Sam Woolfe says that we’re deluding our selves. In our day-to-day lives, it always appears that there is an I who is thinking, perceiving, and interacting with the world. Even the language we use assumes that there is a self – a distinct conscious entity: when we talk to each other we say, ‘I think…’, …
Chris Durante asks himself just what makes him the person he used to be. Stepping into a park I had frequented as a little boy, memories of my childhood began to flood my mind, each one a rich story of a distant past. As I continued to reminisce, each story flowed into the next, and …
Water has puzzled scientists for decades. For the last 30 years or so, they have theorized that when cooled down to a very low temperature like -100C, water might be able to separate into two liquid phases of different densities. Like oil and water, these phases don’t mix and may help explain some of water’s …
Using machine learning to better understand how water behaves Read More »
Tim Delaney foresees five threats to sustaining global civilization. For centuries, social thinkers have pondered whether the Earth’s carrying capacity is being compromised by human overpopulation. For example, in his An Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus claimed that the world’s population was growing too quickly in proportion to the growth in …
Sándor Szegláb decodes the hidden message of the Tractatus. The statements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus start with index numbers. It is taken for granted that this indexing is used in such a way that 1.1 is a comment on or elaboration of 1, 1.11 and 1.12 comment on 1.1, and so forth. With Wittgenstein, …
José Zalabardo investigates which problem Wittgenstein is trying to solve. For many contemporary interpreters of the Tractatus, its ultimate goal is not to answer philosophical questions or solve philosophical problems. Rather, Wittgenstein’s aim is therapeutic – to make his readers see that philosophy is not a legitimate pursuit: the problems are fictitious, the questions are …
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole. “Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language.”Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.03 On 13th March 1919, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a letter telling Bertrand Russell that he had completed a book entitled Logisch-Philosophische …
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess. This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for ‘Logical-Philosophical Treatise’), the only book the Austrian philosopher published in his lifetime. Not the least astonishing fact about it is that, as we shall see, most …
Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism Read More »
Lucian Lupescu sees how far Kant’s and Marx’s ideals overlap. In 1784 Immanuel Kant described humanity as being in a state of immaturity, which to Kant is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another” (An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’, trans Mary C. Smith). The reasons for this …
Matt Qvortrup argues that Marx still inspires those longing for a better world. In the beginning was the word, and Marx had a way with them like no other. Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a supreme stylist with a turn of phrase that few could match. Whatever one thinks of the political ideologies associated with …