About that lion

Ask this guy.

I've always loved philosophy, but there are certain schools of it that do nothing for me. Among these are logical positivism, analytical philosophy and schools that focus on things like grammar and language. Life's too short.

One person who has connections to those schools enjoys a huge international following: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I don't get the attraction.

A while back, someone loaned me a copy of what many people consider to be his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. I dutifully waded through it in hopes of changing my mind. It didn't happen, although there were a few good lines here and there.

I'm about to take issue with one of the most famous of those. In that book, Wittgenstein said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That might be true of things like sea cucumbers, but lions are mammals and we share a lot of similarities in the brain with them, especially in those regions of the brain that have to do with emotions.

I don't think that lions particularly need to talk, although one could argue that they already do non-verbally. But if they did, I think it would be pretty clear. I also have a feeling that most of what they would say would take the form of commands and declarative statements.

They probably wouldn't ask a lot of questions. Or need to.

CUTTING ALONE WON'T DO IT. People concerned about deficits would do well to think less about across the board cuts than about promoting economic growth, according to this analysis in the NY Times.

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PREJUDICE. Scientific research suggests it may be more ingrained than we like to think, but there are ways of countering it.

WANT TO BE HAPPIER? Try focusing. Wandering minds apparently gather negative thoughts.

MORE ON THOSE NEANDERTHALS. Maybe the human edge over our Neanderthal cousins had something to do with our slow growth to maturity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Am I missing something?

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a long standing love of philosophy--some of it anyway. Some varieties, however, like logical positivism and so-called analytical philosophy get on my last nerve.

Recently, however, someone lent me a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's magnum opus Philosophical Investigations, which was one of the most influential philosophy books of the 20th century.

(That should be another reminder that the 20th century wasn't anything to write home about.)

In that book, Wittgenstein broke from his earlier work, which tried to limit meaningful statements to those that could be logically or empirically demonstrated and developed a more flexible approach to language.

After finally finishing the book, all I got from it was the point that language is flexible and has different meanings and uses depending on the context or language game--which is something I already knew.

There were a few decent lines in it, like these:

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

...philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

...the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

The question "What is a word really?" is analogous to "What is a piece in chess?"

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

On the whole, however, I don't get what the shouting is about. So again, am I missing something here?

HEALTH CARE. It looks like the US House will pursue some changes to the Senate health care reform bill.

A DOWNER. Many Americans with major depression don't receive treatment. This is especially true of African Americans and Hispanics.

LOST WAGES from the recession cost more than health care reform.

THE FUTURE is unknowable. Here's a recent op-ed on this topic from the Charleston Gazette.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Love of love of wisdom

Lady Philosophy, from the Jefferson Building in Washington DC.

I have been a philosophy geek for roughly as long as I've been able to legally buy beer (a not altogether unrelated activity). My tastes are pretty wide ranging, but there is one strand of it that I have always avoided like the plague.

That would be the tradition that began as "logical positivism" in the first half of the 20th century and morphed into what has become known as analytic philosophy, which is mostly an Anglo-American thing.

The positivists wanted to purge philosophy of metaphysical jibberish and argued that only those propositions were meaningful that could be empirically verified or logically demonstrated. Anything else--including much of the human lifeworld--was nonsense. Later strands of this tradition spent enormous amounts of time and ink diddling around with questions of what words mean.

Whatever.

One person associated with that tradition who eventually broke with it was Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his early phase, he wrote a hard core positivist book titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which he laid out his rules of meaningful propositions. The punchline was "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence."

My reaction to that has always been, who the hell is this guy to tell anybody what they can and can't speak about? After all, the motto of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is Montani Semper Liberi or Mountaineers are Always Free.

But lately, I finally made myself read his magnum opus, about which more tomorrow.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. According to the Economic Policy Institute, many highly profitable companies cut jobs in 2009.

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DOGS VS CATS. Who wins the pet showdown? Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED