The Two Philosophies of Wittgenstein - Anthony Quinton & Bryan Magee (1977)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มี.ค. 2022
- In this program, Anthony Quinton discusses the early and late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein with Bryan Magee. This is from a 1977 series on Modern Philosophy called Men of Ideas.
#Philosophy #Wittgenstein #BryanMagee
What a fascinating conversation between these two English scholars and gentlemen.
Brilliant. Even as Lord Quinton confuses himself. Simply brilliant. Wittgenstein is really something extra.
This stuff is almost too much to think about without foozling once in a while
I am struck by the simpleness of these ideas that philosophers deal with..
@@carlloeber
These things look pretty simple to us, but they were quite innovative at the time.
An easy and relatable example is that of a bolt and nut. You wouldn't pick one up and think that it is especially complex, but only a few centuries ago, such a thing would have boggled the mind.
Philosophy and science is much the same, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection struck me as obvious when I was a child, but I'd grown up watching David Attenborough programs. Prior generations didn't have the same exposure to these things as you and I did in modern times.
And it's often the case that things appearing to be simple are only reflections at the surface, with a good deal of complex underpinning to deal with.
@@jeremiahblum7833 b
@@carlloeber sure its simple when you passively sit there and listen to someone describe it to you. Try sitting at a blank page and then having to type a coherent 10,000 words on the subject.
This really was an excellent summary of theories that are generally very hard to grasp.
Brilliant discourse.
I always found his difficult to clearly grasp but this video is very effective in explaining things, for me.
Excellent treatise. 👍
One day, I will understand Wittgenstein and apply him to the Arts
I'm sometimes reminded of the Laurel and Hardy film "Chumps at Oxford" ,in which a blow on the head returns Stan to his real persona of the brilliantly donnish Lord Paddington,. At one point, Lord Paddington receives a note from Albert Einstein, asking to have his own theory of relativity explained back to him, as it has gotten Einstein himself confused.
This is the best we can get so far if we wanna know about Wittgensteint.I watched John Searle's ,but didn't feel like this one.Thank you Lord Quinton'
You should just try reading Philosophical Investigations. I think it's quite approachable.
The form of Philosophical Investigations is part of what got me into W. Its efficiency appealed to me, for as many disparate elements as it contains, it's still comfortably approachable and leaves a wide berth around each concept for further reflection, discouraging the habit of simply rushing thru all willy-nilly, speed-reader-y just to 'get the gist'. It's not meant to be skimmed or crammed, more "considered," like scripture maybe. Or sculpture.
I think there are a few reasons he doesn't draw conclusions (or offer further commentary on big statements), but ultimately i think he didn't feel qualified to accurately make those conclusions--or perhaps he understood perfectly and his whole agony in life was that he couldn't find the "precisely correct" way to state it to make sure his grand conclusive statements wouldn't be misunderstood. Whereof one cannot speak... but that doesn't mean one doesn't KNOW.
In a way he had to avoid theorizing because it wouldn't help, it would just be the creation of another language game in which words would have their own particular uses, and it would not elucidate anything.
Yes!@@derendohoda3891
Team latter Wittgenstein over here.
Some of the episodes of this programme are unhelpfully technical, with the professional philosopher getting bogged down in explanation that you only understand if you already understand it. This episode, though, is a model of sophisticated but accessible explanation for the general viewer, along with Bernard Williams on Descartes, Myles Burneat on Plato and a few others.
Very smart guys.
Same cannot be said of the man in your pfp.
just out of curiosity, where do you get these from?
Hoping for another delightful discussion on Ferdinand de Saussure & Wittgenstein...
Thankyou. It was a discussion that lit fires, rather than stamped out fire. I was amazed that the words grammar, noun and verb. .. didn't put in an appearance. Those were the building blocks when I learned a second and third European language. It was satisfying to start making sentences of my own, once I'd learned some blocks. It was a game. More recently, learning 8th and 9th European, I enjoy Michel X's method where complex verb structures are 'parroted', as babies and children do in acquiring their first language. The nouns are easily found in a pocket dictionary and can be slotted in at a later date. Help me out someone ....what was the linguist Michel's surname? I want to say Quoist, but that's wrong.
