Since R.M. Hare's "Language of Morals" is on the list, I recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" should be on the list for any one who want to study Moral Philosophy today.
Along with Popper and Kuhn's works on that list, read Larry Laudan's "Progress and its problems" and "Science and Relativism: some key controversies in the philosophy of science". This goes under Philosophy of Sciences.
> Since R.M. Hare's "Language of Morals" is on the list, I recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" should be on the list for any one who want to study Moral Philosophy today.
“After Virtue” is a legit recommendation.
> Along with Popper and Kuhn's works on that list, read Larry Laudan's "Progress and its problems" and "Science and Relativism: some key controversies in the philosophy of science". This goes under Philosophy of Sciences.
I demur. Comparing two giants of the Philosophy of Science (nb: not plural) to a relative unknown. I would recommend instead “Against Method” (1975) by Paul Feyerabend or “The Sleepwalkers” (1959) by Arthur Koestler.
I'd recommend against starting with "Against Method".
Instead, go directly for the 'sequel' both to Feyerabend's "Against Method" and to two paper/essay collections (both published in 1976, two years after his death) that essentially originated from Lakatos, although they contain numerous contributions, among others by Feyerabend, "Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences: The Critical Background to Modern Science 1800–1905" (edited Colin Howson) and "Method and Appraisal in Economics" (edited by Spiro J. Latsis), namely, "For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence" 'by' both Imre Lakatos AND Paul Feyerabend, which Matteo Motterlini painstakingly assembled from the drafts for the book (which Lakatos and Feyerabend both wanted to produce, but which never produced a finished result in their lifetimes, primarily due to Lakatos' unexpected death in 1974.)
I say this because of what I personally like to think of as 'paraduality' in science which both Lakatos and Feyerabend discuss & address, but from 'opposite' ends. I put "opposite" in single quotes here because I find too difficult to phrase the point I wish to make, so I can only allude to it:
Reading Feyerabend without reading Lakatos carries with it the same (and not just similar or the opposite) problems as reading Lakatos without Feyerabend does - and vice versa.
The same applies to science itself, which kind of sums up the problem both of them approached, from 'different' sides.
I thus find it rather helpful to read the entire matter chronologically 'backwards', starting with 'For and Against Method' and then going back from there.
Thank you for your in-depth comment. I did not mean to imply starting immediately with ”Against Method”, what I meant is that after exploring Kuhn and Popper by all means move onto Feyerabend.
I do appreciate your suggesting Lakatos. I was under the impression that one had to read Feyerabend first, then Lakatos. The work by Lakatos I have made note of that came up in my travels is “The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers”. Would you be able to recommend that text as well or are you sticking to the ones you have suggested?
If I had to pick one I think you are saying to go with “For and Against Method[…]”† because it contains both sides of the coin. Thank you Oh random internet person for such helpful advice!
On the notion of Moral Philosophy, for a 21st century perspective (unlike, but not as opposed to, the 20th century perspective given by the list in question), I'd also recommend "Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought" by Alice Crary, a review of which one may find here:
> Solomon maintains that “nothing has been more harmful to philosophy than its ‘professionalization,’ which on the one hand has increased the abilities and techniques of its practitioners immensely, but on the other has rendered it an increasingly impersonal and technical discipline, cut off from and forbidding to everyone else.”
> As an addendum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are analytic philosophy,”...
Interesting that analytic philosophy is both seen as being the most harmful yet also most prestigious.
Ironically, I took multiple philosophy courses at the university of Texas taught by both Bob Solomon (one of the “eminent philosophers”) and his wife.
I graduated from the philosophy program with a profound distaste for analytical philosophy, believing it to be pedantic BS that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse. Hence the abstraction into symbolic logic, but symbolic logic only works as a pure abstraction: any link to the real world becomes limited by the language constructs you can use to describe the world, the subject/object relationships, etc.
There are many languages and writing systems in the world. I expect the peculiarities of each to rear its head when attempting to use them to do “real” philosophy (I honestly view most of the analytical offshoots of philosophy as mathematics; somewhat telling, the university disagreed and forced all CS majors to take logic classes in the philosophy department).
I think that the perceived stiffness of analytic philosphy is really just the true limitations of philosophy made obvious.
>that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse.
It's not entirely clear that natural languages are more powerful than formal ones (in terms of stating true facts,) but what is easy to see is that English makes it far easier to appear to prove something you haven't. That gives it an illusion of power.
Ironically Neitzsche had something to say about this: you've got the small claims that seem pedantic and insignificant, and the grand claims that explain the meaning of it all, but in the end the small claims can be made so much more certain than the grand ones that they're what you want to base everything off of. Viscosity of water vs. angels on the head of a pin.
Exactly; I’m not saying natural language is better, just that you can’t really do any better without running into the same issues around discourse/rhetoric.
I have to agree. I noticed with more recent philosophy works (including some on this list) it could feel like the philosophers were more interested in arguing with one another than educating the reader.
I also think this is part of the reason why philosophers like John Dewey aren't as well regarded as they should be and/or used to be.
I agree with that. I studied philosophy in college and it was all insider baseball. It was a breath of fresh air when I came across Dewey and William James.
Unsurprisingly, this list is heavily biased towards analytic philosophers.
They don't even mention Heidegger, the most influential 20th Century philosopher in the Continental tradition. Being and Time is his most influential book.
They don't mention Sartre, who probably comes in 2nd. Being and Nothingness is his most famous book (you can tell the Heidegger influence just from the title).
