Site Map for Wittgenstein's Logic of Language and the history of philosophy

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard.... One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down. (Culture and Value p. 48, 62)

The background of all this writing is "logic of language" or, in other words, How is the distinction between sense and nonsense made when discussing philosophical problems?

Further Topics in Logic of Language and Philosophy

• Socrates, The Master of Those who don't Know

• Socrates is neither physics nor metaphysics, but ethics and logic only
  • Ambivalence towards Plato
  • On the other hand, what we learn from Plato's early dialogs, about how to use the Socratic Method is vital to an understanding of that method (although so is Xenophon's Memorabilia)
• Mind, concepts: order imposed on chaos.
• 'Theses' and 'Theories', the meaning of those words in Wittgenstein
• Dialectic versus Introspection - Socrates versus Descartes
• A Classical Education - An education in dead languages?
  • Lichtenberg, ways of thinking, and madness
  • "The other side of the sky" (Plato)
• Aristotle: the Practical Syllogism
  • Aristotle, knowledge and virtue: "Incontinence is not ignorance", or, "Temperance (self-control) is not knowledge"
    • Socrates in the Nicomachean Ethics
    • Aristotle's use of the Common Beliefs of mankind
  • Ethics is practical (but not in Aristotle's arid sense)
    • Aristotle the scientist versus Plato the philosopher (observing rather than amending life in ethics)
      • Aristotle's Ethics, a summation
• Absolute and Relative Ends (Wittgenstein)
  • And "Absolute Value"
  • But Wittgenstein's is not the only way of looking at Ethics
• Socrates, "the master of those who don't think they know what they don't know" (Il maestro di color che non pensano sapere ciò che non sanno)
  • "To be wise is to know the good for man"

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• What does it mean? and Is it true? Socrates and Wittgenstein

• Without a meaning, but not meaningless
• The language-user as workman
  • The justification for a particular classification system
• Other metaphors for the border lines of concepts (Concept fluidity)
  • How concepts cut up thinking
• Socrates and the devil (Replies that are not seen or heard)
  • What is man and what is his death?
    • "An explanation of what life is"
• The argument of Augustine (and later Descartes)
  • "The impossibility of being mistaken"
  • "The correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature" (The verb 'to exist' in the first person present indicative)

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• Polyphemus, the White King, and Protagoras

• Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions and the Meaning of Proper Names (Principia Mathematica *50)
• What does Plato mean by 'worth knowing'?
• Language, nonsense, Socrates, and logic
  • The concept 'concept' (A maid-of-all-work word)
  • Why Socrates' sole concern was ethics (and the tools of logic its study requires)
  • Where 'because' does not indicate a cause
  • And where the explanation of meaning really is a common nature definition rather than a list
    • Do the moral virtues define the good for man, and not the good for man define the moral virtues?
  • "Socrates, I think you are too ready to speak evil of men ... I would recommend you to be careful" (Anytus)
    • "Silencing thought" (an example)

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• Philosophy's First Question

• The First Question for Philosophy
  • Philosophy's only tool is Language
• Wittgenstein and Ethics (Exclusion of Philosophy's Third Part)
  • There is always a choice to be made in philosophy
  • How does a philosopher "clear up thought"?
  • Are philosophical questions nothing more than "discomforts of the mind"? (Wittgenstein)
  • "Philosophical Views"
• The first philosopher was the Ionian Greek Thales, born in Miletus circa 636 B.C.
  • Is water itself the essence of - or only the model of the essence of reality?
    • Three Stages of Water (Model)
  • Are the Greek myths explanations of natural phenomena, or fairy-tales?
    • Earthquakes and Poseidon
    • Thales and the origin of the world, "There are gods in all things", the Egyptian pyramids, and the Seven Wise Men of Greece
  • Does all Philosophy Begin with a Question?
    • Metaphysics in contrast to Natural Science
    • Was philosophy discovered or invented?
      • The two foundations of philosophy
    • Metaphysics and Theism and Physics

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• Remnants of Polyphemus

• Is Aesthetics about Values (worth)?
• Language and Logic (Discourse of reason, Reasoned discourse)
• Remnants of Polyphemus, the White King, and Protagoras
  • What is the essence of the world? (das Wesen der Welt) (Thales and the moon)
    • The ancient Greek view of reality (What is the world's essence?)
  • To define the name 'Socrates' (Venn's diagrams and Russell's theory of descriptions)
• Sense and its absence
  • Is Plato's metaphysical theory of learning nonsense? (Recollection)
  • "What philosophy is?"
    • Is Metaphysics really Impossible?
    • Socrates, Kant, and Berkeley
• Paradoxes and Riddles
  • If vice is ignorance
    • Stop and Think
  • Opinion in contrast to Fact

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• Wittgenstein. To Banish Metaphysics

• "Its method pointless" (Trivial, unfounded, and pointless)
  • Wittgenstein's Project
    • "To banish Metaphysics-philosophy"
    • Philosophy is a disorder of the intellect caused by language (but Some ≠ All)
      • The Fundamental Problem (that the riddle exists)
    • In this context, Thebes as a symbol of Philosophy
• Is a "clear and distinct idea" an absolute point of reference?
  • "If I doubt, I must exist"
    • And Archimedes' fulcrum
    • Concepts, things and phenomena
• The logic of comparison: modern art and instrumental music
• Proof and Persuasion, contradistinction
  • Euclidean plane or the Earth's topography (Logical possibility)
• Sleep-walking and language (There are many meanings of 'meaning')
  • A move without a counter-move (Is this nonetheless a game?)
• Some Remarks about Philosophy (Why is philosophy not understood?)
  • What do we mean by the word 'reason'?

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• The Author of the Tales

• Harvey Hewett-Thayer
  • Modesty
  • "The Enemy of Music"
  • Dostoyevsky's Review of E.T.A. Hoffmann

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• Tolstoy and Death

• From which side is the door to Philosophy barred?
• Tolstoy and Death
  • What Do Men Live By?
    • Jesus and belonging to the ethical kingdom of God
      • Meaning of the word 'Christianity'
    • The kinship of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Prometheus
  • "Where Love Is, There God is"
    • What I mean by the word 'God'
      • Pothinus, bishop of Lyons
• Uses for the concept/picture 'God'
  • "Who are you? I don't recognize you"
    • "A Dialogue Among Clever People"
  • "God sees the truth but waits" ("The Long Exile")
• And at the hour of our death
  • "The Two Old Men"
• But what is "written"?
• The inner life of another human being - Tolstoy's letter to his wife
  • "The mystery in the relations of man to man"
    • The modesty of the soul

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• Can a goat understand man's thoughts, or a man the ways of God?

• "Can a goat understand man's thoughts?"
  • Setting aside the "mysteries of faith"
  • Ethics that is the offspring of a principle that far from silencing thought requires thought
  • "The climate of our world becomes colder"
    • Who is my neighbor?
    • Wittgenstein's letter to Ludwig Ficker
  • A mystery for which there is no model
• On the other hand ... ("God is the father")
  • A metaphor that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways
  • "The mark of belonging to the kingdom of God" (Schweitzer)
  • The laws of nature as the Father's gift to his child
  • "If a father who is not fatherly ..." (Language and truth)
  • Objects of faith versus Objects of history
    • Words may be contrary to reason, but not music (Music is not reasonable, nor yet unreasonable, although irrational)
• Analogy and Definition
  • The concept 'God' and the Theory of Descriptions (Wittgenstein, Russell)
  • Must a proposition's meaning be a picture? (Explanations of meaning)
  • Is the meaning of a religious belief its consequences in deed?
  • Is 'God' a proper name? (i.e. the name of a person?)
• Is religion, as some say, reasonable?
  • "Conjectures about life's meaning"
  • Apropos of The Greek gods are Rational

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• Philosophy begins in boredom

• Philosophy, as Wittgenstein used the word 'philosophy'
  • The limits of Wittgenstein's (work in) philosophy
• And the other kind of faith?
  • Theology is ...
  • Metaphysics in contrast to Natural Science
• "How many things I can do without!" (Diog. L. ii, 25)

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• Philosophic Havers

• Socratic madness (i.e. philosophy)
  • Conceptual Revisions ('ignorance', 'reason', 'concept')
  • Philosophy, logic and language (relationships)
  • Is philosophical wisdom wisdom?
    • Wisdom is modesty (philosophical self-knowledge)
• Folly to the Greeks (Paul's gospel)
• The philosophical mind of the Greeks
  • Evil as the absence of God (Augustine)
    • Theodicy and the Greeks
• Arbitrary Necessities of Thought
  • Pictures vs. Points of reference
    • Supernaturalism and Materialist skepticism
  • Without criteria (unanswerability)

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• Our Concepts before Learning Language

• The Sources of Language. Helen Keller's The Story of My Life (1903)
  • The signs (gestures) with which she first communicated
    • Is this the origin of human language - the felt-need and innate ability (ability which the other animals, apparently, have not) to communicate?
  • From an aimless finger-game to a language game: the patterns touched into the palm of her hand became the words of our language spelled into her hand
    • The day she learned language (Her first sign that was a word of our language)
    • She learns her first "abstract idea"
  • She learns to read printed words
  • She ask her teacher, What does the word 'love' mean?
  • Picturing another sense of perception by analogy (e.g. hearing as "a sort of second sight")
• What do a dog's thoughts look like? (A new comparison, or, analogy)
  • Setting criteria for concepts without language (Definition)
  • Animal intelligence
• When Learning is play, or, Play is learning
• Theory-formation in the Sciences
• Quotation marks and Bertrand Russell

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• Remarks and Questions

• "To reason out the How and Why" (Aristophanes)
  • Had Abraham been Greek --
  • As Socrates was
    • Mysteries as oracles
      • Living Contradictions ("Both the pope and the dictates of conscience are supreme")
        • Church Creed (religion as imposed dogma) and the Freedom of the Lord
  • "The oracle of whoever" (Overhearing, but overhearing wrongly)
• Can God's thoughts be put into the words of man? (A metaphysical, not a grammatical question, and it is without an answer)
  • "Playing god to God"
    • "Enough light, and enough darkness"
  • Ignorance of the fundamental "how and why" of existence
    • Believing without seeing
      • Seeing the thoughts of God
  • Consciousless Conscience
  • "To love God with thy whole heart"
    • "As if there were no God"
      • The Fallacy of the Strawmen
  • Collars that can strangle
    • The third vow, the "vow of obedience"
    • A "chosen" tautology
  • Philosophy is not a Romantic art
• God, Other Minds, Time, the Logical Constants, and Geometric Points
• "To pass from disguised nonsense to patent nonsense" (PI § 464)
  • A plurality of "essences" (Points of view)

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• Graybeard Presumption

• Babble of words (nebulous pictures)
  • "Discourse of reason" means "discourse of words" (Socrates)
  • Two kinds of metaphysics
  • Deep ruts of thought (limiting habits)
• The Keys of the Kingdom - Arthur Stanton (Where is "the spirit of the Lord" found?)
• Summation before sentencing
  • Reflections on the Present Year
    • The riddle and the afterlife

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• "Sometimes rats, sometimes worse"

• The old and the new logic of language
  • "Final, unassailable and definitive"
• Forward to the Beginning
  • "Sometimes rats, sometimes worse"
• Assumptions in November
  • Think for yourself
• Wittgenstein, Hertz, the aim in philosophy
  • Over-reaching the limits of Hertz's insight (Wittgenstein's later philosophy)
    • Long before Hertz: instruments versus names
    • To which does essence belong, nature or convention?
    • Is philosophy like a cube of sugar, or is philosophy a mirage?
      • Antidotes (to philosophy and to Wittgenstein)
      • Wittgenstein's sugar in water metaphor
        • The aethereal as a working hypothesis
    • Der Philosophiefeind (without irony)
      • What is philosophy?

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• Terms and the Soul

• When a concept becomes a non-conceptual existent (hypostatization)
• Ockham and the Principle of Economy (common names)
  • Meaning and explanation of meaning
  • Not without language (Innate ideas)
  • "There are only two ways of knowing what exists"
  • Universal and Individual and Extra-conceptual (extra-mental: existing in more than thought)
    • Examples versus Reason
      • Forms of expression and Pictures
    • "And why do we have just these concepts and not some other?" (Is the cause of concept-formation convention or nature?)
  • Syllogistic demonstration ("abstractive knowledge")
  • "Time is not an additional thing"
  • Experience as a brake to speculative reason
    • Manichaeism
• Intuition, Introspection and the soul
  • To explain concept-formation
    • Universals, three possibilities
      • Realism versus Nominalism, "the relation of thought to reality"
        • The reality of likenesses
  • Intuitions of spirits?
  • Immediate Experience
    • Pictures, clear ideas and the soul
    • "Intuitions" without concepts (Sense perception, language and concept-formation)
• Ockham's authoritarian ethics

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• The Terminist Logic of Language

• Difficulties
• The Origins of Terminist Logic
  • Probable versus Certain Knowledge
  • Meaning and Standing-for
  • Problems with the terminist logic of language (or definition of 'meaning')
• Nominalism (Conceptualism)
  • "Use in the language"
  • How is an abstract term defined?
  • Language origin of philosophical problems
    • Universals, Essences, and Plato's Forms
  • Conceptualism: universals are concepts, based on similarities alone
  • Conventional signs and Natural signs (concepts)
    • "Concepts arise naturally"
      • Ockham as nominalist
  • The Term and the Proposition ("standing for")
  • Signs | Stand-for | Definition
• The terminist 'meaning of a word' (definition)
• Logic is about thoughts, not real things

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• Philosophical questions most varied

• Socrates and logic and wisdom
  • Wittgenstein, 'grammar' and 'ungrammatical'
• Metaphysical Kinds
  • "Reality is not what is seen with the eyes, but with the mind alone"
    • The "opinion of Heraclitus"
    • "The shadow of your table hath destroyed your table" (Richard II)
  • "Grammar Stripping"
    • Inconvenient first principles (Francis Bacon, Aristotle, Descartes)
  • Grammatical Analogies (When grammar dysfunctions and nonsense results)
  • "Everything Functional is also Dysfunctional"
    • Is it an illusion that man is endowed with reason?
• The "Three Laws of Logic" (Criticism of "The Laws of Thought")
  • Law of Identity (A is A)
  • Law of the Excluded Middle (Everything must be strictly either A or not-A)
  • Law of Contradiction (Not both A and not-A)
    • "What any sane man admits"
    • Some is not All
    • "Laws of Thought"
• Questions and Answers with no Red Thread
  • A Word is like a Tool, an Example
  • Wittgenstein's philosophy: where does it lead? Into seeking insights into the logic of language?
• Reasons to "Why question everything?" (Socrates and Delphi)

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• Philosophic Scribbling

• Philosophers - like children scribbling
  • When in order to go on, we must make a rule
    • 'All Cretans are liars, the Cretan said'
  • The origin of unreadable sentences - is it "unreadable" thought?
• The branches of philosophy and the primary school teacher (Their uses in education)
  • The metaphysical question is not answered by describing the use of language (if there is a metaphysical question to ask)
    • Two Metaphysical-conceptual Questions
• Philosophy and the Awakening Mind
  • The Noblest Conception of Philosophy
    • Wittgenstein as Logic without Philosophy
  • "What metaphysics is?"
• Geometry and Reality (Geometry for Plato)
  • Plato and geometry as metaphor
• Existentialism versus Essentialism (Sartre, existence and essence)
  • The Essence of Man and Aristotle

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• Philosophy Epigones

• "One of the heirs of philosophy"
• Plato's Absolute Language ("Where our language suggests a ...")
• Variations on a Socratic Theme (questions and answers)
  • Philosophy not Formulas
  • Comparisons, Methods, Rules (of the Game)
  • "What part of undefined don't you understand?"
    • Titles and Classes
    • "Breadless arts"

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• Category Remarks

• Introduction (Proposition types)
• Wittgenstein and the Propositions of Ethics
  • Which does philosophy investigate, phenomena or concepts?
    • Things versus words
    • Conceptual versus metaphysical questions in philosophy (An example)
  • Metaphors in both directions (A is like B and B is like A)
  • Another proposition type (Answers to 'What is wisdom?')
• Who was Socrates?
• Plato's Ideas, abstractions and metaphysics
• Kant, Metaphysics and Ethics
  • Kant and abstractions (Hamann)
  • What is metaphysics? (Kant)
  • Kant, Ethics and Physics
• Is the end of a tautology also its beginning?

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• The Philosopher's Stone, the Bluebird of Philosophy

• The Philosopher's Stone (of philosophy)
  • "Philosophy is talk about abstractions" (Why must we define everything?)
    • Procrustes isn't dead
  • Seeming right is not being right
  • Philosophy - does it develop?
• More about "signs" and "symbols" (Wittgenstein's distinction)
  • Of language "sounds without sense": undefined combinations of sounds
• A book that would show what philosophy really is
  • Frege and reverence for truth
    • "The ability to hold discourse with oneself"
    • Reverence for Truth (Albert Schweitzer)
• Philosophy is unending perplexity
  • Man is a myth-maker
  • Plato's refutation of Socrates' definition of 'knowing' as 'being able to give an account to others'
  • Do you think that there is only one correct classification system?
    • Query: Are numbers abstract or concrete?
    • Query: branch of philosophy of Albert Schweitzer?
  • Ethics, Plato and fear of punishment ("But if the point of ethics is right-doing ...")
  • What - not whom - you mean by the word
  • Other unanswered (because rejected) questions
    • Query: Paradox or contradiction?
      • Oxymorons

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• Socratic Queries

• Models that don't Describe the Facts
• Socratic Queries (Winter Reflections on Fall Logs)
  • Defining self-control ('self-control')
  • Why we talk about language (Philosophy and language)
  • How "family resemblances" relates to Socrates' search for truth
• Socrates' wisdom. Descartes' doubt.
• Wisdom and sophia - Greek and English words
  • "Trees and open country" (Plato)

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• Humiliation and Humility

• Apropos of Know thyself
  • Form and meaning and logic
• Questions that falsely presume Answers
• Metaphysics in contrast to Natural Science

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• Is the answer to this question no?

• Questions of Meaning
  • The Greek word barbaros
  • "Learned Ignorance"
    • The meaning of 'mysticism' (Schweitzer)
      • Schweitzer's mysticism and Socrates
        • "Justice and kindliness" (Hesiod, the Greek gods)
  • Paradox Formation
  • Other meanings of 'meaning' (impressions, fables)
• Religion and Belief-In (Wittgenstein)
  • "Christianity is refuge for someone in infinite distress"
    • Wittgenstein and Christianity
      • Not doctrine, but a way of life
    • Puzzled by religion
      • Giving an account of the grammar of "belief-in" pictures
    • Wittgenstein - source limits
• Rationalism for Schweitzer
• Oskar Kraus' criticism of Albert Schweitzer's Ethics of Reverence for Life
  • Schweitzer's view of the Enlightenment
• "Subjective Ethics", continued
  • The fish and the pelican

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• Anything in General

• 'What love is?'
  • Love, grammatical reminders and commandments (Paul)
  • The Profound in Metaphysics
  • Time and Chaos
• Empirical versus theoretical (Scientific method and Turn of Mind)
  • The Method of Geometry
    • The persistence of "undefined terms"
  • Language like a game (PI § 108)
  • Linguistic analysis
  • View versus Thesis
  • About the fly-bottle
• Recollection and Real Existence
  • Plato and the Phaedo
    • "True holiness"
  • Traduttore, traditore
    • Terms of thought
    • "Thinking is digesting"
• Language, Logic, Philosophy
  • Syntax and nonsense
  • Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde - "growing daily in badness"
  • Too many assertions, too few questions
  • Grammatical remarks and Statements of fact (hypotheses)

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• Things in themselves

• das Ding an sich = "the thing in itself" (reality independent of perception)
  • Bishop George Berkeley. Perception (and reality)
    • The Hypothesis of Realism (Russell)
    • Berkeley's "To be is to be perceived" (in Copleston's History of Philosophy)
  • "And I make no hypotheses"
  • Creation of ideas versus revision of ideas
  • "Innate concepts" (Kant, Descartes)
• "Why the eternal questions are eternal"
  • For example, Is there an afterlife?
• Mystifications or Self-mystifications | Mysteries or Muddles?
  • Query: Plato, form; Wittgenstein, standard meter
  • "The nature of the thing named"
  • Defining Philosophy and Knowing what you don't know
  • "Circular Argument"
  • A "critique of language" and Kant
  • "What language cannot say cannot be thought"
    • Alternatives to the concepts 'object' and 'space'
• "Not, by Socrates sitting, Idle talk to pursue"
• The "shepherd qua shepherd" vs. "man qua man" (Worldliness vs. Care of the soul)
  • The reward of Christianity
• The misalignment of the ideal and the real
  • Conscience and Philosophy
    • The pastoral versus the dogmatic stage of religion
  • Faith and Eternity
    • "Miracles can't happen"
• Misunderstood language and children's picture worlds
• The Danger of Philosophy
  • "Myriad poverty"

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• Logic and Rationality

• Logic and Rationality
  • Many logics, or not?
  • Threats to sleeping societies
  • Precepts that guide how man lives his life
• The Problematical, the Undefined, and God
  • "... that all species were created independently, and are immutable" (Victorian mysticism)
• Defining "things", "abstract objects", "intangible objects"
• A blunder that big is no blunder
  • The laws of gods and men

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• As a Working Hypothesis

• The soul as a "working hypothesis"
  • The 'soul' and the "Theory of Descriptions"
    • The picture of the soul as a ghostly human being
• "Philosophy begins -- and ends -- with me"
  • Wittgenstein, and of philosophy what remains?
• Thomas Arnold
  • Pascal: Man's inability to understand
    • Every man his own doctor of divinity
    • A return to rationality
• Theses in Philosophy
• Old Queries find a Response
  • Greek Philosophers and the Beatitudes
  • Socrates and Conscience
    • Aquinas, dictates of conscience (Georges | Dominique Pire)
      • "Wherein Do We Differ?"
  • "I can't help thinking there may be some big truth out there"
  • Socrates' ignorance, wisdom and the "examined life"
    • The Rational and Irrational Souls
      • Rationalism versus rationalism
    • The Origin of our own Ideas
• Rationalism as an "asylum for ignorance" (Spinoza)
  • Leibniz and Theodicy
• Thoughts apropos of other topics
  • The picture that Stoicism and Christianity do not share - Ethical eschatology
    • The limit to there being a good society
    • Falling into sin. Its relation to ignorance.
  • Children, Language
  • What do the TLP's "propositions of natural science" look like?
  • The Sea Wolf: Forcing reality to conform to theory

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• Undefined language (nonsense)

• Is some nonsense "important nonsense"? (Ramsey's view of Wittgenstein)
  • The antitheses 'wise' and 'foolish'
• Philosophy is, begins, searches for ... (Replies to Internet queries)
  • Philosophy "is the love of wisdom"
  • Essence and the Ether (Plato and Einstein)
  • Plausibility, Truth
  • "Words are names of things"
  • Justice, virtue and vice
  • Empty space and time
  • Does learning to read come before learning how to criticise what you read?
• Open versus closed to the public, and other philosophical remarks
  • Wisdom and the Greek poets
  • Two projects, two points of view, in philosophy
    • For Bertrand Russell's "Theory of Descriptions"
  • Discourse of reason as a foundation of sand
  • Arguments are not circles

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• Thought-Worlds

• "Defining Qualities"
  • "Either Unfounded or Trivial"
• Inscribed over Plato's doorway: "Only geometers may enter"
  • Question: How does one "reduce an essence"?
• The "Five Cardinal Virtues" - a conceptual investigation
  • Is reason not the excellence that is most proper to man? (Artistic creativity)
    • What is the origin of our creative thoughts?
• Museums in the Greek World
  • The Greek word 'peripatos' ("Peripatetic")
• Each a Prisoner of His Own Thought-World
  • The Conceptual Strangeness of Religion
  • "Talking about these things does more harm than good"
    • Stoicism and Death
  • The distinction between natural phenomena and the use of words
• The Socratic Standard in philosophy: Not to think you know what you don't know
  • Speculation (Plato's or anyone else's), like tea, is not what I want, but various things may be wanted from philosophy
  • "Philosophy is a working on oneself"
• Postscripted
  • "We all need a lot of help", Wittgenstein thought

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• Wittgenstein's Philosophical Code

• Limited aim in Philosophy
  • Limited scope of philosophy
  • Wittgenstein's self-assigned area of research
  • "Absolute value" versus Reasoned Ethics
• But what has changed since the time of Socrates?
• Inside the Fly-bottle
  • Relative Frames of Reference
    • "If an atom is mostly empty space, then why does matter seem so solid?"

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• The Limits of Language

• Importance of the normal case in the logic of language to philosophy
  • Various types of normal case
• The Limits of Language (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache)
  • The Concepts of Infancy
• "Over-reaching" and "under-reaching" (not knowing oneself)
• Is there a relation between "the meaning of life" and Ethics? (First blush, very rough remarks apropos of Schweitzer's account of Nietzsche)
• Induction and adduction
• If you are held captive by an inapplicable picture of how language works, you will find no way out of your philosophical perplexity (Pictures bar the door)

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• Philosophy and Lies

• Geometry's Contact-with-Experience Words
  • Concepts without Percepts (Protagoras)
• Logic as "The Art of Reasoning" (Logic and madness)
  • What are we calling 'reason'?
    • The foundation stone of Descartes' synthetic a priori project in philosophy
  • To distinguish facts from opinion - Using form to indicate the relationship between the concepts 'fact' and 'opinion'
• Degeneration of the human spirit
  • "... pass over in silence"
    • "Absolute value" (Wittgenstein and Ethics)
• Two Kinds of Resignation
  • Mankind is all very well, but this particular man is going to die (Ethical versus natural response to death)
    • "The spirit of the age" (and death)
    • Schweitzer's letter from Malung, Sweden
  • "World and Life Affirmation"
• Ignorance as the Devil (The Devil as ignorance: "Satan" = "the Deceiver" = ignorance)
  • Ignorance in Candide's garden
  • Voices crying in the wilderness ... that are heard but not heard
    • The good as a dysfunction of nature  (Thought experiments)
• Logic queries "in a disordered string" (Words and objects)

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• The Conclusion comes at the End of the Argument, not at its Beginning

• Foregone Conclusion
  • "Reverence for truth" (Albert Schweitzer)
  • "There are not two truths"
  • Kidnapping Words from their Original Homes
• Does Wittgenstein only describe (for the sake of clarifying) one way we use the word 'meaning' -- or also select a 'meaning' of meaning (for a particular purpose)?

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• Logic-Grammar Investigations

• Is there an objective distinction between sense and nonsense?
  • An example of a language where agreement is contractual
• Were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle "slum landlords"?
  • Wittgenstein's rude response does not respond to C.E.M. Joad's view of the task of the philosopher
  • Idealism and Philosophy: "to solve the riddle of the world and the meaning of human existence"
• What is conceptual confusion? Forms of expression: some unique, some unsuitable.
  • Inappropriate forms of expression
  • Memory, if time doesn't exist
    • Time and grammar (measurement)

---

• Philosophy old and older

• The Month of the Falling Leaves
• Philosophy very old
  • Rational WonderRational Wonder
    • Metaphysical Wonder
  • Plato and Language-meaning
  • Know thyself. Logic. And madness
• Before it came? They had at any rate -- philosophy

---

• Nets, Walls, Categories of Philosophy

• Concept not Substance ("The Good")
• Plato's Gorgias - Further comments
  • Partaking in Forms
  • Ethics in the Gorgias and Sophist
    • "I say I know, but I think I know better"
      • An irrefutable proposition
  • Can you take a philosopher's work further than he did himself? (Or do you just go some place else?)
    • Ethics, tautologies, grammar
    • Answerable to Categorical ethics (This is the mistake)
  • Argument by Analogy
    • "Argument by analogy" (Jastrow)

---

• Using Language to Control Emotions and Thought

• Can language be used to limit emotions?
  • All-too-subtle emotions
• Limiting Thought by Enlarging language (vocabulary), by Silencing language, and by Extending (redefining or blurring) the meaning of common words
  • "Slogan swallowers" (George Orwell)
    • The repeated utterance of undefined words ("mere sound without sense")
  • The existence of a symbol and the thing it symbolizes
  • Controlling thought by broadening the meaning of words
  • "Freedom is Slavery" (Two-way propositions: A is B or B is A)
  • The Rule of Law
    • "Fitting up"
    • Conscience and Legal defense
  • Radicals are turned into Statues
  • "Nullification by nomenclature"
    • "Language is determinant"
    • When is a nation-state not a nation-state?

---

• The Augean Stable of Philosophy after 2500 years

• And so does the good man come to this? (Plato, Republic 496c-d)
  • Republic 496a-d (Plato's view of those who are worthy of philosophy, and the madness of the multitude)
    • Boethius (c. 480-524 A.D.), the unsheltered
  • Socrates as Plato's literary invention (Remarks)
    • The rarity of Socrates' divine sign
• Plato, measurement versus opinion in the Republic
  • Plato's "method of definition" in the Republic
• Back to Cleansing the Augean Stable
  • Query: Wittgenstein, family resemblance theory of concept formation
    • How can we look without knowing what we're looking for? (The concept 'beauty')
  • Query: seeing a sentence in a new context is a Gestalt shift
  • Xenophanes and if mathematicians had a god ...
  • Wittgenstein and Berkeley
  • Query: undefined terms and faith, compare (Geometry)
    • What is the correct grammatical account of doctrinal disagreements?
• Logomachy
  • Reality is Water (Thales)
  • Summary of Ethics (A grammatical reminder)
• Is reality confined to what is conceivable? (The limits of natural science)
  • Correlation and conjecture
• If religion were based on evidence would it be religion? (Our concept)

---

• Mankind after the Garden

• Definition of the Good or of 'the good'? (Wittgenstein, Socrates)
• "The groundlessness of believing"
• "Dreams and Vain Fictions" (Metaphysics)
  • "Philosophy is a working on oneself"
    • The Ascent of Mankind
• "Man's character is his fate"
• Do different life forms live in different worlds?
  • "Percepts without concepts are blind"
  • The nonexistence of Canine morality
    • Myth as an Answer to an Unanswerable Question
  • Prometheus sacrificed himself for mankind
    • Fire as a symbol for Mind
      • The "blending of Forms", "Irreducible but yet divisible essences"
    • "Choice of Saviors"
      • Superstition among the Greeks
      • Plato and Reason
        • And Unreason (Philosophical conjectures are not doctrines)
  • Abraham "after the Garden"

---

• Nonsense and Logic (Rhyme and Reason)

• The concepts 'nonsense' and 'absurd'
  • Undefined combinations of words (if the world had begun three years ago)
  • The rules of the game and grammar
    • And if there are no rules?
      • Grammar and forms of life
    • The meaning of language (Humpty Dumpty)
• Some does not imply all, not even in philosophy
• Hippopotamus Grammar (Invisible)
  • How to stay confused in philosophy
    • "Name of a person, place or thing" (What is name of a word that stands for a thing?)
    • Sense and Meaning
      • Ramsey on the nature of the propositions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
  • Is the philosopher a physician? (Hippocrates)
• Why seek to have what is worthless. But is what Socrates seeks -- worthless?
• Philosophy as righting misconceptions and misperceptions (More logic of language clarifications)
  • Logical Positivism and nonsense
    • The "verification principle" (theory of language meaning)
  • "Wittgenstein's language game theory"
    • The word 'game' is defined as 'rules of the game'
  • Finding a way forward by not asking that question ... (Wittgenstein's "new method in philosophy")

---

• What Psychology's relation to Philosophy is not

• Psychology - a presumptuous child of Philosophy
  • Psychology as superstition
    • Motives and Verification
  • "Existential Problems"
    • Existential problems characterize the human form of life
    • Philosophy is not one of the Social Sciences
  • A Universalized Dogma (When may be becomes must be)
• Example of a Philosophical Gestalt-shift

---

• Bertrand Russell in Alan Wood's The Passionate Skeptic

• "The Theory of Descriptions"
  • 'There is no figure both round and square'
• Semantics (The fly-bottle)
  • "A new way of philosophizing"
    • "... a linguistic philosophy" (Russell about Wittgenstein)
• Russell's muddle with 'good' and 'bad'
  • Good habits and Self-control
  • What is the Most Useful Way to look at Ethics?
    • Hodie mihi, cras tibi
• "He was always talking" (Moore about Russell)
  • "... that mathematics was mere rules for using signs" (Russell's view)
  • Russell's absence of method, rather Platonic, way of thinking
• Russell and Moore and Wittgenstein
• Russell and Ockham's razor
  • "The Scope and Limits of Human Knowledge"
  • Non-deductive inference versus deductive inference (Logically necessary versus merely probable)
  • "They are only interested in the questions, not in the answers"

---

• Socrates and flute-girls

• Philosophy and the Irrational (Music and beauty)
  • "Things Socrates would have said" (Xenophon)
  • Plato, Symposium 176e-177a
  • What is the Ethics of Socrates?
    • Socrates, Ethics and World-view
• Despair and Longing
  • Good and Evil Pleasures. As if pleasure were the good for man, i.e. what he should seek and live for
    • "The pleasures of the good are greater than the pleasures of vice" (Xenophon)
    • "Agreeable to the soul"
      • Is the good what does good (benefits)?
    • What is the source of despair? (On Old Age)
      • What are you aiming at, living for?
        • Ethics, Wittgenstein, Socrates
      • Existence and Good
• Philosophical Reflections
  • Philosophy and Socrates
  • "To heal the wounded understanding"
  • The Historical Socrates
    • We make for ourselves a picture
  • Holding discourse always with oneself alone
  • Nothing stays clear for very long ...
    • Phenomena and Concepts
    • Concepts and Phenomena

---

• Philosophical Doom

• "Will the line stretch out until the crack of doom?"
  • Conceptions, ideas, views
  • A Cartesian inconvenience and a Circle that is not
    • The everyday concept 'infinity'
• Stupidity and Philosophy
  • Learned and Unlearned stupidity
• Logic, Syntax, and Meaning
  • In Wittgenstein's later work
  • In Wittgenstein's earlier work
  • When words are called meaningless, it is not their meaning that is meaningless. (PI § 500)
• "Thus it ever is that an evil deed invests itself ..."
  • The original sin, the common name

---

• Ethics and Verification

• The fallacy of following a false grammatical analogy (or grammatical model)
• "And I make no hypotheses"
  • "The Body-Snatcher"
  • Plato's "Ideas", Wittgenstein's "family resemblances"
    • Can the word 'game' be defined by a list of games?
  • Plato's Forms and Kant's Categories
• The grammar of the word 'God' (yet again)
  • The morality of rendering unto Caesar ...
• Apropos of "Can reasoning teach man what the life that is proper (or, good) for him to live is and help him to live that kind of life?"
• Socratic and Platonic Queries

---

• Invisible objects - thrice told philosophy

• Unanswered unanswerable questions
  • Is an "invisible object" a theoretical construct or only misunderstood grammar?
    • Plato and the Good
    • To explain metaphysically or not
    • A meaning that has no meaning
  • Figurative language and the limit of prose restatement
    • "Asylums of ignorance" (Spinoza, Wittgenstein)
      • The Limit of Wittgenstein
• Because I like talking about these things, maybe more than most
  • Philosophy is and is not
    • Virtue is and is not
  • Same old. Same new
    • "Autonomous language games"
      • "The limits of my knowledge are the limits of my world"
    • To get the worst in everything, but be indifferent to fortune (Plato's method of reason alone)
      • The Path of the Philosopher
  • Aristotle on Life and Death (Soul and Body)
    • The development of the Greek concept 'soul'
  • Apollo's paradox. And philosophers' paradoxes
    • The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Games
    • Wisdom, and on the other hand, wisdom
      • But is it philosophy?
    • Wittgenstein's paradox of meaning in the TLP

---

• Fool's Gold and Philosophy

• Catch-all Categories
  • Do we already know what common words mean?
  • The original Philosophical Investigations' motto was taken from Hertz
• Is Philosophy no more than Ways of Looking at Things?
  • 'A philosophy is a rational way of looking at things'
  • "The Socratic Mind"
    • Socrates' use of the word 'soul' (psyche)
    • Plato's Tautologies
  • In what sense is the concept 'God' a way of looking at things?
• "Within the limits of family resemblance"
• My philosophical development (by age)
  • What I mean by the word 'God'
    • Atheist, agnostic, uninterested, (Three categories)
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Brief summary
  • Magic circles in Philosophy
• Logic of Language - Criticism, Questions, Remarks
  • "Unformulated definitions" and concept-invention
  • Descartes was not Socrates
    • The continuity of I (Descartes)
  • What does Tolstoy mean by 'God the Father'?
• The Preface that comes at the End

---

• Strange Grammars

• The excellence that is proper to man (Goodness, Beauty)
  • "How can a rule of grammar tell man how to live his life?"
    • The Wise and the Foolish Man tautologies
• Plato and Definition
  • Statesman 285d-286b
• "What counts as sufficient evidence is forms of life" ("In the beginning was the fact")
  • Conceptual Tools versus Reality ('God' and God)
  • More strange grammar? (Greater Hippias: "The pleasant through sight would not be pleasant through both sight and hearing")
    • The conjuring trick
  • Common Ground (The limits of shared philosophical discussion)
    • Also a common interest in projects in philosophy
  • What is "the bedrock of language"?
  • Can non-existent things be defined into existence?