Michel THOMAS (1914 - 2005)?
Is Wittgentein's writing "Beautiful"?
Wonder if Quinton had been on the bottle again - thank goodness for Bryan giving an account at least!
It's called category theory and was worked out in the 50's.
They talk about "language play" like it has no purpose, as though language is devalued through the 'activity of languaging' if it's not brought to a concrete end in every instance. Just as artists draft and sketch, so do songwriters, wordsmiths... and scientists and mathematicians. Play is exercise for the brain to explore possibilities and define/push boundaries of usage and meaning.
I feel like a lot of Wittgenstein's suffering could've been alleviated by simply recognising that music and language are exactly the same thing; 2 parts of a larger category of communication that includes math and visual art. Taking them as aspects of a larger whole removes much of the needless conflict that kept him up at night.
A discussion this intelligent and non confrontational would not be entertained on modern TV. More's the pity!
Yes. These were massively to the credit of the BBC, presumably cost almost nothing to make, and have lasted far far better than most of the stuff that tries to titillate the largest possible audience regardless of the depths it stoops to and its social effects.
I don't know why anyone hasn't drawn a connection between Wittgenstein's work and Large Language Models yet.
It's tempting to say that LLMs "understand" language, but you wouldn't say a calculator understands arithmetic. Perhaps it's semantically better to say LLMs do language in the same way calculators do arithmetic.
From my understanding, LLMs might connect the ideas from Wittgenstein's early and later work.
Through the architecture of deep neural networks, LLMs are a mapping of the relationship between all points within a dataset. So in this sense, I think LLMs demonstrate that meaning itself, is a mapping of the distance between any given word and every other word within a language.
In otherwords, the meaning of the word "dog" can be defined by its proximity to every other word in the English language.
This concept also addresses the later ideas presented in the video.
Because LLMs are based upon a conglomeration of a very wide set of human output, it's a mapping of the common use and understanding of any particular word. It's a polling or sampling of how we as a collective use any particular word, i.e. the common meaning of a word.
39:20; right. The situational context of language is of fundamental importance of attributing meaning to sentences and words.
For example; one must distinguish between pain, suffering and plain old suck.
Mental stuff without basis in objective reality (egotistical fantasies) usually devolves into ‘suck’. If that suck is acted upon too forcefully, suffering (in oneself and possibly others) arise from mental illness.
One must have a source of deliberate pain to put the suck into perspective. A wee bit of physical discomfort with a touch of pain (I.e. exercise) lessens the suck of inevitable everyday disappointments as the visceral and acute nature of power excursions and then being at rest is a necessary dichotomy for mental well being.
Pain is obligatory - suffering optional.
😅
@04:28: "This is a unique phenomenon in the whole history of philosophy; a philosopher of genius producing two different and incompatible philosophies, each of which decisively influenced a whole generation." - doesn't say a lot for philosophy. No wonder Samuel Johnson called it a "labyrinth", and I wonder if Wittgenstein would not have been happier and more useful to society by becoming a mechanical engineer.
Lucky for us he didn’t! His work is beautiful.
The archetypal philosopher : " well , on the one hand.....blah, blah....But on the other hand.....etc etc.. ". ( a harmless hobby I suppose ? )
12:52 Una propisicion significativa, como tal describe un posible estado de cosas
👏🏽🌹👏🏽🌹👏🏽🌹👏🏽
Could someone explain how Wittgenstein would account for, what could be called, revelation or moments of genuine original thought? Surely something of this sort would leach from that which cant be uttered into what can be represented by language?
Yes it can according to the Tractatus if I understand both you and said text correctly. Since the meaningful thought is the sentence and revelations are thoughts, they too can be represented by language. A thought/sentence is a picture of what is the case, therefore what is the case can be expressed through langauge except the logical form.
@@ahumanbeing_3 Tractatus allows for thoughts which have not been thought before, then? (this is what i was getting at by revelations )
@@chilledtorsion In general yes, but in concreto it depends on the content of the thought. There are things which cannot be spoken of, but which can be experienced. I now think that revelations belong to that category. That means that you can try to speak about them but all that would be (according to the Tractatus) is utterances of nonsense.
There is no original thought. Seriously.
Two masters of the English language. “naïve pristine fundamentalness” - wow
Second comment .....and one could make so many ...it was such a creative discussion. I first studied for a maths degree, and that helps me understand Wittgenstein ....including his paragraph naming practice....the stuff of a thousand boring maths text books. Then I studied European languages as a hobby for the rest of my life. And finally I studied THEOLOGY, which disgusted me. The words and arrangements of theology were death dealing rather than light and life engancing. Oscar Wilde's quote from the Ballad of Reading Gaol, gives a fair description of theologians, for me, " each man kills the thing he loves'.
I think that maybe, as he was writing the tractatis, he was thinking 'actually, what I am writing as a philosophical theory could be completely untrue and may be the other way around and that everything is relative - I'll wait 20 years and then write about how I was wrong. That way I will make double the book sales.' That way of thinking would indeed be consistent with a) his character b) his scientific / earlier interest in mechanics c) his unconscious desire to make as much money as his father did (in book sales). Of course he died too soon to see the publication of 'Investigations.'
Russell was something of a babe magnet apparently..? His massive intellect perhaps..?
Can someone explain why everyone thinks Wittgenstein was so bleedin' clever? 😲 I've always thought he was doing, in his later phase, no more than paraphrasing Protagoras and the other Sophists (or even Berkeley). And in his first phase he was reviving the enterprise of the early Socrates/Plato. 🤔 What do "all" rivers have in common? Or flames? Or Human beings? Describe the smell of newly mown grass, or the colour yellow.
He made an alternative theory to Plato’s influential theory that words have an ideal essence. Basically said that words are just tools used in different contexts or “language games” so therefore there is in need for so formal essence of the world
Wittgenstein most definitely was not a Platonist and I'm not sure that it even makes sense to characterize his philosophy as Platonism without the metaphysics so I'd be interested if you should clarify what you mean here exactly.
@@RuthvenMurgatroyd TL-P 6.53 - 'The correct method in philosophy would really be the following... to demonstrate to [anyone] that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.' Isn't this no more than the method of Socrates as reported by Plato? And I agree that in this later phase he was not a Platonist. W's later writings seem to be just an examination of the problems thrown up in describing one thing in terms of another. Isn't this a rewording of the arguments against Platonic Forms (or ideas) examined in the Parmenides?
"This is for the real adepts in madness, who have gone beyond all psychiatry, psychoanalysis, who are unhelpable. This third book is again the work of a German, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Just listen to its title: TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. We will just call it TRACTATUS. It is one of the most difficult books in existence. Even a man like G.E.Moore, a great English philosopher, and
Bertrand Russell, another great philosopher - not only English but a philosopher of the whole world - both agreed that this man Wittgenstein was far superior to them both.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was really a lovable man. I don't hate him, but I don't dislike him. I like him and I love him, but not his book. His book is only gymnastics. Only once in a while after pages and pages you may come across a sentence which is luminous. For example: That which cannot be spoken should not be spoken; one should be silent about it. Now this is a beautiful statement. Even saints, mystics, poets, can learn much from this sentence. That which cannot be spoken must not be spoken of.
Wittgenstein writes in a mathematical way, small sentences, not even paragraphs - sutras. But for the very advanced insane man this book can be of immense help. It can hit him exactly in his soul, not only in the head. Just like a nail it can penetrate into his very being. That may wake him from his nightmare.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a lovable man. He was offered one of the most cherished chairs of philosophy at Oxford. He declined. That's what I love in him. He went to become a farmer and fisherman. This is lovable in the man. This is more existential than Jean-Paul Sartre, although Wittgenstein never talked of existentialism. Existentialism, by the way, cannot be talked about; you have to live it, there is no other way.
This book was written when Wittgenstein was studying under G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell.
Two great philosophers of Britain, and a German... it was enough to create TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. Translated it means Wittgenstein, Moore and Russell. I, on my part, would rather have seen Wittgenstein sitting at the feet of Gurdjieff than studying with Moore and Russell. That was the right place for him, but he missed. Perhaps next time, I mean next life... for him, not for me. For me this is enough, this is the last. But for him, at least once he needs to be in the company of a man like Gurdjieff or Chuang Tzu, Bodhidharma - but not Moore, Russell, not Whitehead. He was associating with these people, the wrong people. A right man in the company of wrong people, that's what destroyed him.
