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How to Read TLP?
(Class Handout.) (1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic. (2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides. (3)...
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Chump Change: a Thought on TLP 1
(Handout.) What should we say of TLP 1, what should we do with it? We could note, I guess, that it plays an interesting role in a song by New Pornographers, Chump Change. But that’s scarce help. One...
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Beginning and Ending: TLP
(Handout.) “In my beginning is my end.” –T. S. Eliot Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an early, deep influence on Wittgenstein, says of his own masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, that it is...
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Say Show Elucidate
(Another class handout. Last one for a while, I promise.) Let’s think more about saying and showing—and about elucidating. To do so, I want to use an example of Edmund Dain’s but to situate it in a...
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Resolute Reading–New Paper Intro (Draft)
Below is the draft intro of my new paper, “Resolute Reading”. I will post more as I finish the draft. The Resolute Reading of TLP exerts a willy-nilly but mesmeric fascination. Its fans try to...
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Distinctions Among Distinctions
I posted the G. A. Cohen impersonation of Ryle (below) both because I thought it was funny and because it seemed to me to satirize moments in my own work. Now of course I am not worthy to lace Ryle’s...
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Merleau-Ponty on Ideal Language
We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things. Filed under: logic, Merleau-Ponty, Philosophical Investigations,...
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Hell Hath No Fury…
Hell hath no fury like a romantically oriented reader of the Tractatus who has thought of the early Wittgenstein as an enchanting mystagogue, but gone on to read the later one and realized...
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Ordinary Language Philosophy
A few years ago I wrote the chapter on Ordinary Language Philosophy in The Edinburgh (Columbia) Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Philosophies. The chapter got cut in certain ways that I thought...
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Revelation–M. B. Foster
How then are we to understand Revelation in its relation to thought? Belief in Revelation is belief that ‘God has spoken’. What does this mean? Or rather, what is it to believe it, if to believe...
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Why Might Not the Unintelligible Happen? (Royce,Tractatus)
(A class handout.) In an earlier handout I urged that we cannot distribute Frege’s Three Realms across the Pix Theory. In particular, I urged that we cannot treat the picture as in the Third Realm...
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Wittgenstein’s Three Living Principles
More of the fruits of cleaning–an old essay I forgot that I wrote. I gave it at a Pacific APA, I think; anyway, I likely forgot it because it got anaphora’d (carried up) into my Concept ‘Horse’ Book....
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With an ‘L’ on his Forehead…
There are more values available for response in human life than anyone can possibly be responsible to. I think of this as the Not World Enough and Time Problem: we are all missing out on things that...
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