---

• Philosophical Logic - Riddles and Answers | Puzzles and Solutions - Remarks and Responses

• When a vague metaphor becomes doctrine
  • Metaphors for Philosophy, Whole versus its Parts
    • "Epistemology" (the where in philosophy of "How do you know?")
• Remarks: The cardinal virtues. Euclid. Flat earth.
  • Time is a relative or relational concept (a concept, not a thing that runs or moves more or less quickly ...)
  • Read Plato's Apology, for it's not too long
• Responses: Reason is Greek Philosophy. The Afterlife.
  • The Philosophical Question of an Afterlife
• Plato's strange Ideas
  • Plato did not spring directly from Socrates, nor was Socrates his first teacher in philosophy (Aristotle on Heraclitus)
  • Grammar describes both language's syntax and semantics

---

• Measuring Belief | 'National Character'

• Wittgenstein's criticism of Socratic Logic
• "National Character" (Wittgenstein, Malcolm, France)
  • "National identity" (Updates)
• On Absolute Certainty
• Measuring the Degree or Strength of a Belief (Frank Ramsey)
  • We believe there is not a lion outside our door at the moment - but do we know there is not, even without verifying that there is not?
  • Ramsey: 'degree of belief' is nonsense unless a method of measuring belief is specified
  • Is "what a reasonable person believes" a measure of belief?
• Socrates and the rule of law: Can man be free if he is subject to arbitrary rule?

---

• Synonyms provoke Philosophical Insights

• Synonyms I did not See
  • "Incontinence is ignorance" (Virtue is knowledge only if man is free to act)
• More Ghost-like Objects ("concepts")
  • "Invisible concepts"
  • Query: why point, line, and plane are abstract concepts
  • Similes I do not See
  • Abstract Emptiness
    • Are numbers abstract?

---

• "I am honestly disgusted with the other way of thinking""

• Is mythology divine historiography?
  • The 'holy' is 'what the gods love' or, in other words, 'piety' is 'whatever is pleasing to the gods'
    • "Whatever the gods love" does not define the common nature of "holiness"
    • An "other way of thinking" about the meaning of language
• "... with the other way of thinking" in Geometry
  • Drawings are not essential to plane geometry (although used as explanations of meaning)
  • Difference in ways of life, points of reference
  • Freedom through logic of language (the examined life)

---

• Logic at Sea

• Missing the point | Perpetuating the old way of thinking
  • Why read Plato's dialogs?
    • About common names (Plato, Wittgenstein)
      • Rejection of common ground (Wittgenstein, Plato)
        • Essence versus "myriad resemblances"
• The Relationship between logic and grammar
  • Must it be possible to show both ends of an analogy?
  • Form of words versus meaning (Wittgenstein's criticism of current logic)
  • Shadow reality ("gold mountain", "round square")
  • Query: What question has no answer?
• Hypotheses in historiography (critical theology)
• Something even metaphysics cannot offer an hypothesis to explain
• "The death of God" - What does it mean? (Bonhoeffer)
  • Is anything essential to the concept 'God'? (The "Theory of Descriptions": The concept 'God' is various concepts)
    • Where unclarity seems not to be a blunder

---

• Logic of Language Topics taken at Random

• The good = the useful? But what is useful for man?
  • The good = the useful and/or the excellent
  • The concept 'ought' in Ethics
    • Contra Hume's "Reason is an only ought to be the slave of the passions"
      • And the Cuckoo Clock
      • Hume and Causality
      • Billiards and Causality
      • Hume and Kant's awakening
      • Involuntary Categories versus Voluntary Theories (Two imaginations)
        • Wittgenstein in contrast to Goethe (and Kant)
• Various remarks, queries and responses
  • Does Socrates know what the excellence proper to man is?
  • Geometric Object, Fairy Tale Object
    • Are there "stop words" in geometry?
    • Do unreal objects have unreal meanings?
• What do we mean by 'someone's philosophy'?
• If by the word 'Providence' we do not mean 'God playing god', then what might we mean?
  • 'Faith in God' - What does it mean?
    • The frame around the story
    • The relationship between God and the Good
      • Theological Fragments
• Random Grammar Remarks
  • "Quotation source: question everything"
    • Knowledge is not Plausibility

---

• Philosophical Language Pitfalls

• Philosophical ideas in fiction
  • Forms of Expression Suggestive of Ideas
• "Normative science"

---

• Circles are round, or not

• Is there a general definition of the word 'chair'?
  • If it cannot be said, then how can it be that you are saying it?
• "Why is a circle round?" Yes, why is a circle round, for might it not be square or triangular instead?
  • The Attitude of Philosophy
    • Wittgenstein's ideas versus my account of Wittgenstein's ideas
  • Query: why is a circle round?
    • The Geometric circle versus the visually circular
    • Must a circle be round?
• Is black darker than gray?
• "Theology as grammar"

• Philosophy at School

• Correspondent Remarks
  • Language versus Thought
  • Henry Veatch, professor of philosophy
    • Philosophy at Harvard
  • My schooling, such as among the Sophists it was

---

• Idea-matching versus Word-matching

• Language-meaning blindness (Misdirected questions about the logic of language)
  • Ipse dixit (Pythagoras)
  • "No philosophy, only grammar"
    • Socrates, Wittgenstein, Ethics
  • The State of search: "mere sounds without sense"
    • Pictures that don't misrepresent yet do mislead
    • A reference librarian for the Internet
    • The Web Under the AI

---

• "This language game is played"

• "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing at all?"
  • The Capriciousness of Nature
  • Do you think there must be a reason why?
  • When we think about God we think about "our" God, the familiar concept of our own religion, not foreign ones
    • The "Word of God" is always within some frame of reference
  • Contrasting views of Augustine: Schweitzer and Wittgenstein (Early Draft)
    • Enlightenment versus Medieval View
  • Where we ought to say "This game is played"
    • "Language games as the original phenomena"
• Can Philosophy be Taught?
  • Philosophical Integrity (Ethics)
  • Seeking authority in philosophy

---

• "Ignored or Forgotten"

• Immanuel Kant and Gestalt shift: the conceived percepts are without foundation if they themselves are the foundation
  • But then what becomes of objectivity? (Immanuel Kant)
  • Logical construct = conceived percept = fact
• "Like a universal Gestalt shift"
  • Not Commensurable, not Translatable
  • Gestalt shift is not Hegelian
• And so on (philosophically)
• Voluntarily seeing-as versus seeing involuntarily
  • "Only in the mind"
    • And if there is no essence?
  • Not to use the word 'see' equivocally
    • Kant and Copernicus
    • "Concept-blindness" and "aspect-blindness"

---

• In Partibus Infidelium

• "Why words rather than reality?"
  • Percepts without concepts are blind (Immanuel Kant)
  • And what if I decline? (Three reasons I might have to reject Wittgenstein's language-to-games comparison)
• He who has ears to mishear
  • Concepts and Misconcepts
    • Misconceptions of Philosophy
• The Learned Man from the Far West (Matteo Ricci in China)
  • Matteo Ricci's account of Confucianism
    • The Earliest Religion of China
  • The difficulty of a Christian mission in an ancient civilization and unconquered land
    • The mission to China in contrast to Europe's conquests of other lands
  • Ricci's Catechism - choosing the apt terms
    • Ricci's hope for the Christian Mission (The foundations of the Apostolate)
    • Can Catholic Christianity be separated from "Western methodology and customs"? (The incorporation of non-European customs and ways of reasoning)
  • The Western Conquest of China (The later mission)
• Is God "known by the things He has made"?

---

• More Old than New

• First define the question (Metaphysical versus Everyday use of language)
  • Query: etymology foundation of philosophy (modesty)
    • In the end as in the beginning (Philosophy)
      • Who do I think I am? (Metaphysically, ethically)
  • To keep hearing the same answers to the same questions, with variations
• "What's that when it's at home?"

Table of Contents for Philosophical Notes

There are sixty-two pages of notes. But these notes are uneven in quality. Some notes are not thought all the way through, some are preliminary, most need to be revised, many others discarded.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe. (CV p. 27) Every worthwhile idea carries a lot of cheap ones in its train. (ib. p. 58)

These notes mostly supplement or continue the discussions found in the main pages of this site (which are listed above, at the top of this page in the Table of Contents. Some are also briefly described on the homepage).

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62. Conceptual Limits | Forms of Expression

• Our Father and the Kingdom of God
  • The Limit of God
  • "Bound by the laws of nature"
  • Summary Conclusions
    • "To define God"
    • The merciful Samaritan (Luke 10.30-37) - "Who is my neighbor?"
• The Good, the Useful, Borderless Concepts
  • Forms of Expression, and Meaning
    • "The heart has its reasons" (Pascal)
• Forms of life, bird's and man's
  • Thought-forms
    • "Sancte Socrates" (Erasmus)
    • "A Christian is anyone who lives according to the Word" (Justin Martyr)
    • Absurd Comparisons
• The displacement of the "God as a working-hypothesis" to answer man's questions about the natural world (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
  • First impressions and expectations (quite often) are mistaken impressions and false expectations
  • Or maybe this would be a Summary of Bonhoeffer's thought
    • Grotius: Law that is valid "even if there were no God"
  • "God as a working-hypothesis"
    • An example of Bonhoeffer's project of reinterpretation

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61. The Crucible of Doubt (Dostoyevsky)

• Dostoyevsky and the Question of the existence of God
  • "Autonomous Language-games"
    • Augustine about the language of the Trinity
      • The image of the Trinity
  • What does the existence of the view sub specie aeterni prove? (Dostoyevsky and "everything is permissible")
  • The Lord's Prayer
    • Schweitzer and "Redemption through Jesus Christ"
• "Glory to God also in me"
• "The importance of the philosophical act"

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60. Is there a science of time?

• What then is a cow? (Wittgenstein then and later)
  • The relationship between the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations ("The possibility of philosophy is not to construct theories about reality, but to clarify thinking")
    • In the view of Rush Rhees (1905-1989)

• Reminders about Similes
  • Games of Deductive Logic
  • Is there a science of time?
    • If the word 'noun' is defined as 'the name of a person, place or thing', that is a semantic rather than syntactic definition

• "Is a word's meaning really nothing more than its use in the language?"
  • Why does Chaerephon ask?
  • Is anything logically necessary to love and pray to God, e.g. must the word 'God' be a name?

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59. Philosophy in the Sleep-deprived Mind

• Notes for the Desk Drawer
  • Descartes and Socrates, their different Methods and Enquiries
  • Self-control and Ethics
    • But why, if Virtue is knowledge?
  • Miscellaneous Interlude
    • "Reverence for Life"
  • Relations between the Earlier and Later Wittgenstein
• 'A riddle without an answer'
• More notes unintendedly only for myself
  • Hipparchia of Maroneia (ca. 300 B.C.)
  • Grammar and Language Queries (More)
    • Symptoms versus criteria, causes and grammar
  • Induction in definition and ethics (Socrates and Plato)
  • Metaphysics and "wonder"

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58. Socrates - Care of the Soul

• Can man become good through Socratic "care of the soul"?
  • Care of the ethical aspect of oneself
  • My brother has wronged me
• Ethics is practical
  • Who can teach ethics?
    • The forgiveness of ignorance
    • But what does that mean - 'to forgive'?
• Socratic philosophy contrasted with Christianity: wrong-doing is ignorance contrasted with the forgiveness of sins
  • "Philosophy cannot improve your life"
    • The garden, and the soul (Voltaire, Socrates)

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57. Is Reason not the Excellence most Proper to Man?

• The Three Parts of Philosophy
  • Has reason the power to change men's lives?
• Definitions are explanations of meaning, but they can also be tools
• The School of Pythagoras, for children who think they go to school to teach rather than be taught
  • The school of skepticism (Sextus Empiricus)

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56. Reason in Ethics, Authority in Historiography

• Ethics is rational or it is not philosophical
  • Kant and conscience
    • Whom you worship in ignorance. Saving souls. (Francis Xavier)
      • "A Christian is one who ..."
  • Historically conditioned foundations(Hume)
  • The Kingdom of God that is not: the kingdom that is "without"
    • "This not brother for me" (Who is my brother? "Thinking of others")
• Comparative Religion and History (Historiography)
  • The irresponsible use of probability-words
    • Why 'may' must never become 'is'
  • History (Historiography) is Authority-Laden
    • Albert Schweitzer as an historian
      • We must always set criteria for a correct answer - But are all criteria philosophically justifiable?
  • Monotheism and tolerance

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55. Topics in critical-historical theology

• Peasants and Artisans (The historical Jesus)
  • Did the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels exist?
    • "Offensive to the moral and religious sense"
      • An answer to a community's question
      • The end of nationalism
    • "And if anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak as well"
    • "The Uniqueness of Jesus"
    • The many different ways the Gospels are viewed
  • Historical Precedent - William Wrede
    • "Scientific theology" (Hypothesis-formation in historiography)
    • Is there a part of speech 'religious proposition'?
  • Did Jesus believe himself to be the Messiah?
    • 'Messiah' and 'Christ'
  • Schweitzer's view of Historiography: Jesus, historicity and religion
    • About Paulinism and the Fourth Gospel

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54. What Wittgenstein Did Not Banish

• One Sentence Summaries
  • Die Wunder sind geblieben (The wondrous remained)
    • "L. Wittgenstein" (Times obituary, 29 April 1951)
• Language and the Birth of Religion
• Socrates at the Neighbor's Porch

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53. "I wish to be in all things reasonable"

• The subjective element in reason
  • Why reason is necessarily limited
    • The meaning of a text (The TLP made simple)
      • "Wittgenstein did not remember" (Ramsey to Moore)
  • "Seeing as" in contrast to "Seeing as if"
    • Stoicism in Shakespeare's Hamlet (and in Paradise Lost)
  • Is Ethics Rational? (Further discussion of an unanswered question)
    • Synonyms for not-knowing but pretending to (The notion of "intuition")
    • When psychology is superstition
  • Seeing what is not there (but is there)

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52. Confusion, conceptual and real

• Virtue, Bad Habits, Instinct, Self-control (Logic is the tool of Philosophy, but it is only a tool. The topic of this section is Ethics)
  • "The stubborn man within"
  • Another obstacle to the life of good - Uncertainty
  • Another obstacle to the life of good - The Irrational
• Ideals, ideas and old age
  • Wittgenstein's metaphor of language as an ancient city
    • We define words, not "concepts"
  • Ideals that are lived are not lost
  • There are gifts, but education must also be wanted
• General Definitions. Examples. Having the confidence that one knows.
  • Are applications of a word justified by "family resemblances"? In which sense of 'justify'?
    • The absence of a general definition is the usual case, not the exception
  • General definitions versus examples
  • Stories that are myths [didactic], stories that are history [historiography], and stories that are told for both reasons
  • Nonsense also is not a matter of form

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51. Different Standards versus Different Definitions, Socrates, Practical Wisdom

• Grammatical standards versus Definitions of 'grammar'
  • Comparisons like Definitions ('geometric lines')
• Socrates' method and why?
  • Plato and Wittgenstein
• Examples of Practical (rather than philosophical) Wisdom
  • The Spider and the Fly
  • Self-control, wisdom, and the irrational
• "Fragments make you think"

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50. Silencing Reason

• Which philosophy is a "frightful waste of time"?
• Cats and Catness (Medieval Philosophy)
• Time and God
  • "Defining Knowledge"
    • Philosophy defines words, not things
  • Geometric Points? Not yet again ...
    • Procrustean Grammar
    • But if the word 'geometric point' is not the name of an object, then how shall the word 'geometric point' be defined?
• Historical Theology (Historiography) versus Theology
  • The preservation of doctrine, the a priori rejection of Albert Schweitzer's work
    • "Spiritual knowledge" of Jesus and the historical Jesus
    • Reason versus Belief-In
    • Using "catch-words" to evade a problem
  • The loss of Jesus' kingdom of God

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49. Gifts from the Greeks

• Distinctions with and without Differences
• Forms of Life: "If a lion could talk", it would not understand us.
  • "If a human being could talk ..." (Humor versus esprit)
• "Fragments make you think"
  • The Puzzle of Eddington. The Silence of Wittgenstein.
• Replies to philosophical queries
  • Wisdom to the Greek Philosophers
    • Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries
    • Rhetorical Questions
    • "Complex questions"

---

48. Grammatical Investigations

• Time as a possible Form of life
  • Noticing the Absence of a Concept
    • Acquiring a new concept - Learning to keep track of time
• "My material is far away from me"
  • "How can you know what their problems were, or what they had to do about them?"
    • The Gospel in Brief (1883)
  • Character and Truth
    • Concepts like fisherman's nets
• Quests, questions, and "Questioning everything"
  • Geometry - why can't we draw a point?
  • What Socratic ignorance is Not
  • Is the word 'theory' an important word?
  • Socrates and Apollo's riddle
• The grammars of 'soul' and 'God'

---

47. Freedom from Authority, Freedom from Dogma

• Plato and the historical Socrates
  • The Undue Weight of Authority
    • What is "spirit"?
      • "Disembodied soul"
    • The spell of "Apostolic Authority"
      • "And when they agreed with this also"
    • Sheltering behind an authority
• Leibniz and saving pantheism
  • Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss
• Short Remarks and Philosophical Queries
• What manner of thinker was Albert Schweitzer?
  • What does it mean, to be an "ethical personality"?

---

46. Reverence for Truth

• Wittgenstein and Logic, Concepts and Rules
• The "phenomenon of thought" versus the concept 'thought'
  • "Defining a phenomenon"
    • Phenomena, Concepts, Definition, and Limit
• Aristotle and the Principle of Contradiction
  • "True by definition"
  • Why study philosophy's past?
• What is the future of Christianity without the Medieval World-picture?
  • Religion in the eyes of Anthropology versus Historiography ("Historical Theology")
  • "Would he take his coat? I would not ask that."
    • Marian devotion (Maximilian Kolbe)
    • But finally, what are we calling 'prayer'?
• The meaning of 'definition' in Geometry

---

45. You need not lose these hours

• "Dirty-blonde hair" (The Sandman)
  • Goethe, fable of woman
  • Byron, fables about women
  • Beauty and the Art of Pleasing (Pandora)
  • Der Sandmann - der ironische Zug
• The Way Back Down the Garden Path
  • On the contrary, examples are definitions
  • "The high seas of language"
  • Are "words about whose meaning we are at variance" the names of things whose nature is not clear to us?
  • The limits of my words as the limits of what I can know
    • A radically conventional view of language meaning, or not
  • Plato's grammatical model of measuring in ethics
  • Wittgenstein, Plato, and general definitions
• "World-Negation"
  • Albert Schweitzer's account of Socrates

---

44. The Indefiniteness of God

• "Wittgenstein was a very singular man ..." (Russell)
  • "Nothing is too absurd ..." (Cicero)
• Senses of 'to understand' (language and human experience)
• Defining God: saying "what God is" versus describing our use of the word 'God'
  • "To believe that God is the father is not easy"
  • The Golden Calf
• Preconceptions and Misperceptions (and Puzzlement)
  • The Protean grammar of the word 'God'
  • The faith Schweitzer taught to both Africans and Europeans
  • Schweitzer - a Religious Thinker
  • "The Indefiniteness of God"
  • "My ways are not your ways"
    • Suffering and Providence (levels of religious understanding)
      • Possible only in the first person
    • The God of Stoicism ("pictures" of God)
• Religion is turned aside from the world (Karl Barth)
  • Oskar Kraus' view of Albert Schweitzer's ethical mysticism
• Loss of common ground
  • More from that philosophical letter ("Platonicity")
• Putting one's hand in the fire ... (Virtue is knowledge)
  • Anger and the Philosophical way of life
  • Alcohol and philosophy (the life of thought)
• Mysticism and Ethics

---

43. Defining 'Piety'

• Definition by Related Concepts and by Short Stories
  • 'Piety' in Protestantism
    • Philipp Jakob Spener (Pietism)
      • "Christianity is both introspective and active"
    • Albert Schweitzer's view of J.S. Bach
      • Protestant sacred music - the chorale
  • 'Piety' without an explicit religious connection
  • About 'Piety' and 'Reverence', the concepts
• Definition in the Euthyphro ('piety', 'holiness')
  • Definition in Xenophon
• Emotion and Ethics
  • "Logic and the heart" (Schweitzer)
• "From bad companions you learn bad habits"

---

42. From a Provincial Monk to his Friend in the Capital

• Certainty in Ethics
  • Is Albert Schweitzer's ethics rational? (Werner Picht)
    • "The non-rational conclusion of thought"
    • "Compassion is the foundation of ethics"
      • If compassion is the excellence proper and unique to man, then life in accord with that excellence is the good for man
  • Wittgenstein and Ethics
• Mysticism or reason: Is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" a guide to how man should live his life?
  • Ethics as exhortation rather than argument (Wittgenstein)
  • Wittgenstein and presumptuous ignorance (Bach's Fugues)
• What makes someone into a philosopher? (Albert Schweitzer)
• Philosophical Replies to Philosophical Queries
  • Wittgenstein, definition, comparison, metaphysics
  • Physical and logical atoms
    • But particles of what?
    • What is matter?
  • Is time discrete or continuous?
  • Eddington's one table
  • Wittgenstein and the concept 'infinity'
  • Wittgenstein's second "real definition" of logic
• The Limit of Sense
  • "The peace that surpasses all understanding"

---

41. Colonialism, Albert Schweitzer, and Racism

• "The child of nature"
  • Primitive man is not inwardly free
  • The Setting, the Background
  • "A standard bearer of civilisation"
    • The Gospel and the Indigenes
      • The religion of primitive man
  • The Philosophical Mind, or, The Transcendence of Specific Time and Space
    • Harsh words ... in context
    • Bertrand Russell's words when Schweitzer died
    • Civilization, Education and Colonialism

[Three lines of thought came together | Economic independence and health]

---

40. In the beginning ... there was no plan

• The Deed versus the Word
  • The ethical riddle of the natural world
    • "So that the blind pangs even of beasts ..."
• Albert Schweitzer's demarcation of the philosopher's quest
  • Schweitzer's view of Late Stoicism
  • Man's philosophy must determine his way of life
• Russell, Voltaire, Maths and Tautologies
  • Does Bertrand Russell resemble Socrates?
    • "Communism meant the end of all freedom" (Russell's judgment)
    • Russell's aristocratic ideal (Enlightenment France)
  • There are many, many meanings of 'meaning'
  • Socrates, Protagoras, Opinion
    • Socrates' response to Apollo's riddle
    • Protagoras and geometry's tangent
  • Is philosophy merely "a matter of opinion"?
    • Plato and two myths of the absolute
    • The trouble with the form of expression 'philosophical opinion' is the notion mistakenly inferred from it

