I disagree with Ken's summary of Wittgenstein and "practicality".
W's "early" period (Tractatus Logico-philosophicus) was adopted as core
reading
by the Vienna Circle. They were a vigorously practical lot. They said all
metaphysics was nonsense and the meaning of a proposition was determined by
looking at how it could be verified. This motto emphasizes how determined they
were for philosophy to be practical.
W describes his later philosophy (Philosophical Investigations) as a form of
therapy. The therapy is offered to help those who are trapped by the snares of
language and who loose sight of how language is actually used in practice.
This
also seems to me to emphasize the practical side of life.
I am quite sure that if W. had been on the hiring and firing committee at
Cambridge, he would have shot all of the train spotters and stamp collectors
with pleasure. He demonstrated his own disdain for this kind of thing many
times, not least by abstaining from publication and other indicators of being
research-active for the whole of his academic career.
Michael Biggs
At 23:39 28/04/2002 +0200, Ken Friedman wrote:
>What is philosophizing but the search for explanation? Wittgenstein's
>two great periods of thought addressed questions of thinking and
>language formation in different ways. Neither was practical or
>applied in any direct sense. For a great university such as Cambridge
>to afford a Wittgenstein requires exactly what David calls "the
>political economy of our universities or museums - the great train
>spotting and stamp collecting institutions of our time."
>
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