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Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
The Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Pale King and Infinite Jest weighs in on a philosophical controversy in this fascinating early work. In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also detected a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument.Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking and any school of thought that abandons "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.
263 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 17, 2010
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About the author
David Foster Wallace
132 books13.3k followersDavid Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
February 20, 2012
Most people, fans of Wallace or not, will want to skip this. Upon e-mail request back in January of this year I was given a digitized version of the photocopied thesis as typed out on an actual typewriter (!) by the barely twentysomething Dave through the gift-giving mediation of one of the friendly fellows who runs the single best source for DFW-related things on this Interlace system thingy we're all on right this instant. I slogged through this paper over the course of a few days after downloading it, feeling like I was "in" on some secret and underground thing and somberly and beautifully contemplating the life and mind of Tiny Budding Genius Depressive College Boy Wallace while doing the dually sigh-and-sheer-fascination-inducing mental heavy lifting of following the trajectory of the actual content--content which ultimately led to emotionally and intellectually satisfying conclusions.
Now it's being published in book form with supplemental essays by philosophers, including one of DFW's old professors who acted as his advisor on the paper.
It's difficult, highly technical philosophy. Not my exact cup o' philosophical tea, honestly. But Wallace did it and did it while writing another undergrad thesis at the same time which went on to be known as his first novel The Broom of the System . This double-major (English and Philosophy) feat was carried out in the immediate wake of a sort of Mental Breakdown and Subsequent Hospitalization and as such is astounding to me. Oh Dave, I just wanna pinch your cheeks and tell you everything is gonna be alright...
The thesis is also brilliant. Unfortunately and understandably the language of symbolic logic makes most eyes glaze over and their lids droop, including my own, as the response to and representation of the distracted boredom and confusion churning "within." I'm curious to read the commentary that will be published within this professionally bound, non-typewritered version slated for release in a few months.
And for the record, the Big Obvious Sad Thing is still very hard for me to believe and makes me pretty sad when the bare fact becomes a focus. The work remains, however, and in its own incredible way helps to defocus this bare, raw fact-beholding, i.e., makes me feel better.
Now it's being published in book form with supplemental essays by philosophers, including one of DFW's old professors who acted as his advisor on the paper.
It's difficult, highly technical philosophy. Not my exact cup o' philosophical tea, honestly. But Wallace did it and did it while writing another undergrad thesis at the same time which went on to be known as his first novel The Broom of the System . This double-major (English and Philosophy) feat was carried out in the immediate wake of a sort of Mental Breakdown and Subsequent Hospitalization and as such is astounding to me. Oh Dave, I just wanna pinch your cheeks and tell you everything is gonna be alright...
The thesis is also brilliant. Unfortunately and understandably the language of symbolic logic makes most eyes glaze over and their lids droop, including my own, as the response to and representation of the distracted boredom and confusion churning "within." I'm curious to read the commentary that will be published within this professionally bound, non-typewritered version slated for release in a few months.
And for the record, the Big Obvious Sad Thing is still very hard for me to believe and makes me pretty sad when the bare fact becomes a focus. The work remains, however, and in its own incredible way helps to defocus this bare, raw fact-beholding, i.e., makes me feel better.
September 23, 2014
I haven't actually read this book, only the raw PDF of Wallace's thesis, which MyFleshSingsOut kindly mailed to me the other day. I just finished it. I'm seriously conflicted as to how to react.