My experience is, in the right company even a wrong person becomes right, and vice-versa: in a wrong company, even a right person becomes wrong. But this only applies to unenlightened men, right or wrong, both. An enlightened person cannot be influenced. He can associate with anyone - Jesus with Magdalena, a prostitute; Buddha with a murderer, a murderer who had killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people. He had taken a vow to kill one thousand people, and he was going to kill Buddha too; that's how he came into contact with Buddha.
The murderer's name is not known. The name people gave to him was Angulimala, which means 'the man who wears a garland of fingers'. That was his way. He would kill a man, cut off his fingers and put them on his garland, just to keep count of the number of people he had killed. Only ten fingers were missing to make up the thousand; in other words only one man more.... Then Buddha appeared. He was just moving on that road from one village to another. Angulimala shouted, "Stop!"
Buddha said, "Great. That's what I have been telling people: Stop! But, my friend, who listens?"
Angulimala looked amazed: Is this man insane? And Buddha continued walking towards Angulimala. Angulimala again shouted, "Stop! It seems you don't know that I am a murderer,
and I have taken a vow to kill one thousand people. Even my own mother has stopped seeing me, because only one person is missing.... I will kill you... but you look so beautiful that if you stop and turn back I may not kill you."
Buddha said, "Forget about it. I have never turned back in my life, and as far as stopping is concerned, I stopped forty years ago; since then there is nobody left to move. And as far as killing me is concerned, you can do it anyway. Everything born is going to die."
Angulimala saw the man, fell at his feet, and was transformed. Angulimala could not change Buddha, Buddha changed Angulimala. Magdalena the prostitute could not change Jesus, but Jesus changed the woman.
So what I said is only applicable to so-called ordinary humanity, it is not applicable to those who are awakened. Wittgenstein can become awakened; he could have become awakened even in this life.
Alas, he associated with wrong company. But his book can be of great help to those who are really third-degree insane. If they can make any sense out of it, they will come back to sanity."
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W's obsession over the concretisational aspect of language, like a mutually agreed-upon 'naming' of reality is language's only function, strikes me as ironically narrow, considering how broad his mind was--especially considering what a music-lover he was, and how quick he was to pick up on Mendelsohn being a hack.
He claimed music was "not employed in the language game of information" when it quite clearly was and is [from tribes that signalled concrete dangers via drumming from mountaintops to being able to tell if a piece of music is 'happy' or 'sad' thru the complex structuring of rhythm, harmony, intonation/inflection, etc, regardless of a lack of introduction to Western (or Eastern) musical theory or prior explanation of the piece's context]. It's like he'd perpetually overthink himself into a box of forgetting what he himself intuitively understood, rigidly attempting to define along parameters that were not always necessary--no matter how obsessively integral they seemed to him. He wanted black and white terms and values for all the colours in the rainbow, and if they couldn't be rendered so, he somehow considered 'them' invalid, rather than conceding he'd chosen too narrow a premise.
IDK i'm a musician who never studied philosophy, so maybe i've got him wrong, but after reading that Ray Monk bio like 15 yrs ago, I felt like i got to know W as a human more than a philosopher even, but I've had a TBI and lost my identity in the interim so delete or refute this if i'm talking out my a$$.
I'm open to corrections tho; thanks for an awesomely thought-provoking upload, either way! :)
Youre describing the Tractatus early part of his philosophy that he spent the rest of his career trying to wholesale discard. He left the door opening to questioning it because he never figured it out. Tractatus is useful for the underpinnings of mathematics that are more often than not taken for granted, but ever since we've taken for granted that language is still opaque and the understanding of which might never be solved. Dont worry, later Wittgenstein agrees with you, and all but went insane trying to figure it out and struggled to put the meaning and reason for words into words. However absurd it might seem, the "bootstrapping" actually works for math and for language, "climb the ladder and throw it away because you don't need it" it just is, and it's deeper and more fundamental that we might ever be able to understand. At least that's all my limited understanding of it.