---

39. Each day grow older, and learn something new

• Short Queries and Replies
  • Naturalizing a Myth
• "The law is what God commands"
• Remarks written in the margin
  • A Second Reformation
  • Ways of Life versus Forms of Life - Degrees of Choice
    • Olya's Way of Life
    • The Feline Form of Life
    • The MAD Way of Life
    • Hezbollah and the Presbyterian pastor in Beirut, Lebanon
    • "Who was then a gentleman?"
  • Foreword and Afterword

---

38. Did Socrates define words or things?

• Did Socrates have a logic of language?
• "We are taught to imagine objects that we never see ..."
  • The relation between syntax and meaning
• A Picture World of Reasoned Mythology (Metaphysics)
  • Plotinus and "plain nonsense"
• Causality and Time-Travel
  • What, then, is time not real?
  • An Animal that uses Language (Aristotle's "definition of man")
  • "Potential Energy" (For Philosophy of Science)
• The concept 'God' wobbles (For Philosophy of Religion)
  • Polytheism, monotheism, and evil
• Density in philosophy
  • If philosophy is a river, it is a river of cataracts (Bruckner)
  • Pretensions ("Know thyself!")
    • "Cobbler, stick to thy last"
  • "The Bird's-eye View"
  • Character or Intelligence

---

37. The Basic Criticism of Wittgenstein's logic of language

• Fundamental Puzzlement ("name of a phenomenon")
  • Names of objects
  • Names of phenomena
  • Concepts define phenomena, not phenomena concepts
  • Defining phenomena (real definition)
    • Learning is based on its foundation (step by step)
  • Is philosophy nothing but grammatical investigations?
    • Two examples of that method, unresolved
    • Horrific words: 'abstraction', 'abstract term', 'abstract object'
• Fundamental Criticism of Wittgenstein's logic of language
• Remarks for Nowhere or Somewhere Else
  • "The limits of my language ..." (But what does it mean?)
    • Taken out of context, misunderstood
  • Nutshells of Seven Towers
  • Language meaning in the absence of meaning

---

36. Abstract Chessmen, Philosophical Jargon, Geometric Points

• Standards and Definitions
  • Philosophy and Jargon
    • To speak in ordinary comprehensible language
  • Reading Philosophy in Translation
• Is the chess-king a chess-king?
  • Can you play chess without the king?
• Geometric Points, again and again
  • Grammatical Jokes
    • Zero dimensional, an object without extension
    • Through the Looking-Glass
    • A 'point' is 'a unique address in the plane'
      • Philosophy and the teacher of geometry
      • Points invisible
      • Words that are not geometry's jargon
      • Geometry and the "wounded understanding"
    • What is Jabberwocky without Humpty Dumpty's explanations of language meaning (Who defines undefined terms?)
      • A misleading form of expression, because the "undefined terms" are defined, although not by geometers
        • This way ... because the other way is mistaken
      • Points, arrows, locations
      • What is geometry about?
    • Philosophical Grammar is questions about logical possibility, not about real possibility
      • "Words that name the same thing"
      • The Consequences of an inappropriate form of expression
• The Socrates of Plato: Seeking a Universal Standard for Ethics

---

35. Three Conceptions of Philosophy

• Preface. Wittgenstein. Schweitzer. Socrates.
  • Logic and Ethics (Socrates)
  • Schweitzer and World-view
  • Relationship between these three conceptions
  • Some Historical Aims in Philosophy
• (1) Is Philosophy a Mistake?
  • "Don't stop thinking"
  • Wittgenstein's Achievement
  • Pro et Contra Wittgenstein
    • "Metaphysics does not distinguish verbal from real definitions"
      • "The starry sky above, and the moral law within"
    • "That philosophical problems should completely disappear"
    • "Life is Problematic" (The riddle does exist)
      • Original thoughts, eleven years earlier
        • "The murky background"
        • "Without sorrow"
    • Promethean Rebellion
    • An account of what Wittgenstein knows (The Socratic standard)
      • "The deepest problems are really no problems"
      • Ethics as religion rather than philosophy
    • Why is unclarity sought?
      • Does Wittgenstein's sidestep of Plato's puzzle find the correct conception?
      • Logic-philosophy and hypotheses
    • Classical philosophy and Wittgenstein
  • The question about meaning replaces the question of truth and falsity
    • Wittgenstein's later method in philosophy (Sense rather than truth)
  • And judgment is replaced by description
    • But to describe language is to describe facts
  • Meaning versus impressions of meaning
• (2) Schweitzer - Philosophy as "World-view" Formation
  • Schweitzer and World-view
  • Weltanschauung (Schweitzer, Wittgenstein)
• (3) Socrates versus Wittgenstein
  • The three four lines of thought that have formed my own thinking
    • Can philosophy be taught?
    • Aeschines, companion of Socrates in love of learning

---

34. Socrates, Guilty in Law, Equity, Owls, Essence and Frogs

• "Essence Belongs to Grammar"
  • Are some concepts forced on us?
• The Owl and the Egg
• About the Ancient Greeks
  • Things [Ideas] the Greeks Created [Invented]
  • Freedom in Athens
  • But did Pericles make the Athenians better?
• Aristophanes - the Poet [Aeschylus] versus Socrates [Euripides]
  • Poetic wisdom or Socrates?
  • "Socrates was Guilty in Law"
  • 'Equity' and 'Law' are Different Concepts
  • Traditional Views about Socrates
  • Aristophanes' The Frogs (Society is built on complacency, not on skepticism and doubt)
    • To reason out the How and Why (Euripides)
  • Who shall best advise the city?
    • "Taking the Measure of Poetry"
    • "Who knows if death be life, and life be death?" (Euripides)

---

33. Virtue is Knowledge - 'I say I know, but I think I know something else'

• Moral virtue in Plato's Meno
  • The good for man, according to the Greeks
• The irrational and ethics
  • Is vice caused by the body alone or are there other causes?
    • Rational ignorance
• Virtue also requires watchfulness
• Vice is presumptuous ignorance
  • Noble instincts
  • "Virtue is happiness"
• Virtue is Knowledge (It only appears contrary-wise because "I say I know what is good, but I believe I know that something else is". If our way of living shows what we believe)
  • "The will" - a questionable tool of thought
    • Ghost-words (Ghost objects)
  • Wisdom is a virtue: Wisdom is knowledge, and Virtue is wisdom, and therefore Virtue is knowledge (Xenophon)
    • "Knowledge is virtue"
  • "I don't believe it, although I say I know it"
  • In the Garden of Gethsemane ("strength of will")
• Albert Schweitzer's own Christianity
  • The Effect of Reading Nietzsche
    • Bultmann and Bonhoeffer
• Awaiting an insight, a philosophical Gestalt shift

---

32. Philosophy in contrast to Wittgenstein's Logic of Language

• "And we'll grant you all the rest"
  • Drury, "Letters to a Student of Philosophy"
  • A logic or a theory of meaning?
    • Can "the riddle of existence" both exist and not exist?
      • The hippopotamus that is not in the room
  • Verification and Meaning
    • "Forms of life" is and is not a theory
  • Is there a "scientific table"? (Eddington)
  • Relative and Absolute Perspectives
• And we'll grant John Locke all the rest
• Ethics and Aesthetics (Shaftesbury)
• Empirical Psychology
• Wisdom that is not Philosophy? (Confucius)

---

31. Wittgenstein versus Philosophy

• Wittgenstein and pantheism - Conceptual preliminaries
• Wittgenstein's world-view (Rejection of)
  • Spinoza's pantheism: his world-view (nature-philosophy and consequent ethics)
  • Being cured of -- or by philosophy?
  • Wittgenstein's God
    • Plato and the Good (Second Letter)
    • "The essence of the world" after the TLP (Drury's letter to Rhees)
  • "Lost in the Wilderness"
• Ethics and Self-Control
• Not what -- but whom you mean
  • A Muddled Concept
  • Not this picture nor an hypothesis (The world with or without God)
• The Good and God

---

30. Wittgenstein's Master Question

• Socrates and the Professional Philosophers (Sophists)
  • It is not a "stupid" prejudice
    • Thinking that the meaning of a word can be discovered through introspection was not a stupid way of thinking.
  • Friedrich Waismann and "visions" in philosophy
    • Then why give your life to philosophy?
    • Puzzled by why Socrates was "a great philosopher" (Wittgenstein to M. O'C. Drury)
  • "The tyranny of language" (Frege)
  • "Round squares must exist or I could not even deny that they exist"
• Wittgenstein and concepts as a net thrown over reality
  • Wittgenstein's net simile
    • "All meaning is use"
  • Wittgenstein and "philosophy does not explain"
  • Definition by synonym
  • Language twofold: Authority and Convention
    • Our deeply-rooted picture of language meaning
    • Surface versus Depth Grammar
  • "A Real Definition of Philosophy"
  • Wittgenstein's letter to Sraffa (March 1935)
  • What are we calling 'logic'? ("The art of reasoning")
    • "Logical Synthesis"
  • "What applies to the part also applies to the whole", a false grammatical analogy (fallacy)
    • Realism versus Idealism
      • Percepts and concepts ("Concepts without percepts are empty")
• Aims in Philosophy: Russell versus Socrates
• Counting Vanishing Sheep (Philosophy of Mathematics)
  • The Metaphor of the Museum Visitor
• Contradictions and Psychology (Short remarks to philosophical questions)
  • Are contradictions false or senseless?
  • Wittgenstein's Master Question

---

29. When is nonsense not nonsense?

• The limit of science is testable-hypothesis formation
• Categories of Meaning {Classification}
  • Event versus Event-meaning
    • Poor in Categories (Nietzsche)
• A third conception of the essence of the good
• When is nonsense not nonsense?
  • "Language that conveys meaning ..." But what does that mean -- "conveys"?
  • "A simile of one word"
  • Wittgenstein: "the problem of life vanishes"
• Logic and Meaning (their relationship)
  • Geometry and ill-serving similes
  • "Natural Signs"
  • "All philosophy is a critique of language" (whether intentional or not)

---

28. Who are Wittgenstein's philosophers?

• When Wittgenstein says 'philosophers' - What does he mean?
  • Wittgenstein's Shift from asking about truth to asking about meaning
    • Ask about the meaning of the proposition rather than whether it is true or false
  • The meaning of 'geometric point' (For Philosophy of Geometry)
  • Lines and dimensions
  • Human Imagination and the Birth of Philosophy
• Protagoras of Abdera (Greek Sophist-Philosopher)
  • Protagoras in Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers
• "Conventional truth and falsity"
  • Relative and Absolute Truth, the traditional question of philosophy
  • 'Faith in God' - What does it mean? (For Philosophy of Religion)
  • "Doubt on a deeper level"
• Inventing a sense for the text
  • Who decides the meaning of a text?
• "Foundational Propositions" (Chart of relation to grammar and verification)
  • Issac Newton: "... true, or very nearly true"
• Does 'I believe this' mean 'This is the way I live'?
  • What does it mean to say that a bee believes something? (Bees and beekeepers' smoke)
• The Acceptance without understanding of the Scientific World-view by Non-scientists
  • "From God-reliance to Self-reliance"
  • Ethics and Weltanschauung
• Synthetic a priori ("Empirical impossibility")