Their token Continentals are Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and Ricouer... out of a list of 30.
Update: Looks like I misread the title of the article as being about philosophers from 1900-2000, but it's from 1950-2000. Sorry. My bad.
Analytic philosophy was largely a reaction to the idea that philosophy was developing into a mass of meaningless, incoherent, poetic mumbo-jumbo. For example, Bertrand Russell said:
> Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
Analytic philosophy is the tradition that grew out of this reaction, and focuses on precision in language and logic, with a particular focus on the philosophy of language because it turns out it's hard to map natural language to the kinds of rigorous logical propositions that analytic philosophers prefer. Continental philosophy is the tradition that rejected this critique and burrowed even deeper down the path they were going, eventually inventing postmodernism and poststructuralism and other new and exciting forms of what analytic philosophers would consider mumbo-jumbo.
You've basically described all of Continental philosophy as "a mass of meaningless, incoherent, poetic mumbo-jumbo".
First, that's really not a particularly charitable way of describing it. Second, it bespeaks an Analytic approach to things they don't understand -- that is, to assume they're meaningless and not important (or at best some trivial little puzzle to solve). Third, it really doesn't help to understand what Continental philosophy is actually about.
Now, if you'd described Continental philosophy as difficult or incoherent to you, then that would be more reasonable. But it should be pointed out that plenty of analytic philosophy that is also difficult and incomprehensible to some (though I would grant that for the most part Analytics at least try to be clear in their language -- something that can't be said of most Continentals).
> You've basically described all of Continental philosophy as "a mass of meaningless, incoherent, poetic mumbo-jumbo".
No, I’m saying that’s the perception that motivated analytic philosophy.
I didn’t really try and break down what the continentals were up to after the schism because I don’t really know or care. If you view the history of philosophy as an eternal, wide-ranging discussion, the analytics just kind of stopped talking to the continentals at one point and that’s probably the most fair thing you can say about it.
> "a mass of meaningless, incoherent, poetic mumbo-jumbo".
Also: are new developments of analytic philosophy really that "clear" in their language? Usually, no. For example, is Saul Kripke really that "meaningful, coherent and logical" or he is just developing his own jargon?
In my opinion, analytic philosophy often tries to be rigorous with concepts that just are not rigorous to begin with. And they just end up by creating an "ordinate mess".
I haven’t read a ton of Kripke, but the fender and more jargon-filled analytic philosophy is still in a different style.
I think the best oversimplification is that analytic philosophers are more like mathematicians and continental philosophers are more like artists and poets. (And, fittingly, many of the foundational analytic philosophers were also mathematicians, and the continentals, poets and playwrights.)
That last sentence could not be less true. To give just a few counterexamples:
Postmodernism is represented on the analytic side, too, e.g., Feyerabend: Against Method (unfortunately not on the list).
The late Wittgenstein (#1 on the list) can not be clearly labeled analytic or continental.
As final example, reading Foucaults (#12) insights about power structures in society and how they shape our view of reality, and considering that mumbo-jumbo, seems pretty unphilosophical to me.
Analytical philosophy: we don't care about morals, what it means to be human, and meaning. Let's constrain philosophy to an axiomatic system based on formal logic and math. We shall think and express only whatever meagre results our systems allow.
Continental philosophy: we care about unexpressed human experience, morality, insight and meaning (or its lack thereof). We can be as poetic as we think suits the subject matter in inquiring for those things.
I wouldn't agree with this characterization. There are no subjects that are off-limits to Continentals or Analytics.
As they've come to dominate university philosophy departments, the Analytics especially have started to branch out in to all sorts of fields they refused to touch in the past -- even going so far as to start reading and discussing Continental philosophers themselves (while mostly missing the point, in my opinion).
Their difference today is mostly one of approach or writing style, how they understand philosophers of the past, and which of them they consider important. Analytics also seem to be generally more scientistic[1] than Continentals.
It's hard to summarize the difference any better in words that are comprehensible to people who haven't studied philosophy. You really should just read some representative philosophers from each tradition yourself. It's glaringly obvious if you do.
[1] - Note: That's "scientistic" -- not to be confused with "scientific". For a good introduction to the difference avoid Wikipedia (which is pretty awful at philosophy), or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which is much better, but is very heavily slanted towards the Analytic perspective) and see: Tom Sorell's "Scientism": https://www.amazon.com/Scientism-Philosophy-Infatuation-Scie...
> Analytical philosophy: we don't care about morals, what it means to be human, and meaning.
This is a strange claim, given that Rawls, Anscombe, Nozick, and Williams (all on the list) are analyticists explicitly concerned with morality. Anscombe and Rawls were more or less single-handedly responsible for reviving virtue and deontological ethics, respectively.
You might be thinking of the positivists, who were an early (and important) influence on the analytic tradition.
Analytic philosophy comes from the British empiricists (think Hume) and idealists (think McTaggart), and values precision of language and relation of ideas to concrete particulars (e.g., logic). Continental philosophy comes from the phenomenology of the German idealists (think Kant, then Hegel) and values accounts that accord closely with human experience (contributing to the common complaint that continental prose is pointlessly obscure).
The analytic tradition is dominant in American and British philosophy departments, while the continental tradition remains somewhat popular in Germany and enjoys some traction in American liberal arts as a whole.
To make things slightly confusing, philosophers are frequently exchanged between the traditions: Kant has experienced a resurgence in interest among analyticists following Rawls' work, and research in moral psychology has been worked into contemporary critical theory.
"Analytic philosophy" is based on the question, "Can person B really understand a statement by person A?", answered with "No", and logically refined, distilled, and fractionated into a set of rather meaningless notes on the nature of language suitable for the modern academic enterprise.
"Continental philosophy" is a continuation of the other 99.9% of philosophy as it existed before 1880.
Analytic started with the observation that some philosophical problems can be solved (or rather, be made obsolete) by carefully analyzing the language in which these problems are stated. So this school of philosophers is very careful in ensuring what they state is clear and unambiguous. Obviously, this limits analytic philosophers to a subset of our language when they express their thoughts.
Continental philosophers are harder to characterize in a few words (at least for me), because in a sense they use more diverse methods when seeking insights. Many of their works are at the same time philosophical and sociological. For example, Habermas states that truth is a social construct, and explains how society constructs their truths.
I'd say both schools contribute useful insights to philosophy. Read analytics to deepen your understanding of language and scientific method, and to refine your 'fallacy detector'. Read continentals to deepen your understanding of human behavior and social structures. And this is of course a huge simplification, because a) the distinction between these schools is purely artificial, and b) philosophers of both schools have contributed significantly to all areas of philosophy.
Well, it's complicated, but analytic philosophy tends to affirm modern science, whereas continental philosophy tends to be responding to Hegel's idea that our view of reality is ultimately determined by our culture. Also analytic philosophy tends to affirm liberalism, whereas continental philosophy tends to reject it for either socialism or traditionalism.
I think to be clear you need to make it known that by 'liberalism' here you mean classical liberalism -- the meaning of the word as Europeans understand it, not liberalism as Americans understand it. To Americans 'liberal' is a bag into which they shove almost everything .. from quasi-Marxists to Clinton neo-liberals, despite those folks having almost nothing in common.
After 1950, I think the continental/analytic split had grown so pronounced that reconciling the two is somewhat hopeless. I think most philosophy departments in English-speaking universities are so analytic-oriented that asking English-speaking philosophers to rate late-20th-century Continental philosophers is somewhat pointless.
>I think most philosophy departments in English-speaking universities are so analytic-oriented that asking English-speaking philosophers to rate late-20th-century Continental philosophers is somewhat pointless.
You'd be surprised, since Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and all kind of post-modernists and late-20th-century continental philosophers also had made inroads in US universities.
Perhaps more on other humanities departments (e.g. social and gender studies) rather than philosophy?
> Perhaps more on other humanities departments (e.g. social and gender studies) rather than philosophy?
(former philosophy student here) -- honestly, yes. I think you'll find that within American academia that the influence of continental philosophers is mostly within the sphere of 'critical theory' not philosophy depts.
That's not to say that each department doesn't have its contingents of continental specialists. There's plenty of them. But at least at my school, they were the minority, and looked on with what seemed to be a mixture of bemusement and separation. Like a rival but tolerated religion. That might be slightly exaggerated, but at my school in the 90s there was really only one prof I was able to study continental philosophy with (he was good, at least).
My wife just finished her BA in anthropology, and the profs threw around continental philosopher names like candy. But there wasn't a single course accessible to her that actually studied those theorists in depth and with seriousness. IMHO this is a serious problem and part of the reason that post-structural etc. theory is often either taken as a pseudo-religion (by a kind of adherent who does not have a deep philosophical depth in it) or hated and derided (by people who see it all as nonsense.)
Yeah, I can confirm that. There was one professor in my department (my advisor) who didn't teach analytic or ancient philosophy. To take any other courses in continental philosophy, I had to go to the german department and comp lit department, and those were so lacking in rigor that it was hard to take seriously.
There are schools in the English-speaking world where Continentals are studied seriously and in-depth, and from a Continental perspective. But they're rare, and getting rarer even in the non-English-speaking world. Like it or not, Analytic philosophy is just winning -- in philosophy departments, at least.
Unfortunately US departments take it to a level of absurdity, academic solipsism, and middle-class liberal puritanism that's not present in their continental counterparts (who could be very involved with society, daring public intellectuals, and hated middle-class salaried intellectualism -- even if they did work for universities often themselves).
As much as I dislike Analytic philosophy and like Continental philosophy, I can't let this criticism pass without defending the Analytics.
Some Analytics have been very involved with society and be "daring public intellectuals". Bertrand Russell, a seminal figure in Analytic philosophy, was famously politically active and outspoken. Daniel Dennett is a contemporary example, but I'm sure there are others. Analytics just don't tend to make social or political criticism a part of their professional philosophical work unless they're explicitly doing political philosophy.
I would agree that the subject matter that many Analytics tend to focus on, like the philosophy of language and preoccupation with trivial philosophical puzzles is, ahem, pretty academic and not exactly of burning concern to most people outside of Analytic philosophy departments. They're far from alone in this, however, as the same could be said of much of the rest of academia in all sorts of disciplines, including a lot of Continental philosophy -- how many non-philosophers would be interested in Derridian deconstruction or Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception? Even among philosophers, it takes a special breed to be interested in that stuff.
It also doesn't help that the need for translation means that some of the newer material is not available, or bad translation simply makes it seem more obscurantist than it is.
I don't think Heidegger is the most influential 20th century philosopher, and I don't think he belongs on any list, except perhaps a list of Nazis. Foucault is definitely more influential, as is Derrida, if you take the number of citations as evidence of influence. If you want to look at genealogy of specific philosophers, Foucault would have his closest influence in Althusser, and Deleuze would probably have his closest forbear in Whitehead, and Derrida, probably in Levinas.
