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"Sometimes rats, sometimes worse"

Background (logic of language)

If there were no objective distinction between sense and nonsense (in other words, if there were no logic of language, i.e. if language were akin to a game without rules), then philosophy, which is discourse of reason ('discourse', combining both its present and archaic senses, here meaning 'the ability to use language to reason'), would be idle, as it would be if the meaning of language were private (as W.E. Johnson thought) rather than open to the public (and therefore objective, verifiable), because then language could not be put to the test in discussion -- i.e. discourse -- to determine whether it was spoken sounds and written marks with meaning or without meaning (The standard Socrates' set for philosophy is that if anyone knows anything, he can explain what he knows to others (Xenophon, Memorabilia iv, 6, 1; cf. PI §§ 210, 208)).

But no one will seek to find an objective distinction between sense and nonsense unless he first feels perplexed by the vagueness and confusion of our "concepts" (i.e. our language) and distrustful of unclear metaphors -- as "no one seeks to know what he thinks he already knows" (Plato, Meno 84c).

Does philosophy have its origin in language or in [the nature of our] existence? Is the answer either/or or some rather than all?

The old and the new logic of language

It seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] and the new ones [Philosophical Investigations] together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking. (Preface, p. ix)

The old way of thinking: words are names, and the meaning of a name is the thing the word stands for, a thing quite independent of man in its existence, whether that thing is an object or a phenomenon, tangible or "abstract". Or in other words, the meaning of a word is the thing in itself the word names; and so there can be hypotheses (speculation) about the meaning of the word, i.e. about the essential nature of the thing the word names, as in Plato's investigation of abstract terms such as 'piety' and 'justice' (abstract terms name abstract things).

The new way of thinking: the meaning of a word in the language is the public use that we as a community make of the word to do some work in our life. In other words, the meaning of a word is a convention (normally co-incidental rather than contractual, as is best explained by this parable). But the selections and revisions of concepts, the elements of Wittgenstein's new way of thinking, is a bit long to describe and longer to absorb, although it is a simple story in words of one syllable.

When philosophers use a word and try to grasp the essence of the thing .... A picture held us captive. (PI §§ 116, 115)

This is that picture: the meaning of a word is the essence of the thing the word names, an essence that exists independently of man's language and about which man can only speculate, allowing his imagination to speak to him.

The preconception

You say to me: "You understand this expression, don't you? Well then -- I am using it in the sense you are familiar with." -- As if the sense were an atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application. (ibid. § 117)

That "atmosphere" [halo] would be the essence of the thing the word names -- i.e. the word's presumed meaning -- which of course does not change with "every kind of application" of the word -- i.e. every circumstance in which the word is used. "The essence of a thing cannot be reduced or altered without destroying the thing" -- No, it cannot -- but that is a definition of the word 'essence', not a statement about reality distinct from language.

"A picture held us captive." The capture is our being unable to imagine an alternative to that picture of language meaning.

The revised conception

... One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.... It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off. (ibid. §§ 114, 103)

Because we cannot see without them. Until someone, e.g. Wittgenstein, suggests another way to see, i.e. to look at language meaning.

When philosophers use a word ... and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language game which is its original home? --

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (ibid. § 116)

That is Wittgenstein's "new way of thinking", to ask: What's that when it's at home? = How do we normally use the word in our language to do some work in our life? (A 'language game' is 'an activity using language, obeying more or less strict rules'.)

... in what special circumstances is this [word] actually used. There it does make sense [i.e. have meaning]. (ibid. § 117)

And the rest of this discussion must be referred to a description of Wittgenstein's revision of the concept 'grammar' and his identification of the logic of language with grammar.

"Final, unassailable and definitive"

Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel großer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist. (Nestroy)

"All progress appears much greater than it really is." Why is this? Because every great breakthrough strikes us as the great breakthrough -- "final, unassailable and definitive" (Preface to the TLP). Thus in the case of Wittgenstein's later work we overlook that the meaning of 'meaning' Wittgenstein chose for his work in philosophical logic is not the only one possible -- i.e. that Wittgenstein's logic of language is a logic of language, not the logic of language, and that Wittgenstein's way of looking at philosophical problems is a way of looking at philosophical problems, not the way.

Wittgenstein's way of looking at philosophy appears to make philosophical problems disappear, not by solving them, but by showing that they are not problems at all, but really grammatical misunderstandings.

What makes you think that a grammatical joke is deep? And that is the depth of philosophy. (PI § 111)

We fail to see much that the hypothesis doesn't include ... (DW p. 100)

Some is not all, and although Wittgenstein dismissed Plato's question of the essence of man, the afterlife, rational ethics, and other eternal questions, they have not gone away, but philosophy remains in the condition Socrates described. Despite Wittgenstein's early denial, existence is problematical: "the riddle" does exist (as he himself later acknowledged).

A title for Wittgenstein's book

Wittgenstein: I have been wondering what title to give my book. I have thought of something like "Philosophical Remarks".

Drury: Why not just call it "Philosophy"?

Wittgenstein: [angrily] ... how could I use a word like that which has meant so much in the history of human thought? As if my work was anything more than just a small fragment in the history of philosophy. (Conversation from 1949, Recollections p. 160)

The speaker was not a modest man, but he did not believe that his own way of philosophizing was the only possible way, but that there are other ways that are not philosophically stupid as well. That was his later view. His earlier view was that his way alone was the correct way ("... unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved" (tr. Ogden)).

Query: Wittgenstein, teacher of wisdom.

Wisdom is what the TLP claims to be: "... then he will see the world aright" (6.54, tr. Pears, McGuinness). "I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book" (Preface to the Philosophical Investigations).

The Fox and the Cat (Pinocchio)

The Scylla and Charybdis of philosophy: Philosophy without Wittgenstein's [later] logic of language and Philosophy as only Wittgenstein's logic of language, the paired monsters that would destroy rather than "heal the wounded understanding".

Forward to the Beginning

Whenever anyone argued with him on any point without being able to make himself clear, asserting but not proving ... Socrates would lead the whole discussion back to the definition (logos) required ... (Xenophon, Memorabilia iv, 6, 13)

Those who have no need for clarity (transparent reasoning/reasons) are lost for philosophy. (Wittgenstein, "Philosophy" § 89 in The Big Typescript, tr. Luckhardt and Aue)

"Sometimes rats, sometimes worse"

"Cut away whatever is superfluous," the fourteenth century philosopher said. But what is superfluous to philosophy?

I also believe that drunk men see things -- sometimes rats, sometimes worse. (Greene, The Third Man)

Philosophy is about seeing what is there -- and even more about not seeing what is not there, thinking one knows what one doesn't know. There shouldn't be more things in our compendia of philosophy "than can be found in either Heaven or earth" (Lichtenberg; cf. Hamlet i, 5). What a drunk man sees is akin to what a madman sees, thinking he knows what he doesn't know; thinking oneself wise when one is not -- is not knowing oneself, Socrates says in both Xenophon and Plato. In philosophy we want never to say more than we know (BB p. 45), particularly in answering the question of metaphysics, namely of what is real, what illusion.

Outline of this page ...

No shade ... no leaves. November. (Thomas Hood)

Assumptions in November

Query: who gave the name philosophy?

The man who said he was not wise, but clearly was wise enough to see that he was not. The invention of the name 'philosophy' (or 'philosopher', which was the word and idea that can first) was a thought of genius. [Genius is not always easy to recognize, although once the way has been pointed out, the way may seem obvious.] Modesty gave the name 'philosopher' ("lover of wisdom"), in contrast to 'sophist' ("wise man"), to philosophers. The name may have been given by Pythagoras (Later Plato made the distinction even sharper, contrasting the philosopher with God).

Query: Plato, oracle, wise. A wise man knows that he does not know.

Apollo does not say that Socrates is a wise man -- as Chaerephon did not ask if Socrates was a wise man, but rather if anyone was wiser than Socrates. And in Plato's view there is an essential difference between the two statements, and Plato derives the meaning of Apollo's words from that difference: no man is wiser than Socrates because no man is wise -- except in so far as he does not think himself wise when he is not (Apology 23a-b).

"A wise man knows that he does not know" -- and that is all he knows, that he is not wise. That was both Socrates' self-knowledge and wisdom, according to Plato's Apology.

Query: the course of questioning everything.

The word 'course' may suggest a step-by-step method or protocol, or not (e.g. "the course of true love"). The academic course is called 'Philosophy'. Frederick Copleston's history describes two ways the Socratic method begins, namely, either with a thesis or a question, but that difference ends when cross-questioning begins.

[In another sense of 'course', there is the academic rote course ("of course"), which contrasts with the extramural course called 'skepticism', which would be another answer to the query.]

Query: first year philosophy questions.

Why? do you think the questions can be different in your tenth or fortieth year of studying philosophy? Your view of the questions may change and change again (You may stop asking them, or ask them in a different way), but the general questions themselves do not change. Philosophical questions cannot be finally answered, not by you, not by anyone, because philosophy is Socratic dialectic, discussion that does not end.

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me. (OC § 418)

It not only seems, but must be in philosophy. Philosophy is Proteus -- whenever you think you have finally uncovered its secrets, you discover that it has eluded you again. Understanding in philosophy is protean. And "in that case we never get to the end of our work ..." (cf. Z § 447).

"A philosophy is a rational way of looking at things" -- one way, not the only way. (Wittgenstein: "A philosopher says: Look at things this way!") It may be true that some questions are senseless within a particular way of looking at things, but there are other ways (PI § 108) after all, not only that one way. Making yourself aware of other ways is part of thoroughgoing philosophizing, of being a student of philosophy.

Think for yourself

Query: summary of language and definitions in logic.

That is what my Elements of Wittgenstein's Logic of Language ("Synopsis") is intended to be. But that work is original, independent and critical, which is not what is wanted by students, because they are looking for the received view, the school-established order, dogma, and that my site is not. "Dare to doubt!" which is what Kant means when he says "Dare to know" (Sapere aude) -- you have nothing to lose but your preconceptions, the traditions you have been taught and accepted unquestioned, if they prove false.

Dare to use the reason that has been gifted to you to think things through for yourself; Kant's words are the motto of philosophy, whereas the motto of school is "Be brave boys -- Get in line!" (a Soviet slogan) Well, I never liked school, although I did have a few good teachers (although I still hoped it would be a snow-day away from school even for most of them).

[Related: Philosophy and the Sphinx: language riddles the philosopher's understanding.]

There is a difference between the subjects 'Philosophy' and 'History of Philosophy', and I don't know if the first is even taught at school -- or can be taught. For how will anyone do your thinking for you? How will anyone set the questions that you must ask yourself?

Query: know the truth of what you are, that the secret of wisdom is to know your ignorance.

That is what Socrates says in Plato, that to learn to know thyself is to learn humility ("self-knowledge"), to learn how little man knows of what he is (Phaedrus 230a): Why does anything at all exist? Can we perceive everything that exists? What our is death? (Perennial questions) Philosophy is man learning not to over-reach himself, not to think himself wise when he is not, not to think he knows what he does not know.

Query: how philosophy came about?

We have the story of Thales' project in philosophy, to understand the natural world by the natural light of reason alone. And we also have the story of Pythagoras inventing the word 'philosophy'. And there is the story of Apollo's oracle at Delphi and Socrates, as well as the Delphic precept "Know thyself". And there is Plato's view that philosophy began in wonder and wanting to be unbewondered (Aristotle).

Wittgenstein, Hertz, the aim in philosophy

Note: the following comments may not be "quite right in the head", as they try to make sense of what I don't understand -- and let that comment stand for everything I write. (cf. Herodotus vii, 152)

Is Wittgenstein's remark about "Those who have no need for transparent argumentation" in the Socratic spirit (which is the spirit of clarity when reasoning)? It is one of a series of remarks in which Wittgenstein explains what he means by making philosophical problems "disappear" or "dissolve".

The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering them. (Big Typescript § 89)

What does Wittgenstein mean by "putting them in order"? He also uses the expression "tidy up our notions" like we "tidy up a room", restoring order. The "disorder" is in contrast to what is for philosophy a serviceable meaning of 'language meaning', i.e. the disorder has its source in false pictures of our language's logic, of which the principal are that (1) "the meaning of a word is the thing the word stands for", and (2) valid syntax is sufficient to ensure that language has meaning. And the "ordering" is making the semantic grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon) of our language clear. (Note that examination shows that logic is grammar.)

The source of puzzlement: Concepts or Existence?