It's a really difficult thing to grasp tbh. The early career with Tractatus he thought language was like math and could be proven and was perfect. Which makes sense and is useful to a point, but then it's he realized (as might seem intuitive to us now) that he was wrong to a relatively large degree, or that both things are true in certain contexts and untrue in others. Technical, logical language that might be describing a mathematical problem and solution can be pretty precise, like the math itself, but then you're right, that's useless in describing a symphony, or the experience of a symphony, much less for describing the point of reason for the symphony. There's no reason for the symphony, or reason for the experience of the symphony, it just kind of is, and language fails to grasp this, and his lifelong efforts, as well as others, failed to fully capture language within the language of philosophy. Later on, this had the effect, or influence of melting and blurring all the rational lines that the earlier especially enlightenment philosophers tried to interpret nature, the world, life, and humanity with. Then pretty quickly in science we had quantum mechanics to sort of prove that "fuzzy" nature of nature, and in society, the lines blurred and things are constituent upon other things and combined and recombined, sort of like trying a single instrument becomes part of a whole of the symphony, blending together until you can't hear or feel the single instrument anymore, but it's still there. I dunno, it's fun stuff. Basically, until someone smarter than Wittgenstein comes along and figures it out, society and thought seem to have a tendency of having no purpose or meaning, it just is (not that it actually has no purpose or meaning, the purpose and meaning are within themselves, like the symphony, it is its own point, or purpose or meaning). I think you already understand the conundrum, you described the dilemma pretty well in your own.
Mmm, I wanted to add. What you're describing; what I was trying to say; and what Wittgenstein himself came to as somewhat of a conclusion: the symphony can't be described, neither can language. You end up in a loop or infinite regress. Which is why he ended up saying that if you can't say something,cuts better to be silent. Which is kind of strict (he was sort of a strict hawk of a person about a lot of things), but it gets the point across that it's basically something that can't be done, it just keeps going. So it's a weird thing, philosophy works, philosophy of math, science, of philosophy, etc, but as soon as you try to get to a philosophy of language, you start seeing the "matrix code" and it'll break your brain, it more or less broke his. Understandably. It's like wtf even is this problem lol
The example you have of the drum being used to communicate a certain thing isn’t a good example of the thought content of music. Unless I’m missing something that just sounds like a sound that has a meaning, no different to a church bell or dog whistle. The interesting thing about music is that it seemingly does convey some sort of thought - or at least emotion - without language dependent thought.
Die Welt ist alles, was der der Fall es.
(The world is everything that is the case.)
The German original was too poetic for Wittgensteins taste, I guess...
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. (Didn't W write it in German himself?)
@@otterlyso he did. His works were written in De and then translated by others to En
To understand Wittgenstein? It's easy.
Wittgenstein was right - we think in pictures not in words. The word "the" is only a concept attached to something else that's a picture (e.g. "the table" - we don't see the "word" "the" we see a picture of a table in our minds). John Wyndham made a great example of this in The Chrysalids (maybe he read Wittgenstein)
@Fuk U dear oh dear.
if a person is blind, what pictures does he see?
This seems intuitively wrong to me. In fact the primary function of language seems to be thought. Animals have no problem with communicating without it, and at the same time it seems difficult to form a thought of any complexity purely with images. An image can spark a thought, but im not sure the image itself could be described as thought.
for now it is too simple to be useful
- the first man to see a wheel
Hey @jacobFelman what did you mean by this?
@@poopadoncic4023hey what did you mean by this?
Are you a human?
Yes @@JacobFeldman I am a human being. Wasn't sure of the context of your message, so I just wanted some clarification
How do you write and talk about philosophy for that long and still not understand how to go through the heretics that is philosophy
For me, philosophy is about taking the world apart to marvel at how it works and to see it from another viewpoint, like taking a car to pieces. What Ludwig has done is gone too far and broken the car up into individual atoms. Sterile, complex and uninspiring
The only thing interesting about Wittgenstein is Taleb’s description of Wittgenstein’s ruler, as a method to contemplate the authority of judgment. One can flush the rest.
So overrated
Could never figure out the fascination for/admiration/recognition of Wittgenstein. All he could spew out was nonsense (especially in the Tractatus). The infamous fireplace poker incident between him and Popper at Cambridge ought to have opened people's eyes to that fact, but I guess not. Human stupidity: infinite indeed!