Your claim that Heidegger wasn't the most influential 20th Century Continental philosopher runs counter to mainstream scholarship in the field.
Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida were all influenced by Heidegger. You would be hard pressed to find a 20th Century Contintenal philosopher who wasn't.
Heidegger was hugely influential, and also a Nazi (which should not be overlooked, but it should also not be used to try to erase his contribution to philosophy).
I haven't read enough D + L to comment, but I don't really understand what relation Foucault has to Heidegger. They're very different.
In any case, obviously Heidegger was influential. But I don't think it's possible to say he's the most influential. From an empirical perspective, Foucault is the most influential, since he has the greatest number of citations.
If you go over a citation ranking and look at each thinker in terms of schools of thought, the most influential would be marxism, structuralism, then critical theory, then probably phenomenology.
>I haven't read enough D + L to comment, but I don't really understand what relation Foucault has to Heidegger. They're very different.
Writing styles or even subject matters don't matter. Core ideas matter more. Foucault himself said:
"For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. I began by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I set out to read Heidegger in 1951 or 1952; then in 1952 or 1953 – I don’t remember any more – I read Nietzsche. I still have here the notes I took when I was reading Heidegger – I’ve got tons of them! And they are much more important than the ones I took on Hegel or Marx. My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger."
That's fascinating. From what I was taught, I'd have expected Nietzsche to have held that position for Foucault. Did he change later? When does that quote date from?
Call me cynical - but I'd be very wary of taking Foucault's comments about his own work at face value. He could just be saying this to irritate the predominantly Hegelian, marxist academics in French academia at the time. Foucault is many good things - but he's generally very opaque about his influences. Or, at least, there are many very obvious influences he never talks about.
Foucault himself said "For me, Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger"
You can find much more about the Foucault-Heidegger connection if you search around the web. Here are some links to get you started:
I'd argue that every programmer interested in language design needs to read Wittgenstein. His later work in ethics and epistemology (that the article recommends, Philosophical Investigations) is hit or miss, but his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which deals with the nature of language as it relates to our ability to think and formulate ideas, is undeniable. He essentially builds a framework for breaking reality down into logically composable components which can be reasoned over in their own right, regardless of semantics.
Wittgenstein was more of a mystic than a logician, though he tried to dress up his mysticism in what may at first glance appear to be logical garb in the Tractatus.[1] This is something the early Logical Positivist analytics of the Vienna Circle, perhaps willfully, did not understand. He was championing the very thing that they abhorred: religious mysticism.
When Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." He meant it in a respectful way, as a defense of religious mysticism. The Logical Positivists assumed that attitude in the exact opposite direction: to attack religious mysticism and religion in general. They labeled it as meaningless nonsense. No wonder Wittgenstein wanted nothing to do with them, despite their (misplaced and misunderstood) hero-worship of him.
I'm really not sure what any programmer would get out of reading the Tractatus... at least not for anything programming-related.
[1] - The full title being the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", just in case you missed that it was supposed to be logical and philosophical. Wittgenstein starts by labeling some of his statements as "axioms" and constructing what might appear as derivations.. which don't actually follow. On superficial inspection it might look like some kind of logical treatise, but that impression vanishes if you actually try to read and make sense of it.
Not the OP, but I've gone through your (very well written and well thought) answer and it reminded me of what it was that turned me away from Wittgenstein (even though at some point I was a big fan of his, in some regards I still am): I'm talking about the tautology that you also remarked about. I couldn't get over it once I realized it was there. At least Hegel (which I'm not a fan of, that's for sure) had the "courage" to surpass said "tautology" by inventing a conflict (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) that at least looked like it was carrying the conversation, that was carrying us, closer to the truth, with Wittgenstein you feel like nothing like that happens, you're just left sitting there. I'm not criticizing him or anything of the sorts, just stating what I felt.
It is also true that with age (I've now approached my late 30s) I've started to become less and less interested in inquiring about the "truth", or what "truth" means, or what "words" mean, i.e. the topics mostly related to philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger (haven't read anything by Derrida yet), and instead I've started becoming more and more interested (and even obsessed) by what us, humans, really are and what we think. As such, I've started reading more and more political philosophy, and as such I can say that (at least for people like me) philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau are a lot more interesting and thought-provoking compared to the subjects approached by the likes of Wittgenstein or Heidegger.
Later edit: Because I just remembered later after writing most of the above comment: what also drove me away from modern/contemporary philosophers like Wittgenstein was reading a collection of the Heraclitus fragments. After reading them I realized that "truth" was, well, multi-faceted, polyvalent, taken at the limit truth was everything and nothing at all (which you could say that approaches some of Wittgenstein's views as well). More important of all, according to Heraclitus (or to my understanding of his sayings) "truth" and other philosophical-important concepts were on the same "level" as other, less important (from a philosophical point of view) concepts, i.e. that (again, taken to the limit) truth was falseness and falseness was truth. Once I realized that I was no longer interested in pursuing what "truth" is.
I think that Heidegger was more concerned with the human condition than you give him credit for, at least in Being and Time anyway. Given what you said, I think Derrida will certainly be of interest to you.
Not really, at least not until now (I’m in my late 30s). Technically the most “Eastern” philosopher that has had an influence on me was Lucian of Samosata (afaik Samosata was close to the present border between Syria and Turkey), but other than that I didn’t have the “inner drive”, so to speak, to immerse myself into Eastern philosophy. At least not until now. From a distance I do find some parts of it pretty interesting, but, again, that’s just a “guess”.
Come to think of it, I was pretty impressed by Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, who I think are the closest “Western philosophy” got to “Eastern philosophy”, even though I found that they’re not that much discussed in the Anglosphere.
Thank you for your detailed, thorough reply. It deserves a thorough response in return, but I must respectfully leave that to someone else, as my interest in Wittgenstein is not nearly enough to sustain such an effort. So I'll confine myself to commenting on just a few of your points:
First, if Wittgenstein was a logician, then I have to ask what his contribution to logic was. As far as I can tell, he never made one... certainly nothing even approaching Godel, who actually revolutionized logic. Wittgensteins impact on logic, on the other hand, was on all accounts nonexistant.
Maybe Wittgenstein was, as you say, an anti-logician and a philosopher. I won't dispute that.
You write:
"I see nothing mystical in these portions of the Tractatus, and I think it is a bit of a leap to call him a mystic on the grounds that he technically did not reject mystical/ethical statements as being false, only nonsensical and thus on par with tautologies of any kind."
How about these parts of the Tractatus:
5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for
what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them,
on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he
has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he
will see the world aright.
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
These are the statements that W chose to culminate his Tractatus with. They are what the rest led up to (6.432 combined with 6.522 and 7 are especially telling -- to take just 7 and use it in an anti-religious, anti-mystical way as the Logical Positivists did is a perversion of Wittgenstein's obvious intent here), and they are both explicitly and implicitly mystical.
Explicitly because he talks about mysticism itself. He addresses what is mystical, he defines it, it (and the transcendent) is what he at the crowning point of his book concerns himself with.
They are also implicitly mystical because the language and process he advocates are in the mystical tradition. The mystics often talk about the transcendent reality and God as something that can not be spoken of because it transcends human conception, words, and naming, and rather approach it apophatically (as that which it is not). So too does W approach what is of greatest concern to him.
The metaphor of using what one says as a ladder to climb up to the transcendent, at which point the ladder is no longer of use, is another common mystical metaphor. As the transcendent or God is beyond words, then what one says can only at best be a means to get there, and is not itself the point at all.
At the very least, I think you could say that W appropriated mystical and religious language to talk about his philosophical concerns, but I think there is more evidence (apart from the already cited sections of the Tractatus) that his concerns are actually primarily religious rather than philosophical. W himself said that "I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view", that "Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work." W's close friend Norman Malcolm wrote "Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers."
The last thing I want to address is your question (in regards to the statements in the Tractatus) "in what sense do they not follow?"
In a logical derivation, propositions follow one another based on axioms and using the rules of logic (like modus ponens, modus tollens, double negation, etc). Though there do seem to be some sort of axioms and maybe propositions in the Tractatus, they do not follow one another using the rules of logic. There is no such explicit connection between them. It is in that sense that they do not follow.
> First, if Wittgenstein was a logician, then I have to ask what his contribution to logic was. As far as I can tell, he never made one... certainly nothing even approaching Godel, who actually revolutionized logic. Wittgensteins impact on logic, on the other hand, was on all accounts nonexistant.
This might not be a satisfactory answer, but I always found it a fun fact: Wittgenstein is often credited for the invention of truth tables, having used them in the Tractatus.
As a sidenote: though Peirce is widely known as a Pragmatist, he was also a logician, and truth tables were but one of the many contributions he made to logic.
Thanks for the link, didn't know this was a "concept" per-se, so to speak, even less so that it had its own wikipedia page and that Wittgenstein had written about it. I've started thinking about this concept ever since I read Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind", where at some point he mentions that, taken at the limit, each of us speak our own, very private language (the book was written in the early 1800s).
That idea has stuck with me ever since and I've tried ways of both disproving and affirming it, now I'm mostly in the "affirming it" phase. As a quick example, one can just think of a sentence like "I love you", which means different things for different people, even if spoken in the same language, and, most important of all, it might mean (and in many cases it does mean) different things to different people who have lived together for decades (as husband and wife, for example, or as parents and children). On the other hand, more "neutral" sentences like "turn off the lights" seem to mean the same thing for a larger proportion of speakers.
Thanks for the Humboldt reference, haven't been that way and did not know of it. I'd guess it is a fairly common doubt, I remember wondering, as a schoolboy, if what everyone called green was perceived identically.
All this ends up being a centuries long conversation, and the current reference is merely the latest overlay. For instance, Wittgenstein mentioned that one must "throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it", riffing on Schopenhauer's scorn of those who carried books on their backs instead of leaving them behind as climbed ladder steps, and apparently it was Plato who spread the idea that there was a knowledge ladder to be climbed ...
Wittgenstein is like a rock band that abruptly changes style at some point in their career, alienating many of their fans but gaining new ones. One of my philosophy professors used Radiohead as an example, with (I believe) OK Computer as the turning point, but I don't know Radiohead well enough to judge that particular analogy.
I'd agree that the turning point was OK Computer. While that record shows that the turning point wasn't as abrupt as it's often made out to be, OK Computer was the first time a lot of Radiohead listeners went 'huh?!' and either accepted or rejected this new direction. Kid A just affirmed this new direction as more than just some 'influence'.
This is really interesting in the context of that link: if I remember correctly Wittgenstein renounced his previous ideas on language after working for a few years in an elementary school. Some think that this change was prompted by direct observation of how language is actually learnt.
