[lisper]

> Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.

Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.

[d0odk]

Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.

[lisper]

I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example.

> Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed.

So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man.

BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic.

And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting

[glenstein]

>So I am vindicated

I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.

[d0odk]

My gripe is that the commenter above cites early Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware) that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon". I'll concede there is some debate about how Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I wrote.

[glenstein]

I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.

But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.

[knightoffaith]

What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.

[Vecr]

Do you still have your master's thesis?

[lisper]

https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/1d7...

But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.

[d0odk]

Have you read later Wittgenstein?

[lisper]

I've read (parts of) Critique of Pure Reason. Does that count?

[d0odk]

lol

[lisper]

I'll take that as a "no". What would you recommend?