Philosophy essay

1. From the 18th Century on, philosophy has become increasingly specialized due to the following: 1.) Influence of the university system; 2.) Emphasis on the development of a technical philosophical vocabulary; 3.) Attempts to make philosophy systematic and precise; 4.) Renewed interest in the history of philosophical arguments concerning being, reality, knowledge, truth, value, and reason.

1. By the 20th Century, philosophers were struggling for or against furthering what was called “post Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics.”

1. Deconstruction refers to the treatment of philosophical problems as conceptual and linguistic confusions that reveal their ulterior purposes when complex claims and statements are reduced to their smallest meaningful components.

1. Philosophical deconstruction includes any close textural analysis that focuses on overcoming “privileges” hidden in philosophical arguments and theories by taking the text apart – deconstructing it; questions whether any text can have definite meaning. (Privileges are philosophical assertions that are not explained or justified by the philosopher asserting them e.g. Descartes a priori ideas.)

1. Philosophical assertions that cannot be clarified are set aside as empty, meaningless, nonsensical, mystical, poetic, or inauthentic.

1. Deconstructionists challenge the notion that any text can have any definite meaning.

1. Careful linguistic analysis is a hallmark of approaches to philosophical deconstruction.

1. In the loose sense of deconstruction, we can say that: 1.) Hume deconstructed the self, causality, and ethics; Kant deconstructed Cartesian rationalism, dualism, and Humean skepticism; Bentham and Mill deconstructed the good; Marx deconstructed capitalism, philosophy, science, and theology.

1. Philosophical deconstruction had its most direct and influential expression in Nietzsche’s critique of Western philosophy as just one more historically rooted expression of the will to power.

1. Nietzsche said that anti-philosophers such as himself were historians who deconstructed traditional philosophy and metaphysics.

1. To Nietzsche to think unhistorically was to think was to think objectively, universally, generally, and formally (which he didn’t like) rather that existentially and concretely (which he did like.) The philosophy of a particular historical period reflected the values of that period rather than absolute values.

1. Against the backdrop of two world wars, fast-paced scientific advances, and changing social mores, twentieth-century philosophers questioned the very possibility of philosophy itself.

1. Philosopher John Dewey said that “despair of any integrated outlook or attitude is the chief intellectual characteristic of the twentieth century.”

1. Two Approaches to Philosophy

1. Analytic philosophy began with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstien.

1. Analytic Philosophy – refers to a non-literary philosophy that stresses logic, testability, precision and clarity.

1. Analytic philosophers do not belong to a single school of philosophy but to a tradition that goes back to Locke and Hume.

1. Common to the analytic tradition is a notion that the universe consists of independent (atomic) entities.

1. Philosophers disagree as to whether these entities are material particles, sense data, impressions, facts, or something else.

1. To analytic philosophers, philosophy is restricted to analyzing complex statements and claims in order to reduce them to elemental, unanalyzable components.

1. Logic or linguistic analysis are thought to be the only proper methods for sorting out philosophical confusion.

1. As currently used, the phrase “continental philosophy” came into vogue after World War II to acknowledge the growing divide between the English-speaking world (The analytic philosophers were English-speaking) and that of Continental Europe.

1. Continental philosophers tend to explain things not by reducing them to simple entities but by understanding them in their broader holistic context.

1. Like analytic philosophy, twentieth-century continental philosophy is not a school of philosophy or a single way of doing philosophy, but a diverse, often interdisciplinary approach to philosophy.

1. The linguistic turn began when philosophers such as Locke began to wonder about the effects of linguistic confusion on philosophy.

1. Analytic philosophers concentrated on clarifying our experience of experience by clarifying what we say about it.

1. This is so that we do not waste ourselves haggling over empty noises and fighting one another over what they really mean.

1. An important task of philosophers is clearing up of language confusion.

1. Analytic philosophy was focused more on logic and language than on life.

1. Analytic philosophy rejected traditional idealistic metaphysics in favor of what it took to be down to earth realism.

1. Realism – the belief that there exists an independent objective world of things, facts, and states of affairs that are accessible to us.

