Archives For June 2009

Here I Stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. (Luther, Diet of Worms, 17 April 1521)

Introduction

The purpose of philosophy is to systematize human knowledge. This entails the correct identification of reality. In order to succeed, philosophy must correctly identify the most basic principles of reality and build a theory of knowledge on that foundation. Philosophy must be built on reality in order to be sound. For a theory of knowledge to be correct, it must stem from principles that correctly identify reality. Likewise, in order to develop a correct ethical theory, philosophy must build on the foundation laid by a correct theory of knowledge which is in turn supported by correctly identified principles of reality. Misidentification of principles of reality necessarily constitutes fundamental error and inevitably leads to incorrect philosophy, regardless of consistency. In fact, commitment to an erroneous foundation will inevitably lead to further error in consistently systematizing knowledge.

The basic principles of all knowledge are that consciousness exists and existence exists. However, it is not enough to know these basic principles in order to gain sound footing. It is crucial to understand that consciousness is consciousness of something and that that something is existence, or reality. In other words, existence has primacy over consciousness. The error of giving primacy to consciousness over existence necessarily leads to the metaphysical supposition that God has primacy over reality and the epistemological suppositions that faith has primacy over reason and the heart over the mind in order to be consistent. This in turn necessarily leads to ethics founded on a commitment to the philosophical supposition that to love has primacy over life, others over self, right over good and duty over happiness in order to be consistent. Correctly identifying the primacy of existence over consciousness leads to the metaphysical supposition that reality has primacy over God and the epistemological supposition that reason has primacy over faith and the heart over the mind in in order to be consistent. This in turn necessarily leads to ethics founded on a commitment to life over love, self over others, good over right and happiness over duty in order to be consistent.

Continue Reading…

Introduction

Dissatisfied with earlier attempts by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) attempted to elucidate the nature of logical truth in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Wittgenstein was concerned with the relation between language and the world and the logical and mathematical ramifications of this relation (Blackburn 390, Bunnin and Yu 739). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserted that in order to describe reality, logic is necessary, but not sufficient and, in so doing, put forth what has come to be known as the picture theory of meaning (Rohmann 430). In his picture theory of meaning, Wittgenstein argued that language mirrors reality. Whether the picture theory of meaning collapses with Wittgenstein’s rejection of the metaphysics of logical atomism of the Tractatus is disputed among philosophers, but there is a consensus that Wittgenstein abandoned the theory in his later philosophy (Bunnin and Yu 531).

Wittgenstein’s exposition of his later philosophy appears in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953.) In the Philsophical Investigations, Wittgenstein turns his attention from the subject matter of the Tractatus to the workings of ordinary language, the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics. The later Wittgenstein rejects his earlier unified theory of meaning in favor of an explanation based on a diversity of “language games” governed by rules and constituting a form of life. His later approach did not insist on an account of meaning as a psychological or abstract entity, but instead focused on the use of words and sentences (Bunnin and Yu 738-739).

Continue Reading…

Introduction

Dissatisfied with earlier attempts by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) attempted to elucidate the nature of logical truth in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Wittgenstein was concerned with the relation between language and the world and the logical and mathematical ramifications of this relation (Bunnin and Yu 739, Blackburn 390). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserted that in order to describe reality, logic is necessary, but not sufficient and, in so doing, put forth what has come to be known as the picture theory of meaning (Rohmann 430). In his picture theory of meaning, Wittgenstein argued that language mirrors reality. However, Wittgenstein was not concerned with ontology, per se. He believed that the language used in this sort of metaphysical inquiry simply mirrored the logical structure of its subject matter, making the inquiry itself unnecessary by virtue of the impossibility of its very nature (Hunnings 2-3). Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning succeeded in explaining the possibility of falsehood, but ultimately broke down due to its reliance on the atomic propositions it posited, which proved to be untenable.

The Theory

Wittgenstein opened the Tractatus by giving a metaphysics of a world consisting of atomic facts, completely independent of one another, but Wittgenstein gave no examples of what he considered to be atomic facts. He claimed that they existed, but not that he had identified them (Rée and Urmson 395). Next, Wittgenstein stated that all propositions are truth-functional relations among these atomic propositions, that each atomic proposition consists in unanalyzable names designating simple objects, and that the sense of any one of these propositions is the state of affairs it depicts (Bunnin and Yu 738).

Continue Reading…