A one dollar beer, maybe, but I’m not sure. Before my trip in August I went to a used bookstore looking for stuff I’d be fine with throwing out when I finished it, so my bag’d get lighter as I trekked. Among what I got: two books from Oxford U Press’s primer “Past Masters” series, Roger Scruton’s 1982 _Kant_ and A.C. Grayling’s 1988 _Wittgenstein_. I also got A.J. Ayer’s _Language, Truth, and Logic_ which I decided I liked too much to throw out.
I liked the other two as well, but I did part with the books. Before I did so, though, I took notes in my notebook. Said notes are as follows…
Some sources on Kant: Strawson, 1966 _The Bounds of Sense_; Ralph Walker, 1979 _Kant_; Jonathan Bennett, 1966 _Kant’s Analytic_ and 1974 _Kant’s Dialectic_; Donald Crawford, 1974 _Kant’s Aesthetic Theory_. Also Burke, Shaftesbury, Lessing, and Baumgarten.
“Lichtenberg pointed out that Descartes ought not to” have concluded the existence of the I from the existence of thought: “The ‘cogito’ shows that there is a thought, but not that there is an ‘I’ who thinks it.” (12. I thought Sartre said something similar but I could be wrong. This reminds me of a joke: Descartes stops at a restaurant for a cup of coffee. He finishes the coffee and prepares to leave. The server asks, “Can I get you anything else?” Descartes says “No, I don’t think - ” and *poof* he disappears in a puff of logic.”)
“The transcendental unity of apperception is possible only if the subject inhabits the kind of world which the categories describe: an objective world.” (33.) This doesn’t seems to me to hold. It seems to me that the transcendental unity of apperception can only be assumed consistently based on an assumption that there is an objective world, but this could consist of an ‘acting as if’ a la Kant’s comments in the piece on Religion Within the Bounds of Reason (or whatever the exact title is), where he says that people should act as if the whole world depends on our actions. This is not the same thing as asserting that everything _does_ so depend. The point is a maxim of action, not a claim about the world. The maxim is, in a sense, indifferent to whether or not the world is so.
Scruton defines the trans unity of the app as the “I think” accompanying all perceptions, the “immediate awareness that simultaneous experiences belong to me.” (32.)
“The concept of ‘noumenon’ can be used only negatively, to designate the limit of our knowledge, and not positively, to designate things as they are in themselves.” Scruton quotes Kant: “The division of objects into phenomena and noumena and the world into a world of the senses and a world of the understanding is quite inadmissible in the positive sense.” (42. Scruton refs p225 in the first ed of the 1st critique, and p311 in the 2nd ed.)
“All knowledge that we can legitimately claim is subject to the ‘conditions’ of possible experience. To aspire to knowledge of the unconditioned is to aspire beyond the conditions which make knowledge possible.” (47.)
“Practical reason cannot be regarded as a branch of the understanding since it does not issue in judgments (it makes not claims about the true and the false).” (47.)
An argument against the ontological proof of god’s existence: existence is not a predicate and so can not be a perfection. (53.) To say ‘X exists’ says nothing more than ‘X’. That is, “There is an X such that X exists” is redundant, since it says the same thing as “There is an X such that there is an X.” So one could instead simply say “There is an X such that” whatever the quality to be ascribed to the X.
Regulative principles - act as if something is true. These are not descriptions of reality but rather are beliefs which are useful or which guide practice (order and totality, for instance). This from the experiential standpoint. Scruton cites p644 from the 1st ed and p672 from the 2nd ed of the 1st critique, also p619/647. (54.)
A regulative idea “does not show us how an object is constituted but how, under its guidance, we should seek to determine the constitution and connection of the objects of experience.” (p55, p671/699.)
Practical reason, reasons exist for practice, as decisions not as true/false. The starting point is freedom. “Ought implies can.” (Second critique, p165.) — You can because you must.
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, p114: an intelligible world is a practical presumption, a perspective.
The I is the source of causal chains (viewed qua understanding) and is also subject to causal chains (viewed qua part of nature). This is a tension.
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Grayling, _Wittgenstein_.
See also Russell and Whitehead, _Principia Mathematica_; Russell, _Lectures on Logical Atomism_; Frege; Meinong; Hume; Mach; Leibnitz; Ryle; Moore; Ayer. M. Black, _A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus_; Rubinstein, _Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation_; Staten, _Wittgenstein and Derrida_. Ordinary language philosophy.
“because the content of ethics, religion, and the ‘problems of life’ lie outside the world - outside the realm of facts and their constituent states of affairs - nothing can be said about them.” (31.)
“states of affairs which exist settle which states of affairs do not exist (….) how things are determines how they are not, reality as a whole is the totality of existing states of affairs together with everything their existence excludes as non-existent.” (36.)
Apparently the PhD was a new degree when Wittgenstein got it, one imported from the US to the UK. (Look up more on this.)
“understanding language is not a process but an ability” (65.)
