John Heaton > Quotes

“The idols of progress and the belief that technology will solve all our problems, he felt were profoundly wrong.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“If I say: “I know that either it is raining or it is not raining,” this is a tautology. It is the opposite of a contradiction, in that it is true whatever the circumstances, but it says nothing as it applies to nothing in particular.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“So when I tell you what I think, I am not transferring thoughts to you. I do not lose them when I tell them. I express what I think, and for you to understand, you need not think what I think, or have the same thought as I. You may need to know what I think and to say it, but not to have the thought or think it.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“The business of philosophy is critique. It clarifies the limits of meaningful language. Science on the other hand consists of all true propositions. It studies the existence or nonexistence of states of affairs.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“The inner is not a brute reality which can be mapped out by psychologists, but a tangle of concepts relating the inner to the outer which lies at the heart of human understanding.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“He is not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy. Rather, he is teaching a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see differences.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“WHAT IS THOUGHT? A thought is a logical picture of the facts, and a proposition is the expression of a thought in a way that we can read or hear. So what is a logical picture? Consider a gramophone record. It consists of variegated grooves on a plastic base. When the record is played, the information contained in the grooves is reproduced in the music. So the spatial patterns on the record must share a form with the auditory relations of the notes in the music. The music, the score of the music, a digital recording of the music and an analog recording all share homologous form, but there is no way of representing the form. In other words, you can’t SHOW a thought.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“So, it is the spirit in which one acts that is vital, and the notion of language games clarifies this.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“When we think language is on one side and reality is on the other, and then puzzle as to how they link up, we forget that we dwell in language and are merely imagining that we can point at them.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“When told that there was to be the annual jamboree for academic philosophers in Cambridge in 1947, he said it was as if he had been told that there would be bubonic plague in Cambridge, and he would make sure he was in London — which he was!”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“He read Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief and was deeply influenced by it.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“So Wittgenstein went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study under Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who was a lecturer in mathematical logic. This was to lead to a passionate intellectual friendship between these two great philosophers in which both were transformed.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“At the age of fourteen, he was sent to a rather unacademic school at Linz. Adolf Hitler, who was almost exactly the same age as Ludwig, was also there.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Logic enables us to make true and false statements but does not say anything about what is in the world. It is the great mirror which shows something essential about the world, but cannot say what it is. Common sense and science, on the other hand, tell us what is in the world. Two extreme forms of logical proposition are instructive. These are logical contradictions and tautologies. If I say: “I know that either it is raining or it is not raining,” this is a tautology. It is the opposite of a contradiction, in that it is true whatever the circumstances, but it says nothing as it applies to nothing in particular. It is like the Bellman’s map in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark: “A perfect and absolute blank”. Tautology and contradiction are not really propositions at all, although they appear to be so. They lack sense because they say nothing. They give no information, but are of great importance as they show the nature of logic. Wittgenstein argued that all logical propositions can be reduced to tautologies.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Persons, bodies and minds inhabit language.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“We must do away with all explanation and allow only description in its place”.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Only a change in our way of life would heal the sickness of our age — and this is only likely to happen when disaster confronts us.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“The whole idea of “connections” between language and reality is a false one.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Wittgenstein sent the Tractatus to several publishers who rejected it, including his own university press — Cambridge, which was to distinguish itself by rejecting all his writing.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“The music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann were amongst his favourites.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Ludwig was brought up in a house of music. There were seven grand pianos in his childhood home. The composers Brahms and Mahler were frequent visitors to the musical evenings, and young Pablo Casals played there.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Now, ordinarily, when we say we know something, we can give compelling reasons for it. But when a philosopher says he knows he is holding his hand in front of him, he can give no reason that is as certain as the very thing it is meant to be a reason for. My having two hands is not less certain before I have looked at them than afterwards.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Whereas things exist, are in space and time and have properties such as hardness, colour, etc.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930s on he became clear that philosophy was a - a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practised it that way.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“He had an early formulation of what in the Tractatus he saw more clearly — that we can speak of existence only when we assert the truth of some proposition that is not itself existential.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Facts are in logical space and independent of one another and can only be stated or asserted.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“In his many remarks on mathematics, Wittgenstein is concerned to show the delusiveness of this picture. For when we reflect on it, we forget that we are looking at a projection of our own decisions and their consequences.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Russell suggested he write an essay during the vacation on any philosophical subject. He did so, and when Russell had read the first sentence, he was persuaded that Wittgenstein was a man of genius”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“Philosophy should take thoughts that are otherwise turbid and blurred, so to speak, and make them clear and sharp.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide

“His outlook was typically one of gloom.”
― John Heaton, Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide