josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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7 Jul '13 04:27:41 AM

'… it is a matter of cultivating virtues like tact and discretion…'

7 Jul '13 02:42:22 AM

'5.552: The 'experience' that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience.

Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so.

It is prior to the question 'How?', not prior to the question 'What?'.

5.5521: And if this were not so, how could we apply logic? We might put it this way: if there would be a logic even if there were no world, how then could there be a logic given that there is a world?'

7 Jul '13 02:36:59 AM

'Similarly, for Frege and Russell (or Russell at least until he became influenced by the doctrines of Wittgenstein), logic is about something, namely, everything.'

6 Jul '13 05:09:29 AM

'… it begins to look as though these investigations are essentially unbookable…'

5 Jul '13 08:04:08 PM

'We're always trying to do our second reading first.'

5 Jul '13 12:38:53 AM

Neighborhood child, Fourth of July, yelling: 'That's illegal!! That's illegal!!'.

3 Jul '13 08:48:54 PM

('Do the terms really matter, then, as long as I'm feeling it? As long as I put myself into it somehow?' —As if any word could serve at any time to express whatever calls for expression!)

3 Jul '13 08:47:05 PM

(Or: can you really think through something essentially expressive without drawing on your capacity for expressiveness? Could you possibly suppress it, or treat it as separable, partitionable, as if one could allow oneself expressiveness when out in the world and require of oneself inexpressiveness when trying to be serious in the study?)

3 Jul '13 08:34:12 PM

(The effort to find satisfactory terms, to find the right words, is part of philosophy.)