However it might be the case that what he wrote in the Tractatus is still relevant for formal languages, such as programming.
As I understand it, the Investigations arrives at opposing conclusions to Tractatus and Wittgenstein believed he was mistaken in his premises for the earlier work.
> His later work in ethics and epistemology (that the article recommends, Philosophical Investigations) is hit or miss
A couple of things about this. Wittgenstein famously did not write much on ethics. A couple of lines in the Tractatus, no passages that I know of in Philosophical Investigations (not saying there are none, I just don't know of them).
I would rather say that the subject matter of Philosophical Investigations is Philosophy of Language and also Epistemology. To call it "hit or miss" is nowhere near the consensus view among philosophers, in fact one is compelled to say that it is the direct opposite of the view that contemporary philosophers hold. Given that the list in the article is rank-ordered and Philosophical Investigations is #1 should clue you into its status. Easily in the top three most important books in philosophy in the last 100 years.
You are noting that the logical atomism in the Tractatus reminds us of a large software system, which it does.
The problem is that logical atomism isn't actually tenable, as many (not least W himself) have pointed out. But you've actually read the Tractatus and PI, so I'm surprised to hear you still supporting the Tractatus. A full discussion of why logical atomism is wrong is, of course, out of scope here, but essentially, the problem is that there are no logical atoms.
As inspiration for programmers, the Tractatus is probably fine. But as the only take on philosophy of language/epistemology that a person might ever read, it is at least very far from where modern thinking is at.
Can we estimate in any way about how happy these people were?
I doubt there's an objective measure, but I feel like how to be happy and to live a good life are among of the main goals of philosophy. Are they? Did many of them succeed?
This is an interesting perspective, because in his book, "The History of Western Philosophy" recommended elsewhere in this thread, Bertrand Russell makes this one of the metrics by which he rates historical philosophers. For example, he rates Schopenhauer:
> He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. ... It is hard to find in his life evidences of an virtue except kindness to animals ... In all other respects he was completely selfish. It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice.
> but I feel like how to be happy and to live a good life are among of the main goals of philosophy.
Afaik Socrates was saying something about philosophy being the quest for finding out what is "good" and then trying to "reach" it, so nothing directly related to happiness. I'm not a philosopher by any means but I found this description about what philosophy should be as the one closest to the truth. Also, as a pseudo-Kantian I also think that philosophy should have the task of teaching us about our sense of "duty" when pursuing said "good".
Putting the two above concepts together you could say that "inquiring what good is and then trying to pursue and reach it out of a sense of innate duty" is what a "good life" should be, so in that respect I think you're correct.
The Mind's I[1] can work as a decent entree to some core philosophical issues and styles of thinking, while entertaining a lay reader at the same time, or so I found.
If possible, find a local philosophy group. Philosophy is so much better as an interactive discussion.
There are many great first year lecture series by a variety of universities that are pretty good.
probably the one I enjoyed the most was "Justice" which you can find here http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/ ( the site seems to be super snazzy now, was a bit more basic years ago when I first saw it )
But there's a lot more indepth lecture series out there, I'd sugest starting with the greeks / socrates / plato / aristotle.
Seconding the first year university classes recommendation, my philosophy 101 class covered (lightly) most of the people in the threads on this news item. IIRC we had five additional books from selected philosophers, and I really needed the lectures/question/answers to understand the Marx reading material among others.
Listen to "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" [1] (duration 40 minutes; and/or read it [2]) -- an address by Ayn Rand to the 1974 graduating class at West Point.
Whether you agree with her philosophical theory or not, she makes a brilliant case for the layman needing philosophy (for life on earth).
There's a series of books titled "Very Short Introduction" where many of them will cover schools, topics, and thinkers involved in philosophy. They run about 150-200 pages and often provide a good overview of the material. I read the books on philosophy, philosophy of science, Habermas, etc. and they were very good.
I would start with "Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction" by Edward Craig, see what catches your interest, and go from there.
Also +1 for Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy".
I would recommend Walter Kaufmann's The Owl and the Nightingale: From Shakespeare to Existentialism. Kaufmann is most known as a translator and professor, but his own work is fantastic. The Owl and the Nightingale is primarily a history of modern philosophy, but it manages to cover a lot of ground without being superficial. He is extremely engaging and clear, which is uncommon in philosophy :)
In college we used the book "Problems from Philosophy" by James Rachels for Philosophy 101. It covers different philosophy ideas in chapters that aren't too long so you won't get bogged down on certain topics you might not find interesting. After reading this book you should have a good idea of what sort of philosophical questions interest you and you can dig in from there.
I would recommend The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottleib, and his followup, The Dream of Enlightenment. And if that gets you interested, then the 5 volumes on the history of Western philosophy by W.T.Jones. As for Copelston, which some below recommend, it is too detailed for a beginner. And Russell has a strong classical analytic bias.
Also by Russell: A History of Western Philosophy. It has various critics, for good reasons, but it's as good a walkthrough of philosophical developments in the West as anything you'll find.
>Also by Russell: A History of Western Philosophy. It has various critics, for good reasons, but it's as good a walkthrough of philosophical developments in the West as anything you'll find.
I want to second this one, if for nothing else than the fact that in addition to being a wealth of information about the philosophies themselves, it's also a fascinating (granted, biased) perspective about how philosophical developments might map to political and cultural developments, and vice versa. Again, with a nod to its critics.
Also, Russell is, as always, a charmingly witty writer.
