Quotes About Wittgenstein

Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the major sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.

Wittgenstein was very much against women's suffrage for no particular reason except that 'all women he knows are such idiots'.

Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.

Tautologies, according to Wittgenstein, are senseless, because, as they do not picture the world, they lack sense.

Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions 'pseudo-propositions'; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.

the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.

As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.

As Wittgenstein said, "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Dreyfus (1991) claims that Heidegger radicalized "the insights already contained in the writings of such pragmatists as Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey" (p. 6). See also Haugeland 1982, where he writes: "I make Heidegger out to be less like Husserl and/or Sartre than is usual, and more like Dewey (and to a lesser extent) Sellars and the later Wittgenstein" (p. 15).

Quer dizer que a morte não nos tomará nada (já que só nos tomará o futuro que não é), que o tempo não nos toma nada (já que o presente é tudo), enfim que é absurdo esperar a eternidade - pois já estamos nela. ''Se entendermos eternidade não como uma duração infinita mas como atemporalidade,'' dizia por sua vez Wittgenstein, ''então tem a vida eterna quem vive no presente.

Thus Wittgenstein's magnificent statement: "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."31

Prior to my breakdown I went through a 5 week manic phase, with increasing mental excitation, decreasing sleep, and a near certainty that I wa sthe first person to actually understand what Ludwig Wittgenstein was actually saying.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer's view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.

Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.

A main source of our failure to understand is that we don't have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'. … The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a 'Weltanschauung'?)

Me siento inclinado a decir que la expresión lingüística correcta del milagro de la existencia del mundo -a pesar de no ser una proposición en el lenguaje- es la existencia del lenguaje mismo