This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.

Frege famously argued that truth is not a property or relation. In the “Notes on Logic” Wittgenstein emphasised the bi-polarity of propositions which he called their sense. He argued that “propositions by virtue of sense cannot have predicates or relations.” This led to his fundamental thought that the logical constants do not represent predicates or relations. The idea, however, has wider ramifications than that. It is not just that propositions cannot have relations to other propositions but also that (...) they cannot have relations to anything at all. The paper explores the consequences of this insight for the way in which we should read the Tractatus. In the “Notes on Logic” the insight led to Wittgenstein's emphasis on “facts” in any attempt to understand the nature of symbolism. This emphasis is continued in the Tractatus. It is central to his view that propositions are facts which picture facts which prevent us from construing such picturing as a relation between what pictures and what is pictured. It illuminates the importance of context principle with regard to the distinction between showing and saying to which Wittgenstein attached so much importance and it underlies the non-relational view of psychological propositions which he advocates. Finally, if propositions by virtue of sense cannot have predicates or relations the paradox at the end of a work which consist largely of propositions about propositions becomes intelligible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 165 of the church regularly gives renewed expression to inspiration in constantly new existential contexts. There the Christian churches have sometimes done well, and sometimes less well, leading to disillusionment. We can regard all this as a generally accepted consensus among contemporary theologians, though the instruments of the church's teaching authority often have a tendency to dwell on ' the letter ' of earlier statements and to (...) underestimate their historieal and hermeneutical dimensions" (208). Those in the Magisterium who dwell on 'the letter ' believe, erroneously in Schillebeeckx's judgment, that history can and does give rise to nonnative, enduring facts and forms. Theologians who attend to historical relativizing and hermeneutical theorizing, correctly in Schillebeeckx's judgment, know better. His book is clearly designed to demonstrate this point. There is one sense in which his hook docs not, and indeed cannot, fail, given how the facts which he presents for the reader's judgment arise out of the theory with which he begins and necessarily point to the conclusion which his theory already presupposes. This is a fail-safe method for getting to where one wants to go. Unfortunately, it gets there by way of an enormous detour around the facticity of the Catholic faith and practice, a facticity which, despite the efforts of some of our best known (if not finest) theologians over a two thousand year history, has consistently refused to submit to the hypothetical and the theoretical reason of rationalist theologians. Our faith is centered on the Christ, the incarnate, historical Logos of tradition and Scripture, not on the disincarnate, unhistorical logos of theoretical theology. Schillebeeckx is not the first, nor will he be the last, theologian intent upon reducing the Catholic faith to some hypothetical methodology. Happily, however, and perhaps even miraculously, the Church always manages to survive her theologians, a fact which cannot but offer solace to many of the readers of this book. University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas JOYCE A. Ll'J'TLE The.Argument of the "Tractatus :" Its Relevance to Contempora~·y Theories of Logic, Language. Mind, and Philosophical Trust. By RroHARD M. McDoNOUGH. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 311. This book attempts an analysis of the Tractatits Logico-Philosophicus based on taking Wittgenstein's professed "fundamental idea' as the hermeneutic key. Tractatus 4.0312 states, in part: "My fundamental idea is 166 BOOK REVIEWS that the 'log·ical constants' are not representatives." McDonough believes that previous interpreters of the Tractatus have either ignored or downplayed the importance of this statement, and he writes in the conviction that taking it seriously produc&s a reading of the Tractatits that is friendlier toward philosophical language and argumentation than " the strong nagativ& views... which have been hastily claimed " as the import of the book (p. 11). In order to establish this "fundamental idea" as an interpretative device McDonough reminds the reader of links among three ideas. The first is the idea that the logical constants are not representatives. The second is the idea that the sole (real) logical constant is the general propositional form (T 5.47). The third is the fact that the status of the propositions of logic as tautologies exhibits the logic of their constituents, and hence, the logical properties of language and the world (T 6.12). By developing the relations among these ideas, and extending them to the interpretation of the Tractatiis as a whole, McDonough aims to show that Wittgenstein is committed to an explicit, only "technically nonsensical," philosophical doctrin& concerning the derivation of general metaphysical facts about ontology from general facts about the philosophy of logic. This doctrine he characterizes as "the argument of th& Tractatus." By attributing to the book an argmnent or doctrine (in the sense just mention &d) he contradicts those commentators who have understood Wittg·enstein to be earnestly requiring real silence about philosophy and to b& asserting seriously that the Tractatu,s is a self-refuting treatise, to be kicked aside. once its lessons are learned. J\1foDonoug·h begins with vVittgenstein's understanding of negation and th& problem wheth&r there are negative facts. McDonough discusses Russell 's attempt to sort this out, and claims that Wittgenstein diagnoses Russell's mistake in this remark; "For it is difficult... (shrink)

I take as my text propostion 4.0312 of the Tractatus : The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives. My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts. Practically the same words occur in Wittgenstein's Notebook for 25 December 1914, where Miss Anscombe translates them: The possibility of the proposition is, of course, founded (...) on the principle of signs as going proxy for objects. Thus in the proposition something has something else as its proxy. But there is also the common cement. My fundamental thought is that the logical constants are not proxies. That the logic of the fact cannot have anything as its proxy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 345-363 [Access article in PDF] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A "Poem" by Ludwig Wittgenstein David Rozema In the Fall term of 1911 the 22-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein presented himself to the Cambridge philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a prospective student of philosophy. Wittgenstein had left off his studies as a promising young aeronautical engineer because, in the course of his engineering studies, (...) he had become obsessed with problems in the foundations of mathematics, the very problems Russell himself had tried to solve in his Principia Mathematica, a work he had completed just the year before. Wittgenstein, it seems, did not consider Russell's work to be the end of the matter, and so he had planned a book of his own on the subject. Although this work never materialized, Wittgenstein's interest in philosophy grew under his studies with Russell. And although Wittgenstein's early work in the philosophy of mathematics and logic were the initial impetus for his interest in philosophy, the events of his life soon led him back to the concerns which have always been central to the spirit of philosophy: How ought a man to live? What constitutes the good for man? What sort of life is a worthy or a beautiful one?It is likely that Wittgenstein's concern with these questions was heightened by what he saw in Russell, who followed a notoriously loose way of life outside of his academic studies. 1 If Wittgenstein ever wondered whether or not there was any connection between Russell's philosophical commitments and Russell's way of life, he never directly confronted Russell with the question. Russell was, after all, his benefactor, his mentor, and the source for his initial interest in philosophical problems. 2 Nevertheless, I maintain, Wittgenstein did confront Russell indirectly: he confronted the part of himself that was like Russell and, by attempting [End Page 345] to describe it in writing—the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—he discovered its barrenness. Insofar as such an act of writing is elucidatory of a person's soul in what and in how it pictures, it can legitimately be called a kind of poetry, for it bears the essential feature of all poetics: it serves to shape, through catharsis, the passions.Thus, though Wittgenstein neither considered the Tractatus to be a poem nor intentionally wrote it as a poem, it turned out to be a kind of poem in the sense that its form fits its content, both of which, in turn, accurately picture a specific form of life, and the passional result of this poetic construction is (and was, for Wittgenstein) a certain appropriate disdain for the form of life it pictures. This is what I suggest with regard to the Tractatus: it is most helpful and is best read as a poem. I will also try to show that this is how Wittgenstein himself came to think it should be read, which in turn helps to explain why he initially allowed and later continued to allow its publication.What does it mean to read the Tractatus as a poem picturing the form of life implicated by a philosophy like that of Russell's? In this poem Wittgenstein takes the fundamental principles of Russell's philosophy—that all words are signs that stand for objects or kinds of objects and that all meaningful propositions represent a possible arrangement of these objects—and draws out the full-blown implications of these principles. In the last section of the poem Wittgenstein shows the practical consequences of a life lived on these principles, concluding: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 3 The two-edged nature of this remark carries the force appropriate to the last line of a poem, for it is both descriptive and imagistic. It describes Wittgenstein's own thought when he realizes that, because of his Russellian philosophical commitments, he has nothing to say with regard to the good, the truth, and the beauty of life; and it is an image of the necessity that a... (shrink)

Tractatus 4.024 inspired the dominant semantics of our time: truth-conditional semantics. Such semantics is focused on possible worlds: the content of p is the set of worlds where p is true. It has become increasingly clear that such an account is, at best, defective: we need an ‘independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions’ (Yablo 2014, p. 2), because sentences can be differently true at the same possible worlds. I suggest a missing comment which, had it (...) been included in the Tractatus, would have helped semantics get this right from the start. This is my 4.0241: ‘Knowing what is the case if a sentence is true is knowing its ways of being true’: knowing a sentence’s truth possibilities and what we now call its topic, or subject matter. I show that the famous ‘fundamental thought’ that ‘the “logical constants” do not represent’ (4.0312) can be understood in terms of ways-based views of meaning. Such views also help with puzzling claims like 5.122: ‘If p follows from q, the sense of “p” is contained in the that of “q”’, which are compatible with a conception of entailment combining truth-preservation with the preservation of topicality, or of ways of being true. (shrink)

In the commentaries on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, due attention has always been paid to the philosophy of logic contained in this work. In particular the statement that a picture and reality must have their form in common has attracted the attention of the commentators. This statement has been explained now in an extreme realistic way, now in the sense of a linguistic kantianism. Both of the interpretations have this in common that they tend to give a kind of metaphysical status (...) to this 'logical form', considered either as THE form of reality on its own or as THE objective form of language as such. In our article, we try to show that there is no place for this kind of 'hypostases' or reifications in the philosophy of the Tractatus. We point out some important arguments available in the text, to show that Wittgenstein didn't found logic on what can be termed as the objective and given structural form either of language or of reality. The point of his philosophy of logic, we argue, was not a metaphysical, but rather a pragmatical and operational one. Our argumentation is built upon what we consider to be the two basic texts of Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic, namely that we can „postulate” the truths of logic in so far as we can postulate an „adequate notation”(6.1233), and that the so called „logical constants” are not representatives : that there can be no „representatives” (in German : „vertreten”) of the logic of facts (4.0312). We first try to show that logic is not really distinct from the grammar (syntax, form) of a language which is capable to express reality in a complete and determinate way (4.123; 3.14; 3.251; 4.023; 4A66 ; 6.124; 4.002a). And to the extent that there is no meaningfull language without a signified reality related with it, there is no logic either which is not apriori and at the same time a logic applied to reality, i.e. the logic of the world. Consequently, we try to develop an interpretation of 2.16-2.18 of the Tractatus which can account for its a-metaphysical, operational conception of logic. Finally, we attempt a clarification of 5.552, a text which we consider as basic for Wittgenstein's philosophy of the „mystical”. (shrink)

This chapter provides us with an appropriate way in to the logic of the Tractatus. Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica was an attempt to vindicate “logicism”, the claim that truths of mathematics were disguised truths of logic. To overcome Russell's paradox, Russell had introduced the “theory of types”, stratifying sets, and with that the properties of sets. The resulting system was too weak to generate number theory without the addition of further axioms, including the “Axiom of Reducibility”. This chapter (...) examines the logical apparatus of language, “the logical constants” starting with what at one point Ludwig Wittgenstein calls his “fundamental thought” that the logical constants do not stand for anything. Wittgenstein stresses that operations are quite different from Russellian propositional functions. Wittgenstein's task is to introduce a single logical constant that is truth‐functional and in terms of which the whole of standard Fregean logic can be defined. (shrink)

Drewermann himself typifies his whole literary theological activity as a therapy. Therefore, we may consider his therapeutic concern as the structural principle of this synthetic survey of his fundamental ideas. Therapy means deliverance from an evil situation. Throughout Drewermann’s oeuvre this evil situation is being approached from a double standpoint. Now it is described as anxiety , then again as psychic imperfection of man who suppresses essential elements of his inner life in the unconscious. This two perspectives are at (...) the origin of two distinctive trains of thought which run like a seam trough Drewermann’s oeuvre. Either develops its own logic which leads to divergent standpoint with regard to religious fundamental convictions which do not lend themselves to one synthesis. The vision on God as deliverer from anxiety maintains the fundamental ideas of traditional Christian theology like the belief in a transcendent personal God and in the unique role of Christ in the mystery of salvation. Typical of this vision is also the pessimistic outlook on man’s natural existence as they are made explicit in the myths of the Jahwistic primitive history. Mythology is to be surpassed by theology. In contrast, archetypal hermeneutics are in the service of man’s perfection, and have totally different, even opposite, theological implication with regard to the essence of man and his relationship with God. Obviously, hermeneutics are based on an optimistic view of man’s natural existence as it is made explicit in the archetypes. At the same time this perspective calls God’s transcendence into question. We find many statements that point to a coincidence of ‘Gottfindung’ and 'Selbstfindung’, Christ’s unique role in the mystery of salvation according to traditional theology runs the risk to get lost. Christ is reduced to one of the many possible phenomena of a generally human retigion which comes to light in the archetypes. Confronted with these fundamental problems, Drewermann claims that Bible reading in the line of depth psychology must be surpassed by theological explanation. The concomitant emphasis on shortcomings, even aberrations which the interpretation of depth psychology exposes leads Drewermann’s line of thought into insoluble aporia. In the healing process as a coming to perfection of fragmented man, the archetypes are considered as components of a human psyche , good as such, which have to be integrated with conscious life. In man’s striving for deliverance from existential anxiety , the myths and archetypes are seen as a description of an inherently disastrous human existence labouring under anxiety. Thus, the interpretation of Drewermann’s theology is faced with an apparently insoluble contradiction: on the one hand, the archetypal dream of mankind is the ‘language of God’; on the other, Drewermann takes the ‘overcoming of the myths’ the starting point of his theology. What comes to light about the relationship between God and man in both the interpretations in depth psychology and in theology runs not not only directly parallel, but the theological interpretation gives a verdict on the ‘archetypal hermeneutics’ which Drewermann’s new contribution to theology wants to be and to which the bulk of his oeuvre is devoted. (shrink)