I like Russell. He's a witty and entertaining writer. But anyone reading his work should be aware that he's heavily biased towards an Analytic perspective.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any summary from the Continental perspective that's remotely as well written as Russell's. Maybe you could start with reading through some of those comic-book style "Introduction to..." books about various philosophers. They seem to do a decent enough job for a taste of what the philosopher in question is about.
But, really, there's no substitute for taking an intro to philosophy course. Philosophy isn't just meant to be read and pondered. It's critically important to discuss it and the ideas and questions it provokes in you with others who are also encountering this material along with you. A philosophy course is ideal for that. Though, once again, the Analytics dominate such courses in the English-speaking world (and increasingly in the rest of the world as well). So it's pretty hard to find philosophy courses where you can get an Continental perspective.
Part of what makes Russell's book good (or at least useful) was that it connected philosophical developments to later historical events. With that in mind, I think it would be really hard to have an equivalent for 20th century philosophy - we don't have enough historical perspective yet. And that's without even getting into whether you could find a writer capable of understanding and fairly treating both sides of the analytic/Continental divide.
But if I'm wrong and someone does know of a useful work like this, I would also love to see it.
The book is an example of philosophy being done in a lucid, beginner-friendly manner. It's opinionated and conclusions are drawn. You might not agree with them. It's a fine introductory text for getting a sense of argumentative form and a decent sampling of contemporary philosophical debates.
This being HN, I can’t believe anyone hasn’t mentioned Searle (on the list) or Hofstaedter yet as prominent thinkers on computing, philosophy of maths, and the limits of the ongoing AI summer. In ‘Goedel, Escher, Bach’ Hofstaedter has entire chapters dedicated to LISP and its philosophical implications / foundations, ie homoiconicity, metacircularity.
Which chapter is that? I'm looking through the table of contents but none of these terms are mentioned there explicitly. Does he talk about LISP directly or only in passing?
David Armstrong and David lewis for metaphysics! Quine word and object is great, but some of his short essays are more accessible. For a good logic book graham priest an intro to non classical logic. Russell is pleasant intro, but you'll probably want to go deeper.
"As an addendum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are analytic philosophy,” therefore Prof. Chen asked Habermas to recommend some additional European thinkers, and received the following: “Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung (1992), Rainer Forst, Kontexte der Cerechtigkeit (1994) and Herbert Schnadelbach, Kommentor zu Hegels Rechtephilosophie (2001).”"
Note also that this list was collected "at the behest of a Chinese publisher seeking important philosophical works for translation", so the fact that A.C. Graham is missing doesn't disturb me much.
> two professors emailed sixteen philosophers in the U.S., England, Australia, Germany, Finland, and Brazil, asking specifically for "ten of the most important and influential philosophical books after 1950." "They received recommendations,” writes Ho, "from twelve philosophers, including: Susan Haack, Donald M. Borchert (Ohio U.), Donald Davidson, Jurgen Habermas, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Peter F. Strawson, Hilary Putnam, and G.H. von Wright." (Ho was unable to identify two other names, typed in Chinese.)
I would recommend all the works by Robert Nozick, listed at #14 on the list for "Anarchy, State and Utopia". While that might be his most influential book, I found his other books more fun to read.
It's nice and all that but I think there has been far more influence on what would be called philosophical questions like why are we here, how should we live, why is there evil, what is consciousness and the like from scientific discovery than from any of the books in the list. Things like the discovery of DNA, the big bang, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience have had a big impact on how we see the world. Those books I'm not so sure.
Much of the thinking that we call philosophy was created to make sense of the apparent conflict between particular western institution, like (western) science and religion. There are thinkers in other parts of the world who are interested in similar issues, but it might not be right to categorize it as philosophy because they don't have the same sort of clash in their culture to make sense of. That is, western philosophy was consciously created to oppose religious dogma and scientific reductionism, but the same can't be said about (say) Buddhist philosophy, even though they ask similar questions. In other words, part of what makes philosophy "philosophy" is that it insists that it's something different than religious or scientific theory.
What utter rubbish. Every culture has their own philosophical issues that they grapple with. This does not mean these thoughts cannot be labeled "philosophy". "Philosophy", means love of knowledge... the seeking of knowledge is not limited to the West, and there have been philosophers from all around the world.
> That is, western philosophy was consciously created to oppose religious dogma and scientific reductionism,
Where are you pulling this stuff from? Western philosophy traces its roots to mainly Catholic (and some Islamic) philosophers, many of whom were very religious. These philosophers often drew upon earlier philosophers (the Catholic Church is probably the reason why Aristotelian philosophy survives to the present day). These earlier philosophers were also religious.
The separation between philosophy and religion (And between philosophy and science for that matter) is something that has only arisen in the present day, and -- in my opinion at least -- is unlikely to last very long, if history is any indication.
> In other words, part of what makes philosophy "philosophy" is that it insists that it's something different than religious or scientific theory.
These are your own thoughts and opinions on the subject. You are unnecessarily antagonizing science, philosophy, and religion, and I think this perhaps stems from the very western desire to segregate and classify everything.
I don't mean to antagonize, I'm just offering another perspective. There are no doubt many different kinds of rich intellectual traditions around the world. Should we call them philosophy? Philosophy is a category of intellectual discourse invented in the west. The history of the term is bound to the history of the west. Why should we apply a western category to try to understand non-western thought? Isn't this imposing our own way of thinking about intellectual disciplines onto a culture that doesn't understand itself in the same way? It would be better to categorize these disciplines in the way they people from other countries understand them. Islamic thinkers don't draw a line between what we call "philosophical issues" and what we call "theological issues". Why should we draw that line when we read them?
