like the unlike ones, then they are unlike—all of them. But that can’t be. But if they’re unlike the unlike ones, then they are like—all of them. But that can’t be. So thing that are cannot be Many. They’re One.
Hamm: One what?
[Hamm produces a gun; shoots Clov. Hamm and Clov die. Applause is heard offstage.]
Bradley on Ideas
Writers of the stature of T. S. Eliot and Geoffry Hill praise F. H. Bradley’s prose. Here’s a passage from later in Principles of Logic, in the wonderful chapter deploring in detail English Empiricism: “The Theory of the Association of Ideas”. Note Bradley’s remarkable tone of elegiac scorn:
According to the view which to me seems the truth, to talk of an association between psychical particulars [psychological ideas] is to utter mere nonsense. These particulars in the first place have got no permanence; their life endures for a fleeting moment. In the second place they can never have more than one life; when they are dead they are done with. There is no Hades where they wait in disconsolate exile, till Association announces resurrection and recall. When the fact is bodily buried in the past, no miracle opens up the mouth of the grave and calls up to the light a perished reality, unchanged by the processes that rule in nature. These touching beliefs of a pious legend may babble in the tradition of a senile psychology, or contort themselves in the metaphysics of some frantic dogma, but philosophy must register them and sigh and pass on.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 