An ambitious, rich, and challenging work, Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense attempts to trace the path of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the world, to its threatened loss by way of failed and ultimately nonsensical efforts to account for our relation to it, to its recovery as a significant whole, a meaningful habitation for human beings, in the uses we make of everyday language. Aiming to account for nothing less than the purpose of the Tractatus, its overall effects on (...) its readers, Friedlander has provocative things to say about two centrally important issues—the role of the nonsense that the Tractatus itself produces and the relation between the ostensibly logical and ethical facets of Wittgenstein’s text. Part 1 works through the text of the Tractatus more or less in order and in relative isolation from interpretative controversy. Here Friedlander lays out the ontological distinctions that occupy Wittgenstein at the outset; examines the identity of form between language and world that makes representation possible; deepens our understanding of Wittgenstein’s “fundamental idea … that ‘logical constants’ are not representatives”; proposes an original reading of the Tractarian treatment of solipsism and the sense in which “what the solipsist means is quite correct”; and finally, tries to demonstrate the ethical significance of the movement of the Tractatus as a whole and its culmination in apparent self-annihilation. Part 2 helps to fix our understanding of the intricate and subtle reading offered in part 1: chapter 11, by situating it with respect to major interpretative issues, and chapter 12, by giving an interesting account of Wittgenstein’s initial moves away from the Tractatus in the 1929 “Remarks on Logical Form.”. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two substantial interpretations of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Frege’s conception of logic. One is based on Frege’s rejection of psychologism and alleges that this rejection engenders a tension that is resolved in the Tractatus. The other is based on the claim that there are patterns of inference involving what are now known as propositional attitude ascriptions that Frege’s conception of logic is not equipped to handle. I show that neither of these interpretations present a compelling (...) criticism of Frege. I then argue that Wittgenstein inherited from Frege the ideas of affirmation, denial, and the “opposite” of a thought, but came to see that these conflict with Frege’s conception of negation as a truth-function. This leads to the Grundgedanke of the Tractatus: neither negation nor any other “logical constant” is a representative in our picturing of the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR McDONOUGH Professor McDonough's response to my review of his book on the Tractatus consists of six main points. I will respond to them in sequence. First, Professor McDonough believes that I have ignored the central point of his hook: namely, the contention that the Tractatus embodies a philosophical argument built around certain " fundamental ideas." I have not done so, though an (...) ambiguity in his idea of what that argument is explains why he thinks that I have. By " the argument of the Tractatus " Professor McDonough may mean the pattern of remarks in the text concerning the non-representational status of logical con· stants, the idea that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form, and the idea that the tautological propositions of logic exhibit the framework of possibility for language and the world. In his interpretation of the links among these ideas Professor McDonough neither advances nor strays from the sorts of interpretations other commentators have offered. So in my review I dealt principally with the other side of the ambiguity, in which "the argument of the Tractatus " means an attempt, which Professor McDonough attributes to Wittgenstein, to establish a philosophical discourse about logic, the world, and mind, a discourse not covered by the injunction to silence. It is here that Professor McDonough's reading-as I think we both agree-is eccentric, and it was to this most interesting, though mis· taken, aspect of hi,s argument that I have directed my attention. Second, P1ofessor McDonough seems to suppose that I believe that the import of proposition 7 is that no one can consistently offer interpretative discourse about the Tractatus, and that I, in my remarks, seize special, unfair advantage by offering interpretation and then invoking silence. He charges that I " [make my] own interpretative claims " and that I ·then insist " (conveniently) that one must there· after he silent." By no means. It is only Wittgenstein (or one who endorses the Tractarian doctrines) who is open to a circumstantial ad hominem charge of inconsistency if he offers interpretations. For those of us who try to understand the Tractarian perspective without precisely sharing it, the question of consistency with proposition 7 is not an issue. What is an issue is construing Wittgenstein's doctrines in 327 328 JOHN CHURCHILL such a way that they are consistent with proposition 7. It is here that McDonough's reading is, as I have said, both most interesting and least convincing. Further, in suggesting that I have paid attention to the " conclusions " of his argument but not its substance, Professor McDonough does not do justice to the coherence of his own work. Those aspects of his interpretation to which much of my review is directed-for example, his interpretation of the thought as a " meaning locus "-are essential to the structure of his argument. By focusing my attention there I have shown, I believe, how these elements of his interpretation contribute to his central claim that the Tractatus is built around an argument. Third, he attributes to me the implausible idea that there is a " stand· ard interpretation of ' the plain sense of what Wittgenstein wrote ' " throughout the Tractatus. But I allude to a " plain sense " only in commenting on the injunction to silence about philosophy in proposi· tion 7. Of course there are many interpretative difficulties in the text. Professor McDonough supposes me to be denying that by ignoring the fact that, in the line he quotes from my review, I refer only to proposition 7 and to his attempt to interpret it. Fourth, Professor McDonough takes exception to my use of allusions to some of Wittgenstein's later works to illustrate shortcomings in his interpretation of the Tractatus.. He is quite right in detecting my own underlying assumptions of continuity throughout Wittgenstein's philosophical work. If space to articulate those assumptions was lacking in my review, it is scarcer here. I will simply say that one of the strongest continuities, the concern to see how philosophical inquiry comes to an end, is precisely the thing that Professor McDonough's " argument of the Tractatus " misconstrues. Fifth, Professor McDonough provides a list of seven points at which, he... (shrink)

In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett articulates and develops his “fundamental assumption” that the introduction rules for a logical constant determine its meaning. According to Dummett, logical laws in harmony with the introduction rules are justified, while logical laws not in harmony with the introduction rules are unjustified. This powerful picture enables Dummett to criticise certain aspects of our linguistic practice, such as the Law of Excluded Middle and the metaphysics of realism he believes it embodies, as not (...) remaining responsible to the meanings of the logical constants. Against Dummett's fundamental assumption, I bring to bear what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein describes as his “fundamental thought” that the logical constants do not represent. Properly understood, Wittgenstein's point is that since the logical constants may be eliminated from the propositional signs of a fully precise logical notation, the constants do not express meanings to which our use of expressions containing the constants is responsible. I then apply Wittgenstein's fundamental thought to Dummett's proof‐theoretic notation to show that far from determining the meanings of the logical constants, the introduction rules merely allow the constants to be edited from certain inferences, leaving Dummett with no semantic kernel with which to criticise other sentences or inferences featuring the constants. Thus, his picture of what it is to make clear the working of our language collapses. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of ideas derived from Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations, that the formal comprehends more than the logical. More specifically: that there exist certain formal-ontological constants (part, whole, overlapping, etc.) which do not fall within the province of logic. A two-dimensional directly depicting language is developed for the representation of the constants of formal ontology, and means are provided for the extension of this language to enable the representation of certain materially necessary relations. (...) The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between formal logic, formal ontology, and mathematics. (shrink)

In this article I offer a novel explanation of Wittgenstein’s claim, in his Tractatus, that to represent the logical form of a proposition would require our being positioned outside of logic. The account here presented aims to exploit a connection, widely noticed, between the logical forms of objects and those of the propositions in which the names of those objects figure. I show that the logical forms of propositions may, on Wittgenstein’s view, be identified with places in logical space, (...) and that places in logical space are reducible to the forms of both objects and their names. I argue, though, that according to Wittgenstein the representation of a proposition’s logical form would require the existence of a place in logical space not so reducible. I conclude that on Wittgenstein’s position, the attempt to represent logical forms cannot, therefore, succeed. (shrink)

It is and has been widely assumed, e.g., in Hintikka and Hintikka, that the logical theory available from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus affords a foundation for the conventional logic represented in standard formulations of classical propositional, first-order predicate, and perhaps higher-order formal systems. The present article is a detailed attempt at a mathematical demonstration, or as much demonstration as the sources will allow, that this assumption is false by contemporary lights and according to a preferred account of argument validity. When (...) Wittgenstein’s description of the forms of propositions or Sätze in the 5-numbered remarks and Remark 6 is given a close reconstruction, one sees that no Tractarian proposition is logically equivalent to a simple universally or existentially quantified formula of first-order predicate logic. Therefore, although Wittgenstein employs the sign ∀—or, in his notation—occasionally in explanations and illustrations, e.g., 4.0411 and 5.1311, when it comes to logic, the sign ∀ should receive in Tractatus a semantical treatment that is nonstandard. En route to that result, we show that the hierarchy of variables–and, hence, of propositions–defined at 5.501 incorporates the expressive power of finitary classical propositional logic. Also, when constructed over a first-order language for arithmetic, formulae corresponding to the specification of 5.501 pick out all and only arithmetic sets of numbers. Consequently, Wittgenstein’s hierarchy of iterated N-propositions–as described in vide Remark 6–does not collapse: at any level k, one finds propositions at k + 1 or above that are not logically equivalent to any proposition formed at k or below. (shrink)

Wittgenstein responds in his Notes on Logic to a discussion of Russell's Principles of Mathematics concerning assertion. Russell writes: "It is plain that, if I may be allowed to use the word assertion in a non-psychological sense, the proposition "p implies q" asserts an implication, though it does not assert p or q. The p and the q which enter into this proposition are not strictly the same as the p or the q which are separate propositions." (PoM p35) Wittgenstein (...) replies: "Assertion is merely psychological. In not-p, p is exactly the same as if it stands alone; this point is absolutely fundamental." (NB p95) Wittgenstein's response is intriguing, not least because of the centrality to his Tractatus of the idea that a proposition says something. This paper will examine that idea, distinguishing it from 'merely psychological' assertion, and explore in this context how we should understand the occurrence of a Tractarian proposition within another. (shrink)

Albert Maslow points out that Wittgenstein dedicated a copy of the Tractatus to Morris Schlick with the following sentence: “ Jeder disese Sätze ist der Ausdruck einer Krankheit ” (Each of this propositions is the manifestation of a disease.) We will try to see some of the treatments to see if the remedy is not, in many cases, worse than the disease. Few philosophical texts have so many material surrounding it as the Tractatus, but and at the same (...) time do maintain such a vast spectrum of interpretations. To the point that one can expect every now and then, exegetical revolutions. Like the political ones, they usually burry the past in its way. An example: the appearance in the 1980s of Wittgenstein's Vienna was a fundamental milestone that showed that it is impossible to dissociate the author from the Viennese intellectual environment. However, attempts have been made to present this new approach as the refutation of the rest, falsely equating the Tractatus with continental philosophy in a book that is really weak in terms of elements of symbolic logic and without any expertise in regard to the philosophy of logic of Frege and Russell, which are essential to understand the context of the concepts in the text of the Tractatus itself and the records of the time. A similar case is the new interpretation that was awarded some ten years later by the North American school: they rightly called attention to the neglect of the essential paradox of the Tractatus of having intended to say what is shown. However, the value of this perspective is lost when the book is treated as the work of a postmodern nihilist, an antimetaphysical dialectician. The same can be said of the interpretation of Raymond Bradley, whose praiseworthy efforts to highlight the Tractarian modal element have resulted in an inadequate Leibnizian framing in his work The Nature of All Being (Bradley, 1992). To show an overview, I would broadly follow the outline of Cerezo (1998), adding and extending his taxonomy a bit. I think Cerezo´s outline is accurate and simple. Cerezo does not take into account contextualist readings or, in any case, it isnt her concern in her Lenguaje y Lógica in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Let us mention among the ways of reading the Tractatus the empiricist perspectives (in classical version, like Russell, or positivist, like those of Shlick and Carnap ), non-empiricist logicists ( Anscombe, Kenny ), Kantian ( Stenius, Coffa ), metaphysical (in actualist variant, Hacker, or positilist Leibnizian, Bradley), continental (such as Janik and Toulmin ), nihilistic ( Diamond and Conant, Ostrow and his dialectical idea ), and MacGuinn 's elucidatory -ecumenical attempt. David Stern (Stern,1998 ) made a stratification that is not incompatible with the one I point out. 1. The logical-atomistic reading ( logical atomist reading ) of Russell ; 2. The reading of logical positivism ( logical positivist reading ) : with the belligerent antimetaphysical charge ; 3. Metaphysical reading ( metaphysical reading ), like Hacker's, with a logically based idea of metaphysics; 4. The irrationalist reading ( irrationalist reading ) that Toulmin and Janik maintain, for example, or Isidro Reguera, where there is pre-eminence of the religious ethic elements; and 5. therapeutic reading ( therapeutic reading ), which poses it as a kind of infinity joke. We are going to add to the list a reading, which we will call a pathological reading. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus has generated many interpretations since its publication in 1921, but over the years a consensus has developed concerning its criticisms of Russell's philosophy. In Wittgenstein's Apprenticeship with Russell, Gregory Landini draws extensively from his work on Russell's unpublished manuscripts to show that the consensus characterises Russell with positions he did not hold. Using a careful analysis of Wittgenstein's writings he traces the 'Doctrine of Showing' and the 'fundamental idea' of the Tractatus to Russell's logical (...) atomist research program, which dissolves philosophical problems by employing variables with structure. He argues that Russell and his apprentice Wittgenstein were allies in a research program that makes logical analysis and reconstruction the essence of philosophy. His sharp and controversial study will be essential reading for all who are interested in this rich period in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The dissertation analyzes the theory of "logical space" developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I show how this idea represents a development of arguments first put forward by Hermann von Helmholtz, the physicist and physiologist. Helmholtz--instead of honouring Kant's distinction between on the one hand time and space, and, on the other, empirical qualia --stretched the Kantian spatial manifold to cover the other qualia as well: the qualia are also organized in manifolds; and this new, extended (...) manifold is the "space" of all possible human experience. He explained this a priori mesh as being a consequence of the physiological constitution of our bodies, and the physical constitution of the world in which they are situated. The subject is enclosed in an inner world whose structure is the network of possible sensation; outside of her is a world of unknown complexity; and separating the two is what Heinrich Hertz called the "no-man's-land" of sense-physiology, a border zone regulating all traffic between the two realms, common to both, yet proper to neither. ;Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, adapted the picture-theories of Helmholtz and Hertz to his analysis of logic. He too was confronted with the problem of defining a field of possible experience, of possible facts: his analysis of Russell's and Frege's logical theories had led him to the conclusion that the fundamental properties of logic could not be accounted for without assuming such an a priori space. Thus he assimilated Russell's types to the dimensions of a manifold, the elements of which were his Sachverhalte, or elementary facts. The truth-functions of our logic are defined on top of this space: it is the basis on which all symbolic systems, including those of the natural sciences, are erected. (shrink)

