ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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Tom,
This is my usual sort of diagnostic procedure -- Back-Tractatus Algorithm? --
I believe that something went wrong with mainstream 20th century analytic
philosophy somewhere, but I have not found their usual self-diagnostics
to be all that penetrating to the root of the problem. I made a first
approach to this particular complex of issues a couple of years ago:
01. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03289.html
02. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03290.html
03. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03296.html
04. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03297.html
05. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03303.html
06. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03304.html
07. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03306.html
But I need to go back and revisit it all,
a little less polemically and a lot less
scattered in my focus than I was then.
More broadly, a lot has happened in philosophy since Descartes,
and a whole lot more since Aristotle, and yet I find that some
approximations, assumptions, doctrines, and heuristics haven't
really changed all that much, in particular, some dicta about
the "theory of signs" that I call "Aristotle's Approximation":
01. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03284.html
02. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03316.html
03. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03317.html
04. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03324.html
05. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03327.html
06. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03328.html
07. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03332.html
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/Details/issue/abstract/ab017772.html
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/integrat.htm
Jon Awbrey
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Tom Johnston wrote:
>
> Jon,
>
> As you know, logical atomism is the philosophy of the Tractatus, which Witt.
> himself rejected. It is a dead philosophical theory, and leads us down a path
> which Quine and Sellars spent the better part of their careers helping us retrace,
> back to more solid ground.
>
> Are you presenting this material as merely of historical interest, or do you
> believe that, regardless of two generations of work in analytic philosophy,
> and a concensus almost universally achieved, we "scientific ontologists"
> should use logical atomism as part of the foundation of our work?
> If so, I hope that what you hope to use, in logical atomism, is
> pragmatically innocent, consisting merely of some reassuring
> statements about how language is solidly grounded on
> incontrovertible fact (or the observations thereof).
>
> When taking a graduate seminar on the Tractatus, I did spend a semester (or three)
> understanding how the world felt from that point of view. It is attractive, but
> untrue historically (see Kuhn), psychologically (see Kohler) and epistemologically
> (see Quine, Witt. II, Sellars, Feyerabend, Rorty, de Saussure, Heidegger, Derrida,
> Eco, etc, etc.). Or so we all think!
>
> Tom
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of Jon Awbrey
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 11:54 AM
> To: Inquiry; Ontology
> Subject: ONT Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
>
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>
> POLA. Note 1
>
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> I am going to collect here a number of excerpts from the papers
> that Bertrand Russell wrote in the years 1910-1920, my interest
> being focused on the logical characters of belief and knowledge.
> I will take the liberty of breaking up some of Russell's longer
> paragraphs in whatever fashion serves to facilitate their study.
>
> | The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)
> |
> | The following [is the text] of a course of eight lectures delivered in
> | [Gordon Square] London, in the first months of 1918, [which] are very
> | largely concerned with explaining certain ideas which I learnt from
> | my friend and former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have had no
> | opportunity of knowing his views since August 1914, and I do
> | not even know whether he is alive or dead. He has therefore
> | no responsibility for what is said in these lectures beyond
> | that of having originally supplied many of the theories
> | contained in them.
> |
> | Russell, POLA, p. 35.
> |
> | Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", pp. 35-155
> | in 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', edited with an introduction
> | by David Pears, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985. First published 1918.
>
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