Thales did not say that philosophy arose from his awareness that our concepts are disordered; rather, philosophy arose out of his awareness of his ignorance of and desire to know ultimate reality. And although Socrates would say that ignorance of our ethical concepts is the source of our ignorance of how to live our life -- by 'concept' he did not mean 'conventions for using a word' but realities such as piety and justice. These philosophers and their successors would not have said that "philosophical problems = conceptual problems" (Z § 458) if that means that philosophy amounts to mere "houses of cards" (PI § 118) constructed of "grammatical jokes" (ibid. § 111), as Wittgenstein does. Plato would not have said that to "know thyself" is not really a problem but a mere language-induced illusion. For Wittgenstein's predecessors philosophy has its source, not in confused thinking, but in the nature of man's existence.

A philosophical problem always has the form: "I simply don't know my way about." (Big Typescript § 89; cf. PI § 123)

Philosophy begins in being puzzled ("wonder"), Plato and Aristotle say, as Socrates had said that philosophy begins in self-awareness of ignorance. "I simply don't know my way around" -- but not if "simply" means that if we always did know our way about there would be no philosophical problems (and that is what Wittgenstein means).

Wittgenstein's philosophical over-reaching the limits of Hertz's insight

As I do philosophy, its entire task consists in expressing myself in such a way that certain troubles (problems?) disappear. (Hertz.) (Big Typescript § 89)

What Heinrich Hertz (PI's onetime motto from the Introduction to Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics) did was to say that a word like 'force' has no meaning apart from how force is measured. The word 'force' is not the name of an occult "something" -- as if the meaning of the word 'force' were a phenomenon named by that word -- despite that being what that word 'force' suggests to the imagination ("How does the moon attract the ocean? How does it pull the tide in?" What does it mean to say that "gravity" is not a physical agent? Is gravity an explanation, or only a description?)

Long before Hertz: instruments versus names

[George Berkeley] begins the treatise [De motu (1721)] with the remark that "in the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it." (§§ 1 and 53) ... natural philosophers are accustomed to use abstract general terms, and there is a temptation to think [those terms] signify actual occult entities .

Words such as 'gravity' or 'force' [or 'attraction'] do not denote observable entities. Therefore, we may be inclined to think, there must be occult entities or qualities corresponding to these terms. "But what an occult quality is ... we cannot conceive.... What is itself occult explains nothing." (§§ 4 and 6) (Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume V, xiii, 3)

Berkeley gave particular attention to the meaning and use of abstract terms, such as those occurring in the Newtonian scientific theories. Scientific theories are hypotheses, and it is a mistake to think that because a scientific hypothesis "works", it must necessarily be the expression of the human mind's natural power of penetrating the ultimate structure of reality and attaining final truth. Further, terms such as 'gravity', 'attraction', and so on, certainly have their uses; but it is one thing to say that they possess instrumentalist value and quite another thing to say that they connote occult entities or qualities. The use of abstract words, though it cannot be avoided, tends to contaminate physics with metaphysics and to give us a wrong idea of the status and function of physical theories. (ibid. xi, 3)

[Question: If the word 'energy' is defined by method of measurement, is the word 'matter' also defined that way? What meaning would it have in physics if "and I make no hypotheses"? The sea may be divided into individual drops which when combined lose their individuality, whereas grains of sand when combined do not. The moon moves the ocean but not the beach. Both are matter, yet the sand seems more so. (Newton's indivisible particles.)]

Action at a distance. "Twice a day the moon lifts billions of tons of water at high tide." How is correlation known here, much less causality? Is there something to see by watching the moon or the tides, i.e. a mechanism to trace? No, but there is something to see and things to measure: the mass of the moon and the mass of the ocean, and the variable distance between them. Newton gives sense to the expression 'gravitational force' or 'gravitation' by stating a method of measurement? But you can't really say that's the whole meaning of the expression: the picture of two masses being "attracted" to one another is also needed. But what does "attracted" mean? High and low tides are pictures of the ocean and the moon being attracted to one another. Newton: I make no hypotheses about what gravity ("the pull") is? The word 'gravity' is not the name of an object (its grammar is not name-of-object word).

Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (PI § 373)

[And what tells grammar? What is the relation between facts and grammar?] Some metaphysical problems can be shown to be solved by specifying a method of verification (definition). But if philosophical problems of that kind "disappear", it is because it was an illusion that they ever existed, as e.g. "What is energy really?"

"... some philosophical problems." But certainly not all. For example, when Plato asks "what the essence of man is" or when Aristotle says that "Man is a rational animal", it is not because they sense a "disorder in our concepts" or because they "simply don't know their way about". And the same applies when Socrates, in response to the Delphic precept "Know thyself", asks what the specific excellence proper and unique to man is, and whether life in accord with that excellence is not the good for man, and whether rational moral virtue is not that excellence. Wittgenstein himself recognized that "the riddle" does exist -- that the eternal questions are not "nonsense" that are going to "disappear if I express myself differently".

[Common names: Ockham and the Principle of Economy]

To which does essence belong, nature or convention?

If essence is a general fact of nature (PI II, xii, p. 230: "Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature"), and the specific excellence proper and unique to man belongs to man's essence, then Socratic ethics -- i.e. that the good for man is life in accord with that specific excellence (namely, reason or rational moral virtue) -- also belongs to nature.

How could Aristotle's proposition 'Man is a rational animal' be merely a statement of convention (rule of grammar), rather than belong to the nature of things, for surely to say that 'Man is an angel, i.e. a purely rational being', would be -- not to babble nonsense -- but to state a falsehood about human nature?

If we say that "essence belongs to grammar" (PI § 371), we are saying that what the essence of anything is, is merely a matter of convention. (And in one way, that statement is true, since concepts define phenomena, not vice versa.) And so the general proposition is that either essence belongs to nature or essence belongs to convention ("grammar") -- but must it be either/or rather than vary from particular case to case, so that in some cases we would say the essence belongs "to nature" and in others "to convention"?

"But Aristotle is using a particular classification system, not the only possible classification system." Certainly, as does the system for naming days of the week -- nevertheless, it is a statement of fact that today is Sunday, not Wednesday.

Is philosophy like a cube of sugar, or is philosophy a mirage?

Nothing Wittgenstein wrote could make philosophy's three questions -- namely, How to reason, What is real, and How to live -- "disappear". (Only in a fairy tale could Wittgenstein be "Jack the philosophy killer".)

Antidotes

I'd say this, that Wittgenstein must be used as an antidote to some kinds of blunders in philosophy, but then philosophy must be used as an antidote to Wittgenstein's over-reaching. (And his eccentric desire to abolish philosophy.)

If I am correct, then philosophical problems must be completely solvable, in contrast to all others. (Big Typescript § 89)

But nothing stays clear for very long in philosophy. And further -- does describing the grammar of the word 'mind' -- showing that the word 'mind' is not the name of an object as the word 'book' is -- make the phenomenon of mind any less astonishing (and our astonishment is not the kind of puzzle a scientific investigation is going to solve; cf. "astonishment that anything exists" (Are we mistaken to be astonished?)), as if the question of an afterlife, which is not a conceptual or a physical question, were solvable.

Wittgenstein's sugar in water metaphor

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word -- like a lump of sugar in water. (Big Typescript § 89)

Do I understand what Wittgenstein is saying here? Not at all (For all I know "lost to philosophy" may be an allusion to Wittgenstein's own lack of "transparency in argumentation", the "syncopated style" of the TLP). A lump of sugar dissolved in water only appears to disappear -- what is equivocal here: "not be visible" versus "cease to exist" -- it's true that the water is clear, but let it only evaporate and that the sugar has disappeared only in appearance will be evident. Disguising a philosophical problem -- and what else is dissolving sugar in water, which makes it appear as if the sugar were not there -- in no way resolves it.

And, of course, that is not what Hertz does. Compare Wittgenstein's own example --

At first sight it may appear (but why it should can only become clear later) that here we have two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials; a mental world and a physical world.

The mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal.

But let me remind you here of the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy, -- when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object.

I mean, we already know the idea of "aethereal objects" as a subterfuge, when we are embarrassed about the grammar of certain words, and when all we know is that they are not used as names for material objects.

This is a hint as to how the problem of the two materials, mind and matter, is going to dissolve. (BB p. 47)

It is dissolved, Wittgenstein says, by recognizing that not all nouns are names of things (whether those things are physical or aethereal, natural or supernatural), but that many nouns have other uses in the language. (Question: is there a difference between asking for a description of the use of the word 'mind' in the language -- and asking what the mind is? Is the question 'What is the mind?' nonsense? What might lead someone to believe that the mind is aethereal rather than a physical object or physical phenomenon -- is it our experience of thought/thinking?)

The aethereal as a working hypothesis

Where language, a noun, suggests an object and there is none, we say that the object the noun names is aethereal (cf. PI § 36), until we find some other way to account for it (cf. Bonhoeffer's "God as a working hypothesis"). In Wittgenstein's logic of language, where language suggests an object and there is none, the noun in question is not the name of an object; not all nouns are names of things.

But there is a profound difference between saying that the word 'mind' is not the name of an object, either physical or aethereal, and saying that reality is confined to what is, at least in principle, perceptible to the senses (which is the claim of materialism). The first statement is a claim about grammar (a description of the use of a word in the language), but the second is a claim about reality (metaphysics).

Is there a reason why a perceptible event should not have as its cause an imperceptible source? Such a suggestion is pure speculation, maybe it is superstition, (and it runs counter to our way of thinking, for, as with natural science, we look for natural, not supernatural, explanations of things), but it is not nonsense or a misunderstanding of the logic of our language to suggest that "the visible has its origin in the invisible". (Metaphysics as a working hypothesis, a place holder or stand in until knowledge comes to replace speculation.)

Was the cause of Plato's view that that "the soul" [mind, psyche] is aethereal that he did not understand the grammar of our language? Were Plato's Forms (or Archetypes) aethereal (Parmenides 134b) because Plato was mislead by a picture suggested by language and/or because he followed a false grammatical analogy? Is that necessarily why? Is the statement that, grammatically speaking, the word 'soul' is not the name of a thing a refutation of Plato's view (a dissolution of Plato's quandary)?

On Wittgenstein's account, it seems that it is. But Wittgenstein's logic of language is only one way of looking at philosophy, and not the only way possible. And if Plato says that he is talking about the soul, not about the word 'soul', Wittgenstein's reply is that Plato uses language to philosophize and so we have to talk about what distinguishes sense from nonsense in language (PI § 120), but to that question there are various possible answers.

Can one honestly speak of Plato's "subterfuge" (BB p. 47)?

... not about some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm. [Note in margin: Only it is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways]. (PI § 108)

[The phenomenon of mind, for example.]

Der Philosophiefeind (without irony)

Why was Wittgenstein an enemy of philosophy -- why did he turn discourse of reason against itself (rather than, as Socrates had done, both against and for with not only destructive but also constructive criticism)? Why did Wittgenstein want philosophical problems to disappear ("As I do philosophy") -- as he did not only at the beginning but also at the end of philosophical life?

I think partly because he was so powerfully struck by seeing that some philosophical problems are the result of conceptual, i.e. grammatical confusion, and that he concluded that all philosophical problems must be. Partly. But why Wittgenstein also chose that and only that to be "As I do philosophy", I don't know.

What is philosophy?

Of course this is partly a question of how we set the limits to the subject 'Philosophy', e.g. whether we are going to call "astonishment" and the eternal questions 'philosophy', and of how we conceive ethics. According to Wittgenstein: metaphysics is nonsense (grammatical confusion), and ethics is non-rational (because "absolute value" is). And that does indeed make philosophy disappear -- but in which sense of 'disappear', as sugar dissolves in water or as a mirage (illusion) vanishes?

Modesty invented the word 'philosophy', but there was nothing modest about Wittgenstein's claim about what philosophy "really" is.

A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one, although the problem is a conceptual one. (RPP i § 949)

By "conceptual problem" Wittgenstein means that all metaphysical problems are conceptual, i.e. grammatical, confusion, but no more than that. And that statement's "always" is over-reaching, and like all over-reaching it shows a lack of self-knowledge. (What applies to knowing the limits of oneself as an individual also applies to knowing the limits of an insight and method.)

Query: what did Socrates say he doubted?

First whether Apollo was not mistaken when the oracle said that no man is wiser than Socrates, then whether the meaning of Apollo's words was misunderstood or whether Socrates was himself wise in some way.

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