Few would disagree that P. F. Strawson and W. V. O. Quine have been the leading figures in Anglo-American philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. This book brings together a number of Strawson’s widely-scattered previously-published essays from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The unity of the collection is partly provided by the internal connectedness of the essays to Strawson’s most important books Individuals, The Bounds of Sense, Logico-Linguistic Papers, and Subject and Predicate in Grammar and Logic. But (...) its unity principally lies in Strawson’s consistent and vigorous opposition to Quine’s extreme extensionalism. The extensionalist says that the meanings of terms and sentences in natural languages or logical systems are strictly determined by the objects they refer to; and the Quinean extensionalist also says that those objects are ultimately whatever the natural sciences tell us they are. The intensionalist, by contrast, says that meanings in natural language and logic are underdetermined by the functions of reference and have irreducible, autonomous structures that include primitive features of generality and modality; and the Strawsonian intensionalist says that those irreducible, autonomous structures are grounded in the person-oriented world of ordinary speech-transactions and everyday common sense. In the Introduction, Strawson helpfully divides the essays into seven groups or clusters: two on identity and universals; two on quantification and properties; three on singular reference and beliefreports; two on logical form; one on epistemic modality; two on pragmatics; and four on Kant. The essays on Kant are primarily exegeticalcritical, but also have a deeper import. For Strawson’s metaphysical commonsensism and personalism can be fairly neatly derived from Kantian metaphysics by logically detaching Kant’s plausible conception of “empirical realism” from his questionable doctrine of “transcendental idealism”, and by similarly detaching Kant’s plausible conception of a self-conscious embodied empirical subject and her a priori cognitive and practical capacities from his questionable conception of a noumenal self. It is of course impossible in a very short review even to summarize all sixteen essays, far less to explicate or criticize them. So to maximize available resources I will concentrate the rest of my remarks on what seems to me to be the most important paper. In “Logical Form and Logical Constants”, Strawson addresses a fundamental and lingering problem in the philosophy of logic: How precisely to define the logical constants and to justify their introduction into a logical theory? All logicians agree that logical constants are just those terms in a formal or natural language which hold their meanings fixed under the variable interpretations of all other terms, which enter essentially into logical truths and deductions, and which are “topic-neutral”—indifferent to all special subject-matters. But these notions do not get us very far, since the meaning of any term can be held rigidly and topic-neutrally fixed over a language and also held to enter essentially into logical truths and deductions, by sheer stipulation. Strawson’s approach to solving the problem has two basic steps. First, he joins a line of thought shared by Kant, Boole, and early Wittgenstein: “[l]ogic reveals the general essence of all thought and all language”. Secondly, he borrows and exploits Wittgenstein’s idea that all the logical constants are packed into the general form of a proposition, which is simply “this is how things are.” This leads to the proposal that we can “think of standard logic as something in principle excogitatable... by pure reflection on the general nature of statement, on what is the least that is necessarily involved in the making of empirical informative statements”. Such a line of reasoning— rather like Kant’s discovery of his “table of judgments” in the first Critique —runs backward from the notion of an empirical statement to the root logical notions of general term and singular term, of compatibility and incompatibility, and of “identifiable linguistic forms or devices with conventional forces or meaning” ; and from there by gradual steps to the notions of contradiction and entailment, the truth-functions, logical truth, first-order quantification, and so forth. I have a worry about this way of excogitating logic, however. While it neatly accounts for standard logic, I cannot see how it will be able to account for nonstandard logic—whether in the form of conservative extensions of standard logic or in the form of deviant logics. In other words, the starting point for logical reflection must be something more comprehensive than the empirical statement. Now the notion of an analytic a priori statement seems like the obvious candidate: no system, standard or nonstandard, will wholly lack logical laws or logical truths. If so, then Strawson’s disinclination to deploy the notion of analyticity directly may be a concession to Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. On this pivotal issue, in fact, Strawson’s intensionalism has lost out to Quine’s extensionalism—the Grice-Strawson reply to “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” from ordinary-language considerations has not generally prevailed. But we are very fortunate that Strawson has been both willing and so brilliantly able to resist the Quinean juggernaut for five decades.—Robert Hanna, University of Colorado at Boulder. (shrink)

By means of a reductio argument, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus calls into question the very idea that we can represent logical form. My paper addresses three interrelated questions: first, what conception of logical form is at issue in this argument? Second, whose conception of logic is this argument intended to undermine? And third, what could count as an adequate response to it? I show that the argument construes logical form as the universal, underlying correlation of any representation and the reality (...) it represents. I further show that the argument seeks to undermine core commitments of Frege’s and Russell’s. But the reductio, as I read it, is not intended to establish the falsity of any of their specific assumptions. Rather, its aim is to make manifest the indeterminacies that underlie the language in which these assumptions are framed, and establish the need for a transformation of that language. So understood, Wittgenstein’s argument exemplifies his idea that philosophy is not a theory, but an activity of elucidation. The interpretation I propose bears on one of the central debates in the literature, namely how we should understand Wittgenstein’s contention that his elucidations succeed despite being nonsensical. (shrink)

A logically perfect language must meet following requirements: (i) it must not contain „empty“ expressions designating nothing and (ii) it must not involve phrases that are synonymous, homonymous etc. According to Frege, the meaning of a compound expression is a function of meanings of its components, i.e. the meaning of an expression consisting of a functional phrase and a name is the value of the function for the argument. However, for some arguments a function need not give values and, hence, (...) some compound phrases designate nothing in spite of the fact that every simple expression does designate something. Frege’s construction of a logically perfect language fails because it violates condition (i). According to Wittgenstein, every language is logically perfect; otherwise it cannot represent the world. Every expression, simple or compound, does designate something; the meaning of a compound expression consists of meanings of its components; the structure of a complex expression’s meaning mirrors, when completely analysed, the syntactic structure of the expression. Wittgenstein distinguishes between language and notation and we are supposed to look for a logically perfect notation that does not contain homonymy or synonymy. However, following some ideas from Tractatus, it can be shown that Wittgenstein cannot eliminate these phenomena and, hence, violates condition (ii). (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of some Wittgenstein’s ideas in relation to similar ideas of Dostoevsky. The comparison is given on a number of key topics for both: the world as the whole as it is and what it is; the image of the world and the meaning of life; the world of the happy and the unhappy. Despite the fundamental difference between the thinkers, the comparison makes it possible to discover an affinity with Dostoyevsky’s worldview of (...) values in Wittgenstein. The analysis of his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, the philosopher’s “Diaries” and “Lecture on Ethics” in comparison with the analysis of the Russian writer’s fiction texts, helps us to discover those religious and spiritual foundations that both hide and expose to the thoughtful reader beyond the “border and logic of the world”, about which one suggests silence, while the other hides and demonstrates only through the opposite form of false Christianity. The comparison allows us to see that, for Wittgenstein, making sense of the world as the meaning of life is not as silent as he himself claims. At the same time, it was the philosopher’s language of description that allowed us to discover Dostoevsky’s theodicy within the rational world, visibly crucifying Christ but tacitly living it. (shrink)

As a celebration of theTractatus100th anniversary it might be worth revisiting its relation to the later writings. From the former to the latter, David Pears recalls that “everyone is aware of the holistic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but it is not so well known that it was already beginning to establish itself in theTractatus” (The False Prison, 1987). From the latter to the former, Stephen Hilmy’s (The Later Wittgenstein, 1987) extensive study of theNachlasshas helped removing classical misconceptions such as (...) Hintikka’s claim that “Wittgenstein in thePhilosophical Investigationsalmost completely gave up the calculus analogy.” Hilmy points out that even in theInvestigationsone finds the use of the calculus/game paradigm to the understanding of language, such as “in operating with the word” (Part I, §559) and “it plays a different part in the calculus”. Hilmy also quotes from a late (1946) unpublished manuscript (MS 130) “this sentence has use in the calculus of language”, which seems to be compatible with “asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a particular way of asking ‘How do you mean?’” Central in this back and forth there is an aspect which seems to deserve attention in the discussion of a semantics for the language of mathematics which might be based on (normalisation of) proofs and/or Hintikka/Lorenzen game-dialogue: the explication of consequences. Such a discussion is substantially supported by the use of the open and searchableThe Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. These findings are framed within the discussion of the meaning of logical constants in the context of natural deduction style rules of inference. (shrink)

This paper examines the conceptions of logic from Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein and Ayer, and regards the six philosophers as the representatives of logical exceptionalism. From their standpoints, this paper refines the tenets of logical exceptionalism as follows: logic is exceptional to all other sciences because of four reasons: (i) logic is formal, neutral to any domain and any entities, and general; (ii) logical truths are made true by the meanings of logical constants they contain or by logicians' (...) rational insight to consequence relations; (iii) logical truths are analytical, a prior and necessary, so not‐revisable; and (iv) logical laws are normative for how to correctly think. However, logical exceptionalism has encountered difficult open problems: What are logical constants? How to justify basic laws of logic? How are logical laws accessible to us? How to explain the reasonability of rival logics and select from them? How to explain the universal applicability of logical laws? How to explain the normativity of logical laws for correct thinking? This paper concludes that logical anti‐exceptionalism is more hopeful to successfully answer these questions than logical exceptionalism. (shrink)