---

27. Is an unexamined life - worth living?

• In what way might an unexamined life be worthy of a human being?
  • The highest standard of judgment
  • Before you try to answer a question ...
  • The good for a thing is the existence that accords with its undebased nature
    • Not to think oneself wise when one is not
    • Aristotle's "definition of man"
      • A life ruled by instinct is an eternal childhood
• Turning reason against reason
  • "It cannot be proved that man's nature determines what is the good for man" (Hume)
    • If a question of fact is not being disputed here, then what is?
  • Does the test of experience refute the proposition that an unexamined life is not worth living?
  • "Socrates' ethics is also called empiricism"
• Missions and quests in philosophy
  • Why study philosophy?
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Socrates' mission as a philosopher
  • "The riddle does not exist"
    • "A riddle which nobody can solve"
    • Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and nonsense (Where are the limits of what can be done with language?)
  • "The Facts in Plain View"
• More about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the TLP's eccentric definitions of the words 'nonsense' and 'objects')
  • Query: definition of "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
    • Reality according to the TLP
      • Solipsism, or Only I exist
      • What belongs to Grammar
    • Wittgenstein: what philosophy is?
    • But why "my" world? Why not just "the" world?
      • Misunderstanding 'alone I understand'
    • "The world" is a subset of reality (and my world is a subset of the world)
    • Piecing together a philosopher's picture puzzle is not philosophy
      • "Which alone I understand"
        • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.62, tr. Ogden
    • Language, "the world", and knowledge of Reality
• "The slayers of metaphysics"
  • Immanuel Kant
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Three Kinds of definition: synonymous, ostensive, and play-acted
  • Behaviorism and language meaning
  • The requirement of an essential definition
  • Coincidental agreement in way of life
    • Why an essential definition is sought
• Philosophical Queries and Replies
  • "If a lion could talk ..." (but birds do talk, and we don't understand them)
    • Acquainted with another's inner life (soul)

---

26. Undefined in Philosophy and in Mathematics

• The Meaning of 'Undefined' and Mathematics (Waismann)
  • Query: the undefined object in geometry with no dimensions
  • Another "negative definition" of 'point'
• "Is Zero a Number?"
• The Origin of Vagueness - and of Clarity
  • An "unformulated definition"
• "We believe in the Uniformity of Nature"
• The Philosophical Mind
  • "Religious Hypotheses - Subjective Hypotheses"
  • Why does the concept 'God' exist?
    • Heaven and Hell
      • "How we would expect God to be"
  • Three Forms of Captivity
• Meaning is also shown by a statement's implications
  • "May Statements" in Psychology
  • "Unanswerable Questions" - "Unquestionable Answers"
  • Pictures of abstract objects (Queries and Remarks)
• What defines a game?

---

25. Monstrous Gods

• "They at least had God", not the God of the philosophers, however
  • The God of Nature versus the Ethical God
  • The image of God in man - To whom must it be rendered?
    • Objective law versus thoughtful lawlessness
    • God and the Meter Stick
  • The Serpent in the Garden
  • "God the Father" (The Honorary Consul)
    • Belief in God per se
      • Wittgenstein and the Irrational
      • Monstrous Gods (Why the concept 'God'?)
  • Sub specie aeterni

---

24. Goethe - Unity of Life and Thought

• Albert Schweitzer's view of Goethe
  • "Goethe's world-view based on nature-philosophy"
  • "A Unity of Life and Thought"
    • Natural Grace
• Logic Questions. Metaphors.
  • Similes and Common Names

---

23. Is Time not Real?

• Rejecting the grammar that tries to force itself on us: "Time is not real"
  • The level of metaphysics
  • Time as an idle Gestalt shift
• Types of Ostensive Definitions
  • The experience is not the (grammatical) meaning
  • General definition of 'ostensive'
  • The Limits of Definition
• Philosophy of Civilization
  • The Harm done by Schooling
• Existence and Perception (Bishop Berkeley and Dr Johnson)
  • Sense data are blind percepts
  • The meaning of 'nonsense words' (not of 'nonsense')
  • The relation between existence and perception
  • "It may have been" - "It could have been"
  • Is a 'scientific theory' fact-proof?

---

22. Is There a Real Definition of Logic?

• Historical Nominalism
  • George Berkeley's "nominalism"
• The laws of logic as laws of thought
  • Laws of physics versus laws of nature
  • Aristotle on contradiction, the "most incontestable of all thoughts"
  • Is logic the natural science of sound reasoning?
• Critical introduction to Nominalism: What is philosophy?
• Nominal versus Real Definitions (Old remarks)
  • Historical background of the distinction (Aristotle)
    • "Dimly grasped but apprehended by intuition" (What is Man? What is Socrates? And which exists?)
      • Grammar is a public event
    • If you define a thing at all, you must define it "in function of some universal characteristics possessed by the whole class"
    • Seeking knowledge of the world versus Seeking a clear view of our concepts
  • What then is Logic?
    • The word 'logic' as jargon
    • Is there no essence of logic?
      • But if words do not have fixed meanings ...
  • Realism versus Nominalism
    • Transubstantiation (Aristotle, substance, accident)
      • Which things have substance, and which do not?
    • Logic from a Metaphysical Point of View
  • "The existence of concepts"
  • Is regarding words as names of objects the origin of all philosophical confusion?
• Fact versus Theory in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein
  • Metaphysics and word magic ("meaning in itself")
    • "What makes you think that a grammatical joke is deep?" (PI § 111)
  • Family resemblances is not a theory but a metaphor
• Why are we not afraid?
  • Irrational Fears
  • "The Uniformity of Nature"
    • "A light that shines in the darkness of fear" (Being freed from superstition)

---

21. Philosophy begins in Wonder

• "Philosophy begins in wonder", in being perplexed (Plato)
  • "Wonder" and philosophy in Aristotle
  • Socrates as a special case of philosophy beginning in wonder
  • Generalization and Presumption
    • Perplexed by death
  • Metaphysics and Curiosity
    • Philosophy begins in "mistakes in language"
    • Philosophy begins at the age of reason when the impulse to form one's own worldview begins
    • Philosophy, chaos and order
    • Philosophy and the Birth of Learning
  • Perplexity and semantic grammar
    • "Philosophy begins in the things human beings say"
  • Samuel Johnson
• Cause and Correlation
  • Statistics - Generalities (Max Frisch)
  • Facts Replaced by Theories

---

20. Sign, Symbol, and Grammar - Earlier and Later Wittgenstein

• WI versus WII, or, "the Earlier and Later Wittgenstein"
• "Sign", "Symbol", "Rules of Grammar"
  • 'sign' versus 'symbol'
  • "Ideal language", "Reform of language"
  • The word 'nonsense' in the TLP
• "Must there be a reason?" versus "Can there be a reason?"
• Moore and the skeptic, as anyone can see -- afterwards
  • Objective versus Subjective Meaning, or, Logic versus "Whatever seems correct"
  • "Why are they called undefined terms when we can in fact define them?" (Geometry)
    • Zero-dimensional Nonsense
    • Which definition of 'definition' does Geometry use?
    • Mathematicians as Philosophers

---

19. The ethical God and the God of Nature (Originally "The God of ethics versus the God of Nature")

• "... we have no time to give to philosophy" (Phaedo 66b-d)
• Is religious language meaningless?
• If "the meaning is the use in the language" - Propositions versus hypotheses
• The Religion of Jesus
  • Can God command that what is not good be done?
    • Saint Anselm and the essence of God (Perfection)
    • Omnipotence versus Benevolence
    • God and the forces of nature in the Religion of Jesus

---

18. Philosophy and Wisdom

• The Wise Men of Greece
  • Abraham and Socrates
  • Inscribed inside the temple of Apollo at Delphi
    • "Nothing too much"
  • Who were the Seven Sages?
  • "Proverbial wisdom, a preliminary phase of Greek philosophy" (Plato)
    • But is it philosophy?
• Confucius, Wisdom and Philosophy
  • Confucius: "Your duty is at the bottom of a well."
  • Education is to listen, not question
  • "What is know?" (Confucian humor)
  • Why did people abandon Stoicism's "simple kind of philosophizing"?
  • Poetry versus Reason
    • Distances in time: Abraham, Socrates, Descartes
• Mo Tzu, Chinese philosopher?

---

17. Metaphysicians let the words speak to them

• Empiricism versus Rationalism (Wittgenstein's account)
  • The models of Mathematics and Natural Science
  • Metaphysics without ethics (The applicability of Wittgenstein's project in philosophy)
• "Empirical Possibility"
  • "Metaphysics obliterates the distinction" (Z § 458)
  • Confucius and Socrates
  • Philosophy and Theory
  • "Logic" and "Grammar", and Jargon
    • Children's riddles and Philosophy (Kings and metersticks)
      • The riddle of curiosity
      • Shadows of grammar riddles
• Is Philosophy about First but not Last Questions?
  • Laying a foundation versus tidying a room
  • Solutions to the Riddle of Existence
  • Does Religion belong to "the childhood of mankind"?
    • Can one feel that God himself is not implicated in evil?
  • But surely this does not belong to humanity's childhood (The religious sense of existence)
    • Reason in Mystery
    • The eternal questions as a pattern or way of life

---

16. What did Wittgenstein Want from Philosophy?

• "The logic of our language is misunderstood"
  • "Theories of language"
  • Wittgenstein's logic as a life rope. And as a broom.
  • Verbal and Real Definitions of concepts
    • Air Pressure: definitions in natural science
  • "Love is not a feeling" - Wittgenstein's remark is Logic of Language
    • Zettel § 504
• Is there "a Metaphysical Use" of Language?
  • Pictures versus Meaning
  • Of what value is a word's "original home"?
    • A 'logic of language' is objective
    • "Community of Ideas"
      • The Gospel of love, doctrine, and Catholic faith
      • The concerns of a particular community versus the foundations of all communities
      • Law and "any reasonable man"
    • Does a ruler have a length?
    • Must the human appendix have once upon a time been functional?
    • Examples of metaphysical propositions
  • What do we mean by 'parable'?
• What remains to philosophy?
  • What is Philosophical Integrity? ("For the gods are / see everywhere")
  • What I know (or think I know) about Mathematics

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15. Is the Solar System Real?

• "Lying beneath our hands and before our eyes"
• Is the Solar System Real?
  • Must a Scientific Theory be Falsifiable?
    • Is "survival of the fittest" Falsifiable?
    • Is "natural selection" Falsifiable?
  • And if a species is immutable?
• The Relation between signs and ideas
  • Is Philosophy Unimportant?
    • Mathematics is independent of Philosophy

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14. Why Question Everything?

• Question everything (The project of philosophy)
  • "But what did that mean, everything?" To the very foundations of one's life and thought
  • "Test all things; keep what is good" (Paul the Apostle)
  • Socrates, the philosopher (Method, truth, standard)
    • Apollo and the Two Tests
    • The Sophists versus Socrates
    • Asking versus telling
  • "Suspect everything" (Descartes in literature)
  • Why question everything? Why doubt all things?
    • To doubt is to exist (Augustine)
    • Descartes' method in philosophy
  • Socrates and Descartes contrasted

• Socratic Wisdom
  • Socrates' paradox
  • Background to the Socratic Method
    • Socrates' inductive method of definition (in Plato, Aristotle)
  • "I know I am not wise"
    • Chaerephon's Delphic story is attested by both Plato and Xenophon
  • Marcus Cato's view of Socrates
  • Voltaire's view of Socrates
    • Socrates' daemon ("familiar sign")
    • The Athenian indictment against Socrates
      • "Dare to know" (Kant)
    • "Was Voltaire a philosopher?"
  • Stoicism under Rome
    • "The elementary questions man must ask"
  • The historical Socrates as philosophy

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13. Russell's sense of the word 'grammar'

• "Logic is the study of everything subject to rules"
• Wittgenstein, Russell, 'grammar', and 'the same sense'
  • Must logic be objective?
  • Russell's "philosophical grammar"
• Logic, metaphysics, "misdirections" (Logic is the language of metaphysics)
  • Using examples to explain the meaning of the word 'logic'
  • What would the world be like without Philosophy?
    • Wittgenstein and the "last word"
      • Wittgenstein and the end of philosophy
• Theory-making in Philosophy
• Elizabeth Anscombe's grave
  • "I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope they do" (Wittgenstein to Drury)
• John Wisdom's grave
• "Go the bloody hard way!" (The duty of mankind)
  • There are many levels of culture (Engelmann)
  • "Please go the bloody rough way!" (Wittgenstein to Rhees)
  • The renunciation of vanity
  • The words 'ethics' and 'morals', a distinction without a difference

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12. Socrates and Wittgenstein

• Wittgenstein and Socrates - The Origins of their Philosophical Quests Contrasted
  • Wittgenstein's incomprehension of Socrates
    • "The logic of our language is misunderstood"
    • Between Socrates and Plato. Who was Socrates?
    • Between Socrates and Plato (Who was Socrates?)
  • What philosophy is? "That is a philosophical question" (But is it?)
    • Concepts "too vague by far"
    • Mathematics and Metaphysics (opposites)
  • "Philosophy as Ignorance or Nonsense"
    • "Conceptual investigations are idle" (Russell)
    • Of Cats and Men
    • Dissimilarities, but also similarities
    • Philosophy of Ockham
    • Meaning, public, objective, Wittgenstein, Socrates
      • The account books of language
  • What do we mean by 'conceived as'?
    • "A concept is a set of rules and a set of rules is a game"
  • Philosophy, not entirely an unrequited love
  • More things in Heaven and earth
    • "An unjust world is a meaningless world"
  • The Vox populi ("Assimilating Wittgenstein")
    • As if philosophy could ever have "lots of friends"
    • Philosophers come and go, but philosophy is always philosophy
• Rules, the subject of logic. And Games.
  • The logic of comparison
  • Aristotle's ethics and logic tautologies
• The word 'God', what is its use in the language?

