States of Affairs The form of words “state of affairs” is a very odd phrase, and yet it is used primitively in metaphysical theories. What is an “affair” and what is a “state” of one of these?[1] People talk of their financial and romantic affairs, but do ordinary objects have affairs that are in a […]
On the Concept of a Conceptual Scheme The phrase “conceptual scheme”, as it is used in philosophy, anthropology, and the history of ideas, is intended to signify a particular conception of the conceptualizing mind, namely that our ways of thinking of the world are contingent, variable, and sometimes non-translatable.[1] That is, as a result of […]
Mysticism, Philosophy, and the Womb In “Mysticism and Logic” Russell lists four characteristics typical of the mystical temperament: a belief in a special way of knowing, a craving for unity in the world, a denial of the reality of time, and a disbelief in evil. The mystic believes that we (some of us) have a […]
Late Wittgenstein Wittgenstein died in 1951 (a year after I was born) at age 62. This was 30 years after publishing the Tractatusand two years before the Investigations was published. As everyone knows, he changed his views dramatically in the years following the publication of the Tractatus—perhaps the most dramatic self-repudiation in the history of […]
False to Facts We have grown accustomed to a philosophical use of the word “fact”, mainly from the writings of Wittgenstein and Russell in their logical atomism period. Roughly, this is the idea of a fact as a “combination of objects”—a sort of complex of objects, properties, and relations. This conception is what allows Wittgenstein […]
An Ethics of Trust Deontological ethics suffers from a lack of unity: we have a list of duties, expressed as moral imperatives, but no unifying principle behind them. Thus: don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t break promises, don’t commit adultery, don’t be late, don’t betray friends, etc. Is there anything in common to these prescriptions? Is […]
An A Priori Order In his Private Notebooks 1914-1916 Wittgenstein writes: “The great question around which everything I write revolves is: Is there an a priori order in the world, and if so, of what does it consist?” The question is a good one (and highly metaphysical). In the Tractatus we read what looks like […]
Logical Phenomenology What would a phenomenological study of logic look like? It would investigate the modes of consciousness proper to the various categories of logic: variables, quantifiers, individual constants, connectives, predicates, premise and conclusion, rules of inference. This could be directed to a formal language such as we find in a logic textbook or it […]
Linguistic Phenomenology J.L. Austin described his method as “linguistic phenomenology”. It is highly likely that this is an allusion to Husserl’s phenomenology: Husserl’s work was well known in Oxford in Austin’s time and Gilbert Ryle had a special interest in Husserl (he was a colleague of Austin’s). A cheeky allusion, perhaps, but an allusion nonetheless. […]
Cancellation and Quotation Today I happened by chance on an article in Scientific American on panpsychism by Dan Falk. The second paragraph contains the sentences: “As philosopher David Chalmers asked: ‘How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?’ He famously dubbed this quandary the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.” In the […]