So your position is that pilosophy is "western culture" and not science:
In the second case I would expect it to be unifiable across cultural boundries even a posteriori - like for example mathematics, just to show a different disclipine with western/greek name. And in the first case if philosophy IS culture - then it is not unifiable of course...
Philosophy is a word used to describe things. The word has meaning in and of itself. It is not a proper noun. You are attempting to make a word that means something already, mean something specific, and it's not working.
Would you not classify al-jabr as mathematics simply because 'mathematics' describes western manipulations and not Arabic ones? Of course not. Mathematics means a certain thing in the English language, and al-jabr (which we call algebra) falls under that category.
I'm sure other cultures have a word that denotes things like Western philosophy, and they apply that word to people like Aristotle.
However, HN is a mainly english website, and so philosophy refers to any field that concerns itself with knowledge.
Can I suggest Angus C. Graham's translations and work around Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters and Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, collected by Harold Roth)? In particular, the essay, "Taoist Spontaneity and the Dichotomy of 'Is' and 'Ought'" (IIRC) is ... really nice.
I agree. If you are thinking explicitly about the broadest, most important issues, then you are doing philosophy. That said, I do think Western philosophy is best.
E.O Wilson's (the Nobel prize winner) book "Consilience" should be on a list like this but probably isn't. He's a biologist after all, not a philosopher. But a lot of thoughtful people would likely find a lot more to ponder than in it than most of the 'real' philosophy texts.
And no A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, in spite of having an impact on the anti-globalization movement over the last two decades-plus that is hard to overestimate. Plus, that work isn’t just relevant for contemporary political disputes or the perennial question of how to organize human societies; Deleuze and Guattari’s epistemology is a major contribution to human thought in general.
> the two professors emailed sixteen philosophers in the U.S., England, Australia, Germany, Finland, and Brazil, asking specifically for "ten of the most important and influential philosophical books after 1950."
Edit: parent post was edited. It originally read: "This article discredits itself."
She offered, in non-fiction works and talks, the start of a theory of epistemology, with a unique take on concept formation; a full-fledged theory of ethics, centered on life as the standard of value and rational self-interest as the core of human virtues; a political theory aligned with the founding principles of the USA but grounded in her ethics; and a theory of esthetics. As for her metaphysics, it was radically limited and simple -- a bare-bones mix of Parmenides and Aristotle.
Are you aware of her above-mentioned, philosophical theories?
Her work is unappreciated by philosophers because her work is not really in the scope of philosophy and fails to answer any of its core problems, either then or now. Political or social change is not a good barometer for importance in philosophy, even though her work may exhibit some philosophical underpinnings. By the standards of entertainers who dabble in philosophy and were extremely influential, this list could also include, say, Bob Dylan.
It would take me longer than I have to respond well, but others can google “ayn rand philosophical questions” and be the judge. As best as I can tell, she is ignored and slandered because of her politics which are not in fashion and not her ideas.
Adding Ayn Rand would help balance the gender disparity, as well, and yet they don't. The resistance to accepting her as a philosopher is just that great.
I'm not clear on what list you think Rand might be added to, but when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago, our philosophy department included a course that covered some of her work, among that of others. She was mentioned by name in the course description, though I can't speak to the content of the course beyond that.
In order to understand the problem of her popularity among philosophers compare her to someone else who was influential in having written philosophy, plays and fiction, and also for having had some political influence: Jean-Paul Sartre. Imagine Sartre's position in the canon if his writing was not Nobel-prize quality and was - let's be frank - pretty bad, but he was still in possession of some political influence, somehow, as a public intellectual. Under those analogous circumstances, I'm not sure we'd even know who he was here in the United States.
If that’s the criterion, shouldn’t Mao’s Little Red Book be on the list? It has the same scientific merit as Rand’s work (none, that is), but definitely changed the real world.
Karl Marx is a better analogue than Mao to Ayn Rand, and we study him in Philosophy. Both have similar "scientific merit", however relevant you think that is.
What is your experience interacting with it? I've read everything she's written and much of the secondary literature from her adherents and critics. (I've also got a minor in philosophy, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the canon.)
For me, the thoughts of predecessors that she builds upon (or amplifies) benefit from her clear, practical, and direct writing style. She draws out implications and essentializes a bunch of philosophers—having read the original works, I can appreciate what she brings to that particular table.
In my opinion, her most significant contributions are in epistemology. I've never seen her theory of concept formation anywhere else, for example. Her grounding of abstraction in concretes sidesteps many of the issues that led Hume astray.
If anyone's interested, I can provide several books that explore her epistemology in great detail and really shine a light on her contributions.
(Her ethics is also unique, as is her politics, but I think history will look most favorably on her epistemology.)
People are sensitive about Godwinning but you didn't really deserve to be downvoted for that comment. Rand's Objectivism and Hitler's mind droppings have at least two important things in common: they're derivative of Nietzschean existentialism and they've been used to rationalize varieties of political extremism.
I'm pretty sure he was quoting the "Life in Hell" comics by Matt Groening, for some reason. Although that's the kind of thing people sometimes just say (see also: Kevin Kline's character in A Fish Called Wanda.)
Along with Popper and Kuhn's works on that list, read Larry Laudan's "Progress and its problems" and "Science and Relativism: some key controversies in the philosophy of science". This goes under Philosophy of Sciences.