A many-valued (aka multiple- or multi-valued) semantics, in the strict sense, is one which employs more than two truth values; in the loose sense it is one which countenances more than two truth statuses. So if, for example, we say that there are only two truth values—True and False—but allow that as well as possessing the value True and possessing the value False, propositions may also have a third truth status—possessing neither truth value—then we have a many-valued semantics in the (...) loose but not the strict sense. A many-valued logic is one which arises from a many-valued semantics and does not also arise from any two-valued semantics [Malinowski, 1993, 30]. By a ‘logic’ here we mean either a set of tautologies, or a consequence relation. We can best explain these ideas by considering the case of classical propositional logic. The language contains the usual basic symbols (propositional constants p, q, r, . . .; connectives ¬, ∧, ∨, →, ↔; and parentheses) and well-formed formulas are defined in the standard way. With the language thus specified—as a set of well-formed formulas—its semantics is then given in three parts. (i) A model of a logical language consists in a free assignment of semantic values to basic items of the non-logical vocabulary. Here the basic items of the non-logical vocabulary are the propositional constants. The appropriate kind of semantic value for a proposition is a truth value, and so a model of the language consists in a free assignment of truth values to basic propositions. Two truth values are countenanced: 1 (representing truth) and 0 (representing falsity). (ii) Rules are presented which determine a truth value for every proposition of the language, given a model. The most common way of presenting these rules is via truth tables (Figure 1). Another way of stating such rules—which will be useful below—is first to introduce functions on the truth values themselves: a unary function ¬ and four binary functions ∧, ∨, → and ↔ (Figure 2).. (shrink)

Schlick’s relationship with the Tractatus has been mainly investigated in what concerns the conception both of language and world, the insight of logic, the criteria of verifiability, the proper role of philosophy as mental activity. However, some other features of Schlick’s reading of the Tractatus require a closer consideration. In the 1920s, Schlick was dealing with the questions of ethics (and, to some extent, of religion), that represent from the early days the core issue of his philosophy of (...) culture. Schlick’s intellectual relationship with Wittgenstein ought to be explored also in this broader context, namely after his first encounter with the Tractatus. As it emerges from their private conversations in 1929, Schlick did not agree with Wittgenstein’s account of ethics as a domain going beyond the limits of language. Whereas Wittgenstein maintains that “that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same [Tractatus 6.421]”, Schlick considers ethics as a factual science. As he says in the Problems of ethics (1930), “if there are ethical questions that have meaning, and are therefore able to be answered, then ethics is a science”. Wittgenstein’s position is patently in contrast with Schlick’s. According to Wittgenstein, ethics, no differently from religion, cannot be tested as is usual for meaningful propositions, namely by recurring to hypotheses, high probability or knowing. My paper aims at highlighting this contrast, that is rooted both in the Tractatus and in Schlick’s conception of ethics as science already endorsed in his work before the arriving in Vienna. How Schlick would have appreciated Wittgenstein’s late thoughts on ethics remains, at any rate, an open question. (shrink)

The author compares Frege's theory of sense and reference with Wittgenstein's Tractatus theory of "logical picturing through language." The aim of Frege's theory, according to Carl, is to arrive at a concept of judgment suitable for his logic and at a satisfactory account of the relation between thought and truth. In all this, Frege uses both linguistic and epistemological reflections. Wittgenstein's interest is different: his theory is concerned with the relation between language and reality, his concept of truth is (...) one of correspondence. The words "Sinn" and "Bedeutung" stand, in Tractatus, for the objective "correlates" of sentence and name respectively. The Sinn of a sentence is a function of the Bedeutung of the names occurring in it. Sentences have Sinn, words have Bedeutung. According to Carl, Frege and Wittgenstein ask different questions and pursue different explanatory goals. Frege's problem, unlike Wittgenstein's, is oriented by a Kantian understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. That for Frege the Sinn is the fact that is represented in a sentence, points on the one hand to Frege's basically epistemological interest and, on the other, to Wittgenstein's linguistic-ontological concern. Tractatus gives a version of correspondence theory, which Frege explicitly rejects; just as Frege's concern with assertion and judgment are rejected by Wittgenstein as being of no logical importance. In spite of these fundamental differences in orientation, they do have, according to Carl, common theories and thematic interconnections. Both connect the idea of Sinn with understanding of linguistic expressions, both have a functional interpretation of the sense or the reference of complex expressions. Both accord centrality to the concept of truth. (shrink)

Drawing on affective sciences, I argue that normally elicited emotions involve a component—the appraisal process—that represents evaluative properties unconsciously. More specifically, I argue that, given a substantial agreement in affective sciences about what emotions are, given broadly shared definitions of representation, evaluative properties, and unconsciousness, given how appraisals are conceptualized by most (neuro)psychological theories of emotion, and given empirical evidence about affective states elicited by stimuli perceived unconsciously, we are led to conclude that normally elicited emotions involve a component that (...) represents evaluative properties unconsciously. In the last section, I assess which philosophical theories of emotions are in contradiction with my conclusion, ask whether it implies that emotions represent evaluative properties consciously as well, and discuss how it relates to the debate on unconscious emotions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the Tractatus’ proof of the unity of logic and language. The kernel of the proof is the thesis that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form. I argue that the Grundgedanke, the existence of the sole fundamental operation N and the analyticity thesis, together with the fact that the operation NN can always be seen as having no specific formal difference between its result and its (...) base, imply that NN is intrinsic to every elementary proposition. I also argue that the picture theory of proposition is an account of the generation of propositions via naming, and that its crucial idea is that naming is the instantiation of the form of a name, which consists in arbitrarily picking out an object as the meaning of the name from those objects sorted out by the form of the name. It follows that the existential quantifier, that is, NN, is intrinsic to naming (and therefore to every elementary proposition). It is then proven that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form. This, together with the truth‐functionality of logical necessity, implies that logic and language are unified via a general rule – logical syntax. (shrink)

Logical form is thought to be discovered by keeping fixed the logical constants and allowing the non-logical content in the sentence to vary. The problem of logical constants is the problem of defining what counts as a logical constant. In this paper, I will argue that the concept ’logical constant’ is vague. I demonstrate the vagueness of logical constancy by providing a sorites argument, thereby showing the sorites-susceptibility of the concept. Many prior papers in the literature on logical constants hint (...) at this vagueness, but do not explore how theories of vagueness apply to logical constants. In the second half of this paper, I do just this. I consider approaches to logical constants that resemble nihilism about vagueness and more recent theories that relativize truth to precisifications. Finally, I argue that approaches that accept the potential indeterminate status of putative logical constants are preferable to nihilism or relativism about logical constancy. (shrink)

Logic is usually thought to concern itself only with features that sentences and arguments possess in virtue of their logical structures or forms. The logical form of a sentence or argument is determined by its syntactic or semantic structure and by the placement of certain expressions called “logical constants.”[1] Thus, for example, the sentences Every boy loves some girl. and Some boy loves every girl. are thought to differ in logical form, even though they share a common syntactic and semantic (...) structure, because they differ in the placement of the logical constants “every” and “some”. By contrast, the sentences Every girl loves some boy. and Every boy loves some girl. are thought to have the same logical form, because “girl” and “boy” are not logical constants. Thus, in order to settle questions about logical form, and ultimately about which arguments are logically valid and which sentences logically true, we must distinguish the “logical constants” of a language from its nonlogical expressions. (shrink)

José L. Zalabardo puts forward a new interpretation of central ideas in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning the structure of reality and our representations of it in thought and language. He presents the picture theory of propositional representation as Wittgenstein's solution to the problems that he had found in Bertrand Russell's theories of judgment. Zalabardo then attributes to Wittgenstein the view that facts and propositions are ultimate indivisible units, not the result of combining their constituents. This is Wittgenstein's solution to (...) the problem of the unity of facts and propositions. Finally, Zalabardo shows that Wittgenstein's views on the analysability of everyday propositions as truth functions of elementary propositions arise from his views on the epistemology of logic: this offers a new perspective on the nature of Tractarian analysis. (shrink)

This paper investigates Wittgenstein’s account of the relation between elementary and molecular propositions (and thus, also, the propositions of logic) in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I start by sketching a natural reading of that relation – which I call the “bipartite reading” – holding that the Tractatus gives an account of elementary propositions, based on the so-called picture theory, and a different account of molecular ones, based on the principle of truth- functionality. I then show that such a reading (...) cannot be attributed to Wittgenstein, because he holds the view that an explanation of logical complexity is already given by a correct account of the (pictorial) nature of elementary propositions; this is implied in his claim that “an elementary proposition contains all logical constants/operations in itself”. After clarifying Wittgenstein’s notion of an operation from the Notes on Logic to the Tractatus, I finally explain why Wittgenstein claims that an elementary proposition contains all logical operations in itself, and hence why he can be said to provide a unified (and thus not bipartite) account of language and logic. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

P.M.S. Hacker has argued that there are numerous misconceptions in James Conant's account of Wittgenstein's views and of those of Carnap. I discuss only Hacker's treatment of Conant on logical syntax in the _Tractatus. I try to show that passages in the _Tractatus which Hacker takes to count strongly against Conant's view do no such thing, and that he himself has not explained how he can account for a significant passage which certainly appears to support Conant's reading.

Many philosophers claim that understanding a logical constant (e.g. ‘if, then’) fundamentally consists in having dispositions to infer according to the logical rules (e.g. Modus Ponens) that fix its meaning. This paper argues that such dispositionalist accounts give us the wrong picture of what understanding a logical constant consists in. The objection here is that they give an account of understanding a logical constant which is inconsistent with what seem to be adequate manifestations of such understanding. I then outline an (...) alternative account according to which understanding a logical constant is not to be understood dispositionally, but propositionally. I argue that this account is not inconsistent with intuitively correct manifestations of understanding the logical constants. (shrink)

In paragraphs 107-108 of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks, “The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” This paper attempts to illuminate his notion of this “real need” which is shared by that work and by his earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by comparing these works with some of the writings (...) of Tolstoy and Schopenhauer with which he was familiar. I do this not to discredit either of his writings as works on logic but to show in what manner they are, indeed, works on logic. (shrink)

An analysis of the sources of Wittgenstein’s picture theory — which include not only his moment of insight on reading a magazine story about the use of models in a traffic court, but also the work of Russell, Hertz, and Boltzmann — provides the basis for an exploration of Wittgenstein’s articulation of a pictorial conception of representation in his wartime notebooks and its crystallization in the Tractatus. A discussion of Wittgenstein’s later criticism of the picture theory and his notion (...) of a “philosophical picture” illustrates the fundamental reversal in his transition to his later conception of philosophy: instead of taking literal pictures as a guide to the nature of meaning, he came to regard philosophical theories as akin to expressing an aesthetic preference for a certain style of representation. Wittgenstein’s treatment of factual language in the picture theory is related to his Tractarian approach to logical form, and the role of the show/say distinction in his early conception of logic and language. Particular attention is given to the difficulties generated by the idea that the conditions for the possibility of a given domain of discourse cannot be described in language, but must be shown by the form of words in question. (shrink)

This paper explores the relevance of Wittgenstein’s early work for treatments of religion. The first section briefly outlines some different interpretive possibilities with respect to early Wittgenstein’s thinking. The following section explores the idea that what is important about early Wittgenstein’s work resides not in the meaning of the text as such, but in elements of his Jewish heritage. The third section outlines the immediate task that is undertaken in the body of the TLP. Central notions are those of (...) mysticism and logical form and the two concluding sections explore how these notions play a role in treatments of religion. This they do either by exhibiting parallels between themes in theology and themes in logic, or they do so by playing a role in assessing cosmological arguments in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to compare the role played by logical analysis in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Russell’s On Denoting. Whereas in Russell’s work it is an important element of his argument in support of description theory, in his pupil’s it does not function this way. Russell, while analysing various propositions, including descriptions translates them into formal language, indicating that those propositions, despite the appearances, in fact do not denote. Logical analysis shall be a tool decisive in (...) favour of Russell’s thesis. Wittgenstein similarly analyses some troublesome propositions and claims that they are meaningless. The difference is that Russell’s final conclusion is derived from logical analysis, whereas Wittgenstein’s from pure speculation. In Tractatus logico-philosophicus logical analysis is not a method thanks to which the author gets certain result, just as it was the case with his teacher and his On Denoting. In Wittgenstein’s early philosophy logical analysis concerns just a few technical problems connected only to some ideas from Principia mathematica, and not to the main subject of his work, which is the analysis of philosophical theses. (shrink)

Central to a new, or 'resolute', reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus is the idea that Wittgenstein held there an 'austere' view of nonsense: the view, that is, that nonsense is only ever a matter of our failure to give words a meaning, and so that there are no logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Resolute readers tend not only to ascribe such a view to Wittgenstein, but also to subscribe to it themselves; and it is also a feature (...) of some readings which in other respects are clearly not Resolute. This paper forms part of a reply to Hans-Johann Glock's work in which he argues (in part) that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus held a view of nonsense other than the austere view. Instead, Glock argues, Wittgenstein there held that there are many logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Here, I outline and defend the austere view, together with its attribution to the early Wittgenstein, against a number of Glock's criticisms, and focussing especially on Wittgenstein's reformulation in the Tractatus of Frege's context-principle. (shrink)