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11. Criticism of Meaning as Use

• Wittgenstein's question
  • Two possible answers - The first
  • Two objections - The first
  • Two objections - The second
  • Two possible answers - The second
  • Rules of a game comparison and consequent first criticism
    • First criticism
    • Logic of meaning versus Theory of meaning
    • Tilt at windmills, not pinwheels. Philosophers and Sophists
    • Logic DEF.= the study of rules
    • Wittgenstein's comparisons
  • "Questions that are not" - Second criticism
• Words and Things. Are all words the names of real things?
  • "Theaetetus-flies"
  • Define the question before you try to answer it
    • The correct interpretation versus various possible interpretations
  • Grammar without Rules
  • The Limits of the Method of Language Games
  • Criticism of "Meaning is Use"
• The Philosophers of Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment
  • "What philosophy is?"
• "The Language of Percepts" is Concepts
  • Umbrella versus Essence
  • Moral Concepts
  • Among my teachers in Philosophy
    • The philosophers from whom I have most learned
    • The Winter Seed
  • "The Lord is kind, and his goodness is everlasting"
  • Unphilosophical Remarks
    • Belief is measured by willingness to take risks (Ramsey)
• Eduard Zeller's Account of Socrates
  • Knowledge of the Good
• The Irrational, and Rationality Gone Mad
  • Rationalism as madness
• Ways of Life, and Philosophy as Definition
  • Metaphysics and thought-experiments
  • "Language and thought"
  • Socrates' Philosophy of Definitions

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10. Philosophy and Death

• What are we calling 'Reality'?
  • Why Study Philosophy then?
  • Aristotle - Is death to be feared?
  • "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal." (Philosophy as a point of view & a way of life)
    • Things more important than death
    • Death's implication for Socrates
      • The foundations of Socrates' ethics
      • Socrates and self-control (temperance, self-discipline)
• Philosophy and oblivion-seeking
  • The body, according to Plato - But is that its only role?
    • Analogy to a Shadow
    • "The Reality behind Reality"
    • On the other hand ...
  • The Thing in Itself: Reality beyond the Individual
    • Shadows versus Reality
  • Ethics, Metaphysics, and Reality
• Infinal Acts
  • Life becomes burdensome
    • The Why of existence
• Appearance and Reality - "On a deeper level"
  • More than the appearance of death?
    • Implicit agreement in language conventions
  • "Life Forms" and Concept-formation
  • Plato and the Body and Logic [Grammar]
• About death, lasting remarks

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9. Why Philosophy Cannot be Easy

• Concepts and Abstractions
• Why Philosophy cannot be Easy
  • Query: Wittgenstein easy
  • Showing every step in the line of thought
  • "Weaknesses of Wittgenstein's language games"
• Religion and "primitive language games" (Origins)
  • Prayer as a "language game"
  • Description versus Judgment
    • "My new way of philosophizing" (Wittgenstein)
  • Philosophy criticises its own foundations
• The Logic of Natural Language Versus Formal Logic
• How to say the whole thing in a few words?
  • What can be worthwhile about the site?
    • Lichtenberg, age, apostle
• "General Linguistics-Semantics"
  • Sowing Ideas (Philosophy beneath the Snow)

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8. Is it Possible to Doubt Everything?

• Absolute skepticism as a picture with no application
  • The eternal questions without answers as a "form of life"
  • Is it possible to doubt everything? The limit of investigation
• "Question Everything" (Descartes)
  • "In practical life only"
    • The limit of Wittgenstein
  • What did Socrates question?
  • Absolute skepticism (Pyrrhonism)
  • "The truth is not determined by taking a vote" (Plato versus Aristotle)
  • The foundations of the moon
  • "I cannot doubt that I exist, because I must exist to doubt" (Augustine)
  • Should anyone philosophize?
• What do we mean by 'understand'?
  • Mr. Ballard (philosophical thoughts without words)

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7. How did Wittgenstein see himself?

• "Biblical versus Greek" [For Philosophy of Religion]
  • "The Good is whatever God orders" (Wittgenstein's religion and submission to the will of God)
    • Origin of the Concept 'Mind' (The "mind-body" distinction)
      • History of the concept 'mind'
• Showing rather than saying the "deeper meaning" (For Play-acted rules of grammar)
• Faith and Rationality
  • But how does one think of God?
  • Reverence where it's due (But is it due?)
  • The "Meaning of the Facts" versus the Facts Themselves
  • Nationalism as Religion
    • A Metaphor for Nationalism
  • Einstein, the artisan (Apology 22d-e), and the Atomic Bomb (Seiei Shinohara)
    • There are limits to what I can do to defend what is good, and I must accept those limits (Lichtenberg)
    • "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy ..." (Philosophy is criticism)
      • "Wittgenstein's view of Western Civilization" (according to Rush Rhees)
    • Tribal Exclusions - From Two Directions
    • The Straw Man (The scarecrow, the man who is not there)
    • "Me and my people" (Another Example)
      • Pragmatism's definition of 'believe'
• Science (Archeological and Genetic Research) and Ethics
  • "Wittgenstein and Race"
    • Wittgenstein and the Enlightenment
    • 'Race' - What does it mean?
    • What was Wittgenstein asserting about himself??

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6. Knowing and Saying

• The Philosophy of Socrates: must we be able to "give an account of what we know"? (explain and defend in cross-questioning what we know to others)
  • If there is to be knowledge (Socrates), and if language meaning is to be objective (Wittgenstein)
  • To know = To have thought the thing through (to be able to state the reasons for and against)
  • Absolute Preconception (Plato and Heraclitus)
  • Is there a particular definition of the word 'know' that should be used in philosophy?
    • Is there a particular definition of the word 'meaning' that should be used in philosophy?
  • Knowing by touch rather than by sight
  • Abstraction, Clarinets and Games
  • "Is the meaning of a word justifiable?"
• Does Augustine know what time is?
  • What would it be like for everyone to be mistaken?
• Language, knowledge, Socrates
  • Aristotle, imagery and thought
• Plato's Meno and "grammatical reminders"
  • The Socrates with questions and not the Socrates with answers (History and Plato)
• Is there no general definition of 'to measure'?
  • "To give an account"
  • "Well, I have a general idea of it"

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5. Ethics and Values

• Ethics and Nature-Philosophy
  • World-view and Wandering through Life
    • Schweitzer's use of language
  • Human and Non-human Values (What is amoral cannot teach man morality)
    • Rebellion versus Acceptance (Western man)
      • But Christianity's God ≠ Nature, and it is Nature we are at war with
    • Reverence for Life (Albert Schweitzer)
      • "The brotherhood (fellowship) of those who bear the mark of pain"
      • Reverence also for plant life
      • "A village of the kingdom of God"
      • Relation to St. Francis of Assisi
  • Ethics versus Values
    • Ethics has no foundation
    • Prudence before revising moral values
  • The Foundations of Ethics
    • A foundation does not stand on the same level as other propositions
• Canine versus Human "Forms of Life"
• "Dysfunctional Evolution"

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4. Why don't we speak of negative numerals?

• Whole and Negative Numbers
  • Worshiping negative numbers
  • Negative Numerals, Words and "Word-als"
    • What are numbers?
    • Words and "wordals"
• Children are encouraged, and like, to use their imaginations
• Equivalent-word definitions
  • Definition in Mathematics
• "Empiricism" and "Rationalism"
  • The two halfs of knowledge seeking
  • Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• For "What philosophy is?"
  • Metaphors and Philosophical clarity
  • Aeneas and the golden bough
  • Unburied Souls
• What do we call academic 'scholarship'?
  • "Review of the literature"
• Knowledge by Any Other Name
  • Contradiction is not the only god in logic. It is not even a god in logic.

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3. Classification of Metaphysical Statements

• Wittgenstein's view of Metaphysics, continued
  • The Endless Afternoon of Metaphysics
  • Blaise Pascal's view of Metaphysics
  • Metaphysics and magic
• Sources for Wittgenstein's definition of 'sign'
  • Convention to indicate a sign with quotation marks
    • G.E. Moore's distinction between a sign and its sense
• "Perhaps only genius can understand genius" (Robert Schumann)
  • Through whose eyes shall we see Wittgenstein?
• The Reductionism of the Physicists
• What Philosophy is? (continued)
  • "A book to teach you how to think"
  • What is a Philosopher?
  • The Old School
    • Moore, Russell, Explanations of meaning
  • "Physical Theories" versus Hypotheses (Galileo and the Holy Office)
• "With the idea, now is always"

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2. Did Wittgenstein have a Philosophy of Language?

• Philosophy of Language versus Logic of Language (a limited interest in language)
  • Did Wittgenstein have a theory of grammar?
  • Did Wittgenstein have a philosophy of language?
    • Wittgenstein's Break with the Speculative Tradition in Philosophy
      • Meaning in the TLP versus Meaning in the Philosophical Investigations
    • Contrast to J. L. Austin
  • The anthropologist's view of language: Wittgenstein imposed his game metaphor on what he observed
    • More Features of Games
  • "Language is nothing but names of things"
    • Definition of 'noun'
• Wittgensteinian ("A philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas")
  • Jargon and Wittgenstein
  • "When you are playing ping-pong, you mustn't use a tennis racket"
    • Bach's dedication of his work, and Wittgenstein

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1. The Point of View of Grammar and Sense and Nonsense

• Wittgenstein defined a point of view
  • Are philosophy's problems without solutions?
  • Is Metaphysics Nonsense?
    • Idealism, Realism, and physical objects
  • Science versus Metaphysics
• "Sense data" and Seeing-As [For Malcolm's view of G.E. Moore]
• Does Mathematics consist Entirely of Rules?
• What is the difference between a scientific and a metaphysical theory?
• 'Beauty' and Karamazov [For Wittgenstein's Aesthetics]
• What Philosophy is? [For Notes about C.D. Broad and Wittgenstein]
  • What am I calling philosophy? (Limits of interest)
• "Time isn't real" [For The meaning of 'meaning' in Wittgenstein's logic of language]
  • "Is economics a science?"
• Do you know what is said if you do not know why it is said?
• "Biblical" versus "Greek" - Wittgenstein's view of the Good
  • "Here I do not use reason"
    • On "Spirituality"
• Picturing a world where 2 + 2 = 5
  • Between mathematical and empirical propositions (Poverty in categories. Achilles and the tortoise)

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• Quotations and comments removed from "Care of the Soul"

• Care of the soul, the religious way
• "Jesus, an imperious ruler" (Albert Schweitzer)
  • "Jesus remains what he was"
  • "Once freed from history" (one possible view of this)
    • Subject to natural reason alone
• "As we have forgiven those who have wronged us"
  • The silent saints
  • Know thy own wrong-doing
  • Christianity and Stoicism
  • As, not more, than
  • The Mind of Job
• The pharisaic Church
  • "Why I am not a Catholic"
• What do we mean by the word 'forgive'?