1. The proper task of philosophers is to toss aside mistaken claims about reality and replacing them with the testable assertions identified by rigorous analysis.

1. The Tractatus was written by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

1. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein said that can be said must be said clearly, and what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.

1. The aim of the book was to set a limit on the expression of thought and asserted that only through language could the limit be set.

1. Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s attempt to show the underlying structure of language.

1. In Tractatus Wittgenstein rejects earlier philosopher’s attempts to grapple directly with problems of existence, knowledge, truth, and value because those problems are illusory, linguistic, results of misunderstanding of language and how it works. Wittgenstein said in Tractatus that these bogus “philosophical problems” will disappear once their true nature is recognized.

1. According to Tractatus what can be said is what can be said meaningfully. What can be said is the same as what can be thought. What cannot be said is what cannot be thought and trying to say the unsayable (as philosophers had done) amounts to trying to think the unthinkable.

1. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought that he had set the stage to show that complex propositions were meaningful only if they could be analyzed into simpler propositions that consisted only of names. He thought that analysis had to end in simple unanalyzable names that refer to objects.

1. Tractatus said that sentences that could not be reduced to simple symbols – primitive names - were meaningless. Objects themselves could not be analyzed only pictured. The objects existence could not be proven, only shown.

1. Most philosophical questions were not false, but nonsensical. Therefore, we could not answer them but only establish that they were nonsensical.

1. Most questions of philosophers arose from our failure to understand the logic of our language.

1. The problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world that came from Locke and Hume could not be refuted in the conventional way because it rested on linguistic misunderstanding. Skepticism was not the powerful expression of an irrefutable philosophical principle at all but was nonsensical.

1. The problems of life, such as religion, are not nonsensical, but trying to say anything about them is.

1. What is left for philosophers to do? If philosophers do their job they will see that all meaningful propositions fall to the natural sciences and they will allow science to deal with them.

1. Actually, Wittgenstein was concerned with the meaning of life. Wittgenstein realized that for all of its successes, science would never touch the really important problems of life. His deconstruction of traditional philosophy was not intended to leave us with nothing of value. Rather, it was a way to of telling philosophy to put up or shut up.

1. Actually, Wittgenstein was concerned with the meaning of life. His deconstruction of traditional philosophy was a way to say put up or shut up.

1. Wittgenstein’s Turn (His book Investigations)

1. Wittgenstein later decided the Tractatus’ claim that the only meaningful language was one in which sentences stated facts that reflected the logical structure of the world was in itself a metaphysical assumption. A misunderstanding of the logic of language.

1. In Tractatus Wittgenstein said that the structure of the real world determined the structure of language.

1. In Investigations, he made a turn-about and said that the structure of language

determined the structure of thought, and so the structure of our experience.

1. In investigations, he began to think of words as tools and sentences as instruments.

1. He said that fact stating was only one language use. There were countless others, and therefore, countless other ways of experiencing the world.

1. In Investigations, Wittgenstein said that language that we used in ordinary life, using expressions such as “forms of life,” language games,” and family resemblances,” not as once-and-for-all, fixed, logically exact relationships, but rather as certain kinds of natural human practices.

1. Wittgenstein said that we may not advance any kind of theory.

1. He said that we sought clarity only to clarify the ever more complicated structures that that occurred in our march toward progress (which was really our end) and not as an end in itself. To Wittgenstein, clarity was valuable as an end in itself.

1. To Wittgenstein, there was no one philosophical method, there were many different methods each for different problems.

1. In Investigations, Wittgenstein said that those methods were demonstrated by examples rather than by philosophical theories.

1. Our task as philosophers was not to solve grand problems but to assemble reminders for a particular purpose. That purpose was to see how language really worked.

1. To Wittgenstein in Investigations, description had to replace explanation.

1. He said that philosophical problems we solved not by giving new information but by arranging what we had always known.

2