[分享] 每日一星！哲学家：路德维希 维特根斯坦

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Philosopher: Ludwig Wittgenstein

[I] He began by trying to reduce all mathematics to logic and ended by finding most metaphysics to be nonsense.[/I]

If you would like to watch philosophers squirm(不安)---and who wouldn’t? ---pose this tough question: Suppose you may either a) solve a major philosophical problem so conclusively that there is nothing left to say(thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history); or b) write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required-reading list for centuries to come. Which would you choose? Many philosophers will reluctantly admit that they would go for option b). if they had to choose they would rather be read than right. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein tried brilliantly to go for A0 and ended up with b).

The revolution in mathematical logic early in the 20th century opened up a delicious prospect: a rigorous science of meanings. Just as the atomic theory in physics had begun to break matter sown into its constituent parts and show how they fit together to produce all the effects in nature, logic held out the promise of accounting for all meaningful texts and utterances---from philosophy and geometrical proofs to history and legislation---by breaking them into their logical atoms and showing how those parts fit together(in an ideal language) to compose all the meanings there could be.

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As a young engineering student in England, Wittgenstein saw hope of the new mathematical logic and rushed to Cambridge to become the protégé(学生) of Bertrand Russell(英国哲学家、数学家、逻辑学家、分析哲学主要创始人，世界和平运动倡导者，获1950年诺贝尔文学家), whose monumental [I] Pricipia Mathematica [/I] (1913) (《数学原理》), written with Alfred North Whitehead（英国数学家、哲学家，后移居美国在哈佛大学任教。）, was an attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein’s first book, published in England in 1922, the even more grandly titled [I] Tractantus Logico-phlosophicus [/I] （《逻辑数学论》）went even further, and was thought by him, and by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key problems definitively solved once and for all. Some “philosophical” propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated within his symstem and those that couldn’t –among them, metaphysical riddles that had bedeviled(困扰) philosophers for centuries---were nonsense.
You know from the moment you open the [I] Tractatus (《逻辑哲学论》)[/I] that it is something special. Each left-hand page is in German, facing its English translation on the right, and the sentences are numbered, using a hierarchical system that tells you this is formal proof. The book begins straightforwardly enough: “1. The world is everything that is the case.”（世界就是所发生的一切事情。）( In German, it makes memorable rhyming couplet（压韵双行诗）: [I] 跌welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.[/I] )And it ends with and ending to end all endings: “7. Whereof one cannot speak, therof one must be silent.” (一个人对于不能谈的事情就应当沉默。)

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Happily, in those days before tape recorders, come of Wittgenstein’s disciples took verbatim notes, do we can catch a rare glimpse of two great minds addressing a central problem from opposite points of view: the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing(图灵), the problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, “the bridge may fall down. “ For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to f” follow the rules” of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn’t need ot understand rules to follow them. Who “ won”? Turing comes off as somewhat flatfooted and naïve, but he lift us the computer, while Wittgenstein left us… Wittgestein.


Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein’s legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any othere charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another( and , presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstiens, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed the new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one’s first exposure to either the [I] Tractatus or Philosophical in vestigations [/I] is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts.

tomatoeggsUID: 82073

Happily, in those days before tape recorders, come of Wittgenstein’s disciples took verbatim notes, do we can catch a rare glimpse of two great minds addressing a central problem from opposite points of view: the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing(图灵), the problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, “the bridge may fall down. “ For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to f” follow the rules” of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn’t need ot understand rules to follow them. Who “ won”? Turing comes off as somewhat flatfooted and naïve, but he lift us the computer, while Wittgenstein left us… Wittgestein.


Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein’s legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any othere charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another( and , presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstiens, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed the new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one’s first exposure to either the [I] Tractatus or Philosophical in vestigations [/I] is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts.