Family Resemblances (Wittgenstein)

Today I want to write about a very interesting idea in philosophy that gets misunderstood a lot, so to do my guy Ludwig Wittgenstein some justice, here's my take on his notion of Family resemblances.

Part 1: The Quest of Philosophy

People have to make judgements to survive. 'This' is good, 'that' is bad. 'This' sounds reasonable, 'that' sounds idiotic. This - theoretical physics - is science, that - astrology - is not. This - Michelangelo's David - is art, that - my MS Paint drawing - is not.

But, those claims beg the question: what is good? What is science? What is art?

Ideally, we would like to find one condition, the essence of being good, or of being a science, or art. That's basically what Socrates tried to do when he went around asking questions like: "what is justice?"; "what is good?"; "what is duty?", …

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus

He's sharp. He's cute. He's Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of modern philosophy!

In this video we look at his Tractatus, his first major work and only one to be published in his lifetime. Basically we could say that he wanted - just like Bertrand Russell - to find out how our thoughts relate to reality. In an attempt to answer this question he put forth the "Picture Theory of Language".

I try to give an easily approachable lecture that serves as an introduction to Tractatus. In the second part of the video I examine the task of his logical analysis and portray how exactly he imagined science to construct true sentences of the world by deriving at the so-called "simple objects", the elementary particles of reality. A true sentence, in this view, would be the stated relation between signs for those particles, that would reflect their relation in reality.

The logical empiricists, also known as the "Vienna circle", took the ideas of Tractatus and constructed a very interesting variation of Wittgenstein's ideas, that I will present in the next lecture - on the dispute between Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger.

 

What do words mean? - Semantic change and definitions

Phenomenal, Chair, Bebeflapula.

What do these words mean – and – who gets to decide?

This posts serves as an introduction to semantics, the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning in language. It also serves as an introduction to the fresher and more interesting problems in modern philosophy of language.

It’s common for people to sometimes just assume that meanings are these fixed things that never change and hence words are always to be understood in just a certain fixed sense that is dictated by definitions or the origin of a word. We’ll see how that holds up.