A definition of art attempts to spell out what the word “art” means. In everyday life, we sometimes debate whether something qualifies as art: Can video games be considered artworks? Should my 6-year-old painting belong to the same category as Wallis’ Hold House Port Mear Square Island (see picture)? Is the flamboyant Christmas tree at the mall fundamentally different from a Louvre sculpture? Is a banana taped to a wall really art? Definitions of art in analytic philosophy typically answer these (...) questions by proposing necessary and sufficient conditions for an entity x to fall under the category of art. -/- Defining art is distinct from the ontological question of what kind of entities artworks are (for example, material objects, mental entities, abstractions, universals…). We do not, for example, need to know whether a novel and a sculpture have a distinct ontological status to decide whether they can be called “artworks.” -/- Definitions of art can be classified into six families. (1) classical views hold that all artworks share certain characteristics that are recognizable within the works themselves (that is, internal properties), such as imitating nature (mimesis), representing and arousing emotions (expressivism), or having a notable form (formalism). A modified version of this last option is enjoying a revival in 21st century philosophy, where art is said (2) to have been produced with the aim of instantiating aesthetic properties (functionalism). Classical definitions initially met with negative reactions, so much so that in the mid-twentieth century, some philosophers advocated (3) skepticism about the possibility of defining art while others critiqued the bias of the current definitions. Taking up the challenge laid out by theses critics, (4) a fourth family of approaches defines art in terms of the relations that artworks enjoy with certain institutions (institutionalism) or historical practices (historicism). (5) A fifth family of approaches proposes to analyze art by focusing on the specific art forms—music, cinema, painting, and so one—rather than on art in general (determinable-determinate definitions). (6) A last family claims that “art” requires to be defined by a disjunctive list of traits, with a few borrowed from classical and relational approaches (disjunctivism). (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transcendence and SensibilityAffection, Sensation, and Nonintentional ConsciousnessIrina Poleshchuk (bio)Over the years, the question of sensibility has largely been discussed in a variety of discourses developed in the humanities and has gained attention in psychology and the cognitive sciences. Sensibility has been seen as a constituent part of subjectivity, endowing subjectivity with meanings developed in different layers of subjective and inter-subjective life, but also as setting new horizons of ethical (...) becoming. In this context, Emmanuel Levinas represents a unique philosophical approach: sensibility reveals the core of the ethical encounter with the other person, including traumatic experience and ethical gift of this intersubjective encounter. The ethical event starts from sensibility and from the radicality on which the face-to-face relation is built, but it also results from the sensible life of subjectivity. I address here a famous line in Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence: “Only a subject that eats can be for-the-other” (OB 74). In its hunger, and in its constant search for the means of feeding itself, subjectivity is for the first time disclosed as a vulnerable and affected self. This vulnerability [End Page 1] is different in its nature from the vulnerability provoked by the appeal of the other. The satisfaction of needs, the ability to enjoy food, to enjoy laboring to acquire it, but also the memory of the pain caused by hunger all indicate fundamental levels of vulnerability whereby the self is exposed to the affection of the otherness. In the following sections of Otherwise than Being, Levinas moves further toward disclosing a sensible subjectivity endowed with transcendence. Sensibility becomes structured as the other-in-the-same, where the trace of the other is exactly transcendence impregnating subjectivity. Here, being affected by the other, the vulnerable and the sensible self takes its crucial forms: it is pure passivity, it is an ultimate exposure, and it is nonintentional. These modalities of sensibility are to indicate ethical mapping of subjectivity where responsibility for the other eventually becomes irreversible.To approach the novelty of sensibility as the central component of the face-to-face relation, I elucidate the function and meaning of mechanisms enabling subjectivity to be structured as the other-in-the-same. The face-to-face relation is, first of all, an experience of the affective trace left by the appeal of the other. Thus, my goal is to explicate how this affection, manifested as the address of the other, is embedded in Levinas’s reading of sensuous intuition and how the affection enlightens an ethical sensibility at the level of nonintentional consciousness and passivity. Beginning with Husserl’s view of hyletic data, I discuss the work of affection and sensation in intentional consciousness and how these feelings participate in constructing sensibility. I analyze the importance of Levinas’s innovative idea of nonintentional consciousness, leading up to the concept of passivity, which acts as the host of transcendence or, in other words, of the other-in-the-same. Finally, I turn to the phenomenon of two sensibilities and provide an interpretation of their structures and their role in building face-to-face relations.Sensation and AffectionThe first step toward unraveling sensibility is to address Urhyle. Urhyle plays an essential role in the dimension of affection, sensation, [End Page 2] and sensibility. In his earlier works, Levinas addresses hyle and, to some extent, follows Husserl’s reflections on Urhyle and affection. A discussion of Urhyle will help to elucidate Levinasian logic.For Husserl, Urhyle is “a foreign core in me” (Ichfremdekern).1 Being something foreign within consciousness, Urhyle indicates a core within consciousness, which leads to a constitutive bifurcation of the self and of the nonself. The appearance of Urhyle is indirect: it is not constitutive, it does not constitute itself, but rather Urhyle structures the constitution of the self. How can Urhyle be shown? Affected consciousness or sensible data is the first strange or alien content within the self, affecting and exciting the self as nonconsciousness (Unbewüßtsein) on the level of original hyletic (Urhyle) preconsciousness and allowing primary sensibility to grow, which apparently becomes a content of the self.2 Consciousness is, first of all... (shrink)

"Logic", one of the central words in Western intellectual history, compre hends in its meaning such diverse things as the Aristotelian syllogistic, the scholastic art of disputation, the transcendental logic of the Kantian critique, the dialectical logic of Hegel, and the mathematical logic of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell. The term "Formal Logic", following Kant is generally used to distinguish formal logical reasonings, precisely as formal, from the remaining universal truths based on reason. (Cf. SCHOLZ, 1931). A text-book (...) example of a formal-logical inference which from "Some men are philosophers" and "All philosophers are wise" concludes that "Some men are wise" is called formal, because the validity of this inference depends only on the form ofthe given sentences -in particular it does not depend on the truth or falsity of these sentences. (On the dependence of logic on natural language, English, for example, compare Section 1 and 8). The form of a sentence like "Some men are philosophers", is that which remains preserved when the given predicates, here "men" and "philosophers" are replaced by arbitrary ones. The form itself can thus be represented by replacing the given predicates by variables. Variables are signs devoid of meaning, which may serve merely to indicate the place where meaningful constants (here the predicates) are to be inserted. As variables we shall use - as did Aristotle - letters, say P, Q and R, as variables for predicates. (shrink)

JOHN CORCORAN AND WILIAM FRANK. Surprises in logic. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 19 253. Some people, not just beginning students, are at first surprised to learn that the proposition “If zero is odd, then zero is not odd” is not self-contradictory. Some people are surprised to find out that there are logically equivalent false universal propositions that have no counterexamples in common, i. e., that no counterexample for one is a counterexample for the other. Some people would be surprised to (...) find out that in normal first-order logic existential import is quite common: some universals “Everything that is S is P” —actually quite a few—imply their corresponding existentials “Something that is S is P”. Anyway, perhaps contrary to its title, this paper is not a cataloging of surprises in logic but rather about the mistakes that did or might have or might still lead people to think that there are no surprises in logic. The paper cataloging of surprises in logic is on our “to-do” list. -/- ► JOHN CORCORAN AND WILIAM FRANK, Surprises in logic. Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150, USA E-mail: [email protected] There are many surprises in logic. Peirce gave us a few. Russell gave Frege one. Löwenheim gave Zermelo one. Gödel gave some to Hilbert. Tarski gave us several. When we get a surprise, we are often delighted, puzzled, or skeptical. Sometimes we feel or say “Nice!”, “Wow, I didn’t know that!”, “Is that so?”, or the like. Every surprise belongs to someone. There are no disembodied surprises. Saying there are surprises in logic means that logicians experience surprises doing logic—not that among logical propositions some are intrinsically or objectively “surprising”. The expression “That isn’t surprising” often denigrates logical results. Logicians often aim for surprises. In fact, [1] argues that logic’s potential for surprises helps motivate its study and, indeed, helps justify logic’s existence as a discipline. Besides big surprises that change logicians’ perspectives, the logician’s daily life brings little surprises, e.g. that Gödel’s induction axiom alone implies Robinson’s axiom. Sometimes wild guesses succeed. Sometimes promising ideas fail. Perhaps one of the least surprising things about logic is that it is full of surprises. Against the above is Wittgenstein’s surprising conclusion : “Hence there can never be surprises in logic”. This paper unearths basic mistakes in [2] that might help to explain how Wittgenstein arrived at his false conclusion and why he never caught it. The mistakes include: unawareness that surprise is personal, confusing logicians having certainty with propositions having logical necessity, confusing definitions with criteria, and thinking that facts demonstrate truths. People demonstrate truths using their deductive know-how and their knowledge of facts: facts per se are epistemically inert. [1] JOHN CORCORAN, Hidden consequence and hidden independence. This Bulletin, vol.16, p. 443. [2] LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kegan Paul, London, 1921. -/-. (shrink)

Many commentators have attempted to say, more clearly than Wittgenstein did in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, what sort of things the ‘simple objects’ spoken of in that book are. A minority approach, but in my view the correct one, is to reject all such attempts as misplaced. The Tractarian notion of an object is categorially indeterminate: in contrast with both Frege's and Russell's practice, it is not the logician's task to give a specific categorial account of the internal structure of (...) elementary propositions or atomic facts, nor, correlatively, to give an account of the forms of simple objects. The few commentators who have hitherto maintained this view have mainly devoted themselves to establishing that this was Wittgenstein's intention, and do not much address the question why Wittgenstein held that it is not the logician's business to say what the objects are. The present paper means to fill this lacuna by placing this view in the context of the Tractatus's treatment of logic generally, and in particular by connecting it with Wittgenstein's treatment of generality and with his reaction to Russell's approach to logical form. (shrink)