There is a turn, post-tractatus, toward the therapeutic approach to philosophy, dissolving or disentangling from philosophical questions — questions which arise from mistaken uses of or ideas about language. (68.) Against any notion of deep or hidden essence of language. (70.) Language is a set of language games, related to each other like a family resemblance. (72.) “[I]f the meaning of words consisted in a denotative link with objects, then that link would have to be set up by ostentive definition” - pointing - but Wittgenstein holds that “ostension cannot serve as the foundation for language-learning because in order to understand that an object is being named the learner would have to be in command of at least part of language already - namely the language-game of naming objects. The point can be explained like this: suppose you are teaching a non-English speaker the word ‘table,’ and that you do so by uttering the word while ostending (pointing at) a table. Why should he take it that you are naming the object rather than, say, describing its colour, its function, or the polish of its surface, or even ordering him to crawl under it? Of course the language-learner in this example, since he already has command of his own language, may well take it that the language-game in question is that of naming objects; but for a first-time learner no such knowledge is available.” (73.) The ostention as foundation view comes from Augustine quote and is rather widespread, including Wittgenstein’s view which he later repudiated.
The term ‘rules’ as in ‘rules of a language game’ (78) means ‘conventions,’ something agreed upon by a group as a common way of acting, not as in ‘laws,’ things which dictate.
“What constitutes a rule is our collective use of it; rule-following is a general practice established by agreement, custom, and training. Therefore, although rules indeed guide us and afford us with our measures of correctness, they are not independent of us and hence do not constitute a coercive standard imposed from outside our rule-following practices themselves.” (80-81.)
A ‘form of life’ is “the underlying consensus of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, assumptions, practices, traditions, and natural propensities which humans as social beings, share with one another and which is therefore presupposed in the language they use; language is woven into that pattern of human activity and character, and meaning is conferred on its expressions by the shared outlook and nature of its users.” (84.)
“There can be no such thing as a language invented by and intelligible to a single individual only (….) language is essentially public.” (85.)
“[H]aving reasons, and giving justifications, has to end somewhere. Where they end is the form of life constituting the language game; this is the framework which confers intelligibility on what we do. Testing our beliefs can only be carried out against a background of beliefs which are not open to test: ‘the questions which we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some of our propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn’ (On Certainty, 34). The exempt propositions are the ‘grammatical’ propositions, that is the propositions constituting the framework of our language and practices, and they form the system within which all testing takes place.” (96.)
“Although Wittgenstein talks of these beliefs as constituting the ‘foundation’ of our language-games he does not mean by this expression” the typical sense of foundational beliefs, “beliefs which are fixed and permanent.” Instead Wittgenstein “has it that the foundational beliefs are only relatively foundational - they are like the bed and banks of a river which determine the course along which the waters flow; the bed and the banks are in the course of time eroded and therefore shift, but this is a long process and from the viewpoint of our ordinary talk and practice the foundational beliefs serve as what is ‘fast’ and ’solid’.” These are not subject to doubt. (97.)
Two kinds of relativism: cultural and cognitive. Cultural: our ability “to recognize cultural differences presuppose an ability (…) to gain access to other cultures so that we can recognize the differences as differences; which shows that there are points in common between cultures which allow mutual access and hence mutual understanding to take place.” (105.)
Cognitive: this is a view that a member of a community could never at all know what it is like to be a member of another community. (Conceptual community.)
The difficulty for the relativist position is how to “recognize another form of life as another form of life” since this “ability to detect that something is a form of life and that it differs from our own surely demands that there be a means for us to identify its presence and to specify what distinguishes it from ours. But such means are unavailable if the other form of life is impenetrable to us, (…) if it is closed against our attempts to interpret it enough to say that it is a form of life.” (107-108.)
Thus, “if we are to talk of ‘other forms of life’ at all we must be able to recognize them as such; (…) if we are to see that the form of life is different from our own we have to be able to recognize the differences. This is possible only if we can interpret enough of the other form of life to make those differences apparent. And therefore there has to be sufficient common ground between the two forms of life to permit such interpretation.”
Hence, the “mutual accessibility between forms of life” required to articulate different forms of life as forms of life and as different “gives the life to cognitive relativism.” (108.)
Private language argument is often taken to mean logical privacy: not logically private but logically public and only contingently private in practice (”Robinson Crusoe” languages). (109.)
Grayling holds that the private language argument means languages can’t be private at all. Since languages consists of intersubjective conventions there can not be language without at least two subjects who hold - and check and reinforce each others’ holding of - these conventions together. The publicness (qua intersubjectivity) of these conventions means there are no Robinson Crusoe languages.
A difficulty: “if rules are constituted by agreement by agreement within a language community, and are not determined by anything external to that community’s practices, then the problem facing a putative private language user - namely, that he cannot tell whether he is, or only thinks he is, following a rule - also faces the community as a whole. How does the community tell whether it is following a rule? The answer Wittgenstein gives is: it cannot tell. (…) If, in the case of the individual, nothing counts as marking this crucial difference, then (…) the individual is not following rules at all, and hence is not using language. But does this not apply to the language-community as a whole?” (111.)
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Notes on Ayer, _Language, Truth, and Logic_, to come…