On the one hand, I was astonished to find what a close emotional connection I had to it. DFW wrote his thesis in 1985. It’s clear to me that he was heavily influenced by Dowty, Wall and Peters’s Introduction to Montague Semantics. Well: I read that same book just about then, and I was also heavily influenced by it! It pretty much pushed me into doing formal semantics of natural language, a subject I’ve worked with, in one way or another, ever since. I found Wallace’s paper easy to read; I’ve thought a great deal about these issues, and the technical tricks he uses feel completely natural. I’ve used most of them myself, and I’ve written some similar papers.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
On the one hand, I was astonished to find what a close emotional connection I had to it. DFW wrote his thesis in 1985. It’s clear to me that he was heavily influenced by Dowty, Wall and Peters’s Introduction to Montague Semantics. Well: I read that same book just about then, and I was also heavily influenced by it! It pretty much pushed me into doing formal semantics of natural language, a subject I’ve worked with, in one way or another, ever since. I found Wallace’s paper easy to read; I’ve thought a great deal about these issues, and the technical tricks he uses feel completely natural. I’ve used most of them myself, and I’ve written some similar papers.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
January 26, 2012
In the wake of David Foster Wallace’s suicide there has been (and will most likely continue to be) much curious probing of his biography and personal life. Just last year, Rolling Stone columnist David Lipsky published a series of conversations with Wallace that took place in 1996 during the book tour for Infinite Jest. The book, entitled - in very appropriate Wallacesque language - Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, strove to understand the emotional underpinnings of Wallace’s mental breakdown while a student at Amherst College, as well as some of the content of Wallace’s fiction, i.e., the theme of clinical depression and the tough linguistic attempts that human beings make in order to describe the feeling. Much of the published commentary on Wallace’s writing career seems to steer in this vein as well; writers struggle to analyze why such a prodigiously talented novelist and essayist was so inescapably hounded by his own mental demons, so much so that he took his own life. Even a popular commencement speech that Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005, has now been reformatted as a small book - resembling the sort of physical design a volume by Deepak Chopra might have – its title, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Compassionate Life. Next month, Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, will hit bookshelves, prompting even more commentary, likely concerning the creative struggles and doubt that Wallace underwent in composing what, in retrospect, seems to have been the source of a great deal of his frustration as a novelist. While the aforementioned commentaries, interviews, and published orations aren’t unnecessary, they do represent a strained sort of attempt to market Wallace as a highly analytical and philosophical writer. This is probably due to the fact that Wallace could have easily followed in his father’s footsteps, and was more than capable of writing as an academic philosopher.
James D. Wallace (David’s father) was a philosopher who taught at the university of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though the two had divergent philosophical tastes, Wallace the elder’s thesis adviser at Cornell University was Norman Malcolm, a close friend and disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The younger Wallace became interested in mathematical logic, and became particularly fond of Wittgenstein’s work. James’ area of philosophical expertise was ethics. At Amherst, in the early eighties, Wallace had a double major in English and philosophy. For his thesis for the former, he wrote the novel Broom of the System; a story in the black-humor tradition, thematically concerned with Wittgenstein’s notion of solipsism. The main character's - Lenore Beadsman - great-grandmother was a former student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge, an overbearing influence in her life, determined to prove to her “how life is words and nothing else.” The latter, his philosophy thesis, was a paper on the philosophy of fatalism espoused by Richard Taylor in his infamous essay. Wallace’s aim at the time was to write philosophy and do philosophy, while writing fiction on the side. Both papers must've been equally overwhelming projects.
The fatalism essay spawned a complicated problem for most philosophers since 1962, commonly referred to as the “Taylor problem”. The general, logic symbol-devoid explanation of fatalism is: human actions and decisions have no influence on the future, rather, how things stand in the future determines what happens in the present. This particular philosophical outlook dates back to Aristotle, along with the LEM (law of excluded middle). In his De Interpretatione, Aristotle states that truth statements are either true or especially not true. The LEM, in the language of modal logic can be expressed as (p v-p); in other words, with any truth proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is true. The narrative example that Taylor used in his famous essay was that of the naval battle scenario. A naval commander is about to perform one of two actions, call the two acts P and P` respectively. If P (the commander puts in the order for a naval battle) then O (there is a naval battle tomorrow), if P` (the commander does not put in the order for a naval battle) then O` (there is no naval battle tomorrow). The argument’s logical circularity basically works like this: If P is true, O` is not possible, therefore if P` is true then O is not possible, and vice-versa, and so on and so forth. In other words, the fatalist “ … thinks of the future in the manner in which we all think of the past.” Also, the argument basically implies that if something occurs in the future, then the conditions necessary for it to occur have already taken place and were determined by that particular outcome. Along with this hypothetical scenario and the true or not true universe of LEM, Taylor included six presuppositions for his argument. The first four presuppositions were more or less already explained in the battle scenario, which Wallace found reasonable enough. It was the last two presuppositions Taylor included that Wallace took issue with.
Presupposition number five states that no agent (in the situation above, this would be the naval commander) can perform a given act if there is lacking, at the same time, or any other time, a condition necessary for the occurrence of the act. Presupposition six disavows the efficacy of time in this hypothetical scenario, e.g., time is irrelevant here. This is where the entire argument becomes, as Wallace said, “ulcer inducing”. This is because there is a great deal of semantic confusion concerning exactly what Taylor means by certain descriptions of the agent’s ability to put the order in. Is it that the agent physically cannot do so, due to location and temporal restraints, or is it simply that the agent is physically incapable of doing so?
Since this is Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, it’s steeped in the incredibly dense, convoluted language of formal semantics and modal logic. Symbols of mathematical logic flood the page, and the lay reader, not versed in the vernacular of this particular school of philosophy is basically incapable of following the way in which Wallace deconstructs fatalism. The system J that he comes up with is described as a system that basically encapsulates every situational-temporal possibility to an infinite degree. The system was named after his thesis advisor Jay Garfield, who in response to the specific issues that Wallace had with the way in which Taylor had collapsed so many logical modalities, gave Wallace a sort of crash-course in Montague grammar and tensed modal logic. It’s difficult to summarize, but Wallace found a way around Taylor’s tricky problem by honing in on the fatalist’s move from semantics to metaphysics. In Wallace’s own words, “ … the kinds of modalities we are concerned with in the Taylor problem must be regarded as situational physical modalities.” Taylor, who never considered himself a fatalist, simply found a neat trick of collapsing modalities from possibility and actuality into logical necessity. Then there is the trickier problem of how physical possibility is sensitive to time. The J system was basically devised for “formalizing, representing, and interpreting tensed physical-modal propositions.” Wallace’s brilliant thesis concludes by saying that Taylor was attempting to utilize a semantic argument for a metaphysical conclusion, or confusing physical possibility with logical necessity.
Again, the Taylor problem and Wallace’s intellectually tenacious thesis statement are incredibly difficult to follow. For the most part, Wallace explains his solution to the Taylor Problem in a language translatable to the lay reader. Even for an undergrad thesis, it’s still pretty engaging stuff. Included in this edition, is an illuminating introduction by James Ryerson, commenting on the significance of Wallace’s work as a philosopher, and the important intellectual role that mathematical logic and semantics played in the creation of Wallace’s debut novel Broom of the System, the Taylor essay in its entirety, a series of refutations of the Taylor problem from The Philosophical Review, Wallace’s actual thesis, an epilogue by Jay Garfield, and Taylor’s response to his critics. It would be something of a fallacy to suggest that the actual problems posed by Taylor’s fatalist argument offers some insight into Wallace’s motivations as a writer. It might say something about his interest in modal logic, and how intellectually ambitious he was at the time (considering the weight of a task such as that of critically analyzing Taylor’s troubling argument). It’s possible that his subsequent mental breakdown was informed by how mentally taxing technical philosophy in the vein of modal logic could be. Although, the importance of this paper is to be found in the way in which it reveals what a truly talented philosopher Wallace was, and how his experience with semantics and mathematical logic – in some not-so-clearly-definable-way – helped shape him into the enormously talented fiction writer and essayist that he came to be.
James D. Wallace (David’s father) was a philosopher who taught at the university of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though the two had divergent philosophical tastes, Wallace the elder’s thesis adviser at Cornell University was Norman Malcolm, a close friend and disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The younger Wallace became interested in mathematical logic, and became particularly fond of Wittgenstein’s work. James’ area of philosophical expertise was ethics. At Amherst, in the early eighties, Wallace had a double major in English and philosophy. For his thesis for the former, he wrote the novel Broom of the System; a story in the black-humor tradition, thematically concerned with Wittgenstein’s notion of solipsism. The main character's - Lenore Beadsman - great-grandmother was a former student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge, an overbearing influence in her life, determined to prove to her “how life is words and nothing else.” The latter, his philosophy thesis, was a paper on the philosophy of fatalism espoused by Richard Taylor in his infamous essay. Wallace’s aim at the time was to write philosophy and do philosophy, while writing fiction on the side. Both papers must've been equally overwhelming projects.
The fatalism essay spawned a complicated problem for most philosophers since 1962, commonly referred to as the “Taylor problem”. The general, logic symbol-devoid explanation of fatalism is: human actions and decisions have no influence on the future, rather, how things stand in the future determines what happens in the present. This particular philosophical outlook dates back to Aristotle, along with the LEM (law of excluded middle). In his De Interpretatione, Aristotle states that truth statements are either true or especially not true. The LEM, in the language of modal logic can be expressed as (p v-p); in other words, with any truth proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is true. The narrative example that Taylor used in his famous essay was that of the naval battle scenario. A naval commander is about to perform one of two actions, call the two acts P and P` respectively. If P (the commander puts in the order for a naval battle) then O (there is a naval battle tomorrow), if P` (the commander does not put in the order for a naval battle) then O` (there is no naval battle tomorrow). The argument’s logical circularity basically works like this: If P is true, O` is not possible, therefore if P` is true then O is not possible, and vice-versa, and so on and so forth. In other words, the fatalist “ … thinks of the future in the manner in which we all think of the past.” Also, the argument basically implies that if something occurs in the future, then the conditions necessary for it to occur have already taken place and were determined by that particular outcome. Along with this hypothetical scenario and the true or not true universe of LEM, Taylor included six presuppositions for his argument. The first four presuppositions were more or less already explained in the battle scenario, which Wallace found reasonable enough. It was the last two presuppositions Taylor included that Wallace took issue with.
Presupposition number five states that no agent (in the situation above, this would be the naval commander) can perform a given act if there is lacking, at the same time, or any other time, a condition necessary for the occurrence of the act. Presupposition six disavows the efficacy of time in this hypothetical scenario, e.g., time is irrelevant here. This is where the entire argument becomes, as Wallace said, “ulcer inducing”. This is because there is a great deal of semantic confusion concerning exactly what Taylor means by certain descriptions of the agent’s ability to put the order in. Is it that the agent physically cannot do so, due to location and temporal restraints, or is it simply that the agent is physically incapable of doing so?
Since this is Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, it’s steeped in the incredibly dense, convoluted language of formal semantics and modal logic. Symbols of mathematical logic flood the page, and the lay reader, not versed in the vernacular of this particular school of philosophy is basically incapable of following the way in which Wallace deconstructs fatalism. The system J that he comes up with is described as a system that basically encapsulates every situational-temporal possibility to an infinite degree. The system was named after his thesis advisor Jay Garfield, who in response to the specific issues that Wallace had with the way in which Taylor had collapsed so many logical modalities, gave Wallace a sort of crash-course in Montague grammar and tensed modal logic. It’s difficult to summarize, but Wallace found a way around Taylor’s tricky problem by honing in on the fatalist’s move from semantics to metaphysics. In Wallace’s own words, “ … the kinds of modalities we are concerned with in the Taylor problem must be regarded as situational physical modalities.” Taylor, who never considered himself a fatalist, simply found a neat trick of collapsing modalities from possibility and actuality into logical necessity. Then there is the trickier problem of how physical possibility is sensitive to time. The J system was basically devised for “formalizing, representing, and interpreting tensed physical-modal propositions.” Wallace’s brilliant thesis concludes by saying that Taylor was attempting to utilize a semantic argument for a metaphysical conclusion, or confusing physical possibility with logical necessity.
Again, the Taylor problem and Wallace’s intellectually tenacious thesis statement are incredibly difficult to follow. For the most part, Wallace explains his solution to the Taylor Problem in a language translatable to the lay reader. Even for an undergrad thesis, it’s still pretty engaging stuff. Included in this edition, is an illuminating introduction by James Ryerson, commenting on the significance of Wallace’s work as a philosopher, and the important intellectual role that mathematical logic and semantics played in the creation of Wallace’s debut novel Broom of the System, the Taylor essay in its entirety, a series of refutations of the Taylor problem from The Philosophical Review, Wallace’s actual thesis, an epilogue by Jay Garfield, and Taylor’s response to his critics. It would be something of a fallacy to suggest that the actual problems posed by Taylor’s fatalist argument offers some insight into Wallace’s motivations as a writer. It might say something about his interest in modal logic, and how intellectually ambitious he was at the time (considering the weight of a task such as that of critically analyzing Taylor’s troubling argument). It’s possible that his subsequent mental breakdown was informed by how mentally taxing technical philosophy in the vein of modal logic could be. Although, the importance of this paper is to be found in the way in which it reveals what a truly talented philosopher Wallace was, and how his experience with semantics and mathematical logic – in some not-so-clearly-definable-way – helped shape him into the enormously talented fiction writer and essayist that he came to be.
February 12, 2019
Did not finish. Could not finish. David Foster Wallace was a smart cookie. I don't know what brand of cookie is smartest*, but he must have been one of those. So his senior thesis, presented while an undergraduate honors student of Philosophy, sailed right over my head with all its academic jargon, formal symbols of logic, and various charts and graphs and illustrations. But I did really enjoy the biographical essays included by people who knew him during his time as a college student, in particular the fawning and adulatory introduction, "A Head That Throbbed Heartlike."
3 stars out of 5. Nonessential reading for anyone, even serious Wallace fans.
___________
*Fig Newtons, probably.
3 stars out of 5. Nonessential reading for anyone, even serious Wallace fans.
___________
*Fig Newtons, probably.
October 4, 2016
First, let me admit that this book is hard to rate because it's intended for a very specific audience - namely, enthusiasts and critics of the work of David Foster Wallace. I am neither as yet, but the book did really help me understand more about him and the way he thinks, which I am hoping will help me read Infinite Jest at some point and actually get through it.
This book is a fascinating argument about fatalism. Richard Taylor declares that we should basically all be fatalists, and there are several reprints of other articles written in response to Taylor before it gets to Wallace's argument against Taylor. Wallace examines the semantics of Taylor's argument and ultimately concludes that his is a metaphysical, not a semantic argument, that he's attempting to solve with semantics.
As a non-philosopher who is not entirely familiar with logical concepts, it was hard for me to follow, but I am glad I read it. If nothing else, it's an impressive piece of rhetoric and clues you in to the talent Wallace possessed, even as a senior in college.
This book is a fascinating argument about fatalism. Richard Taylor declares that we should basically all be fatalists, and there are several reprints of other articles written in response to Taylor before it gets to Wallace's argument against Taylor. Wallace examines the semantics of Taylor's argument and ultimately concludes that his is a metaphysical, not a semantic argument, that he's attempting to solve with semantics.
As a non-philosopher who is not entirely familiar with logical concepts, it was hard for me to follow, but I am glad I read it. If nothing else, it's an impressive piece of rhetoric and clues you in to the talent Wallace possessed, even as a senior in college.
August 8, 2023
Well, I guess it turns out that even genius-level prose writers aren’t able to produce great philosophy at age 20-21. I’m not sure what I was expecting, exactly? I’ve graded undergraduate philosophy papers and would undoubtedly have given this one an 'A' . . . but would not have recommended it for publication, lol. Definitely looking forward to DFW’s high school notebook doodles being sold as a $27 hardcover or whatever.
December 15, 2025
Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of DFW and Mark Costello’s Signifying Rappers collaboration, I am grateful for Mr. Costello’s perseverance to have his friend’s college philosophy thesis published and supplemented by many credible scholars.
This was one of the most engaging texts I’ve read in quite some time and forced me to review my Intro to Logic notes from my senior year of college with the legend, Professor James Goetsch.
James Ryerson’s intro was far more interesting than anything I’ve read by D.T. Max about Wallace and provides an inviting arena where complex ideas and invented symbols begin to make sense. Symbols and concepts in Wallace’s writing are just as important as variables in mathematical logic proofs to accomplish the divine “click.” Perhaps this is the closest academics can come to a time machine in order to understand Wallace’s undergraduate psyche and trajectory as both an intellectual and literary powerhouse.
“One of the few giveaways in their exchange that Wallace is also a goofy college kid is that he alludes to Descartes as ‘Monsieur D’ and Kant as ‘the Big K.’” (9)
I believe that Wallace was often in the shadow of his father James, which also simultaneously motivated him to strive for excellence. Though their literary and career palettes perhaps mesh like a Venn diagram, his actual thesis was dedicated to both of his parents, James and Sally. Wallace’s father’s dissertation for his PhD at Cornell was on the topic of pleasure.
“‘I am not interested in logic,’ James explained to me, ‘I have been amused by the way that logicians move into an area of philosophy, try to axiomatize it, and end up focusing on logicians’ problems instead of the other problems that other philosophers are concerned about.’” (4)
David’s academic pursuit was focused on situational modality, whereas modality can be seen as a variable or clause in a larger equation:
“Unlike logical modality and plain-old physical modality, situational physical modality, he observed, is not eternal and unchanging but rather highly sensitive to details of time and place (as the Eiffel Tower example illustrates).” (11)
According to Ryerson, “One of Wallace’s assets as a philosopher was his instinct for collaboration.” (9) Wallace also demonstrated a fear of metacognition: “He was perpetually on guard against the ways that abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real.” (1)
Personally, I think metacognition is wicked important for self-improvement.
Ryerson’s analyses of Wallace’s literary works expose alternative philosophical perspectives that I was previously unaware of:
“Indeed at the simplest level, Lenore just is Wallace.” (20)
“The story ‘Good Old Neon’ invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the ‘fraudulence paradox.’” (18)
“Few readers of Infinite Jest will forget the lonely fate of Hal Incandenza, who becomes so alienated from the world that his speech becomes unintelligible to others, or the lifeless zombiehood that befalls anyone who watches the novel’s eponymous film, which is so entertaining that its viewer becomes incapable of doing anything other than watch it.” (33)
Ryerson does fail to explore the role of drug usage in Wallace’s opus during his intro. Is there a morality to using drugs to function at a “higher level”? Perhaps Wallace’s Infinite Sierpinski idealism could be a series of checks and balances between the three points of 1) COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS 2) PHYSICAL HEALTH and 3) MIND EXPANSION.
“In Wallace’s view, Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact with the outside world.” (30) Perhaps David addressed this in fiction through JOI. Jim’s Wraith contradicts Wallace’s “factual” ideas of situational modality because there is an entirely new set of rules, boundaries, and interpretation of what time is. I.e.: the physical Asian Coke can with condensation. Then again, it is fiction. The author is God.
Maureen Eckert prefaces the actual thesis with bountiful praise: “For here Wallace demonstrates more than the deep familiarity with philosophical ideas, themes, and texts shown in the works he published during his life. This essay isn’t merely about philosophy; it is philosophy.” (138)
Condensed solipsism can be viewed as the ideal that nothing exists apart from your own mind and mental states. I’d hate to completely summarize the actual thesis, because it's a fun challenge to try and wrap your own mind around it, but I will end my review with several points that may serve as a codex or inspire further constructive logical questioning.
* Presuppositions are challenging...
* In my personal understanding, Taylor’s presuppositions are similar to “pleading the fifth” in America. Coincidently, Wallace affirms that, “the Taylor-presupposition which has come in for the most sustained vigorous attack is his fifth.” (152)
* The order of words are important because they influence both meaning and metaphysical value (if you’re into that sort of stuff) of modalities.
* Wallace’s 5th citation from the Metaphysics text that defines what a fatalist is focuses on the pronoun, “he.” Females can be philosophers too!
* How did Wallace create his symbols on a typewriter in the 1980s?
* Wallace’s use of Kripke and Montague models utilizes the assumption that the reader is familiar with them, but unfortunately I am not.
* Wallace creates a matrix to represent different language sets.
* Wallace’s explanation of his created J-analysis including “mother-relation” and “daughter-relation” is fairly similar to the concept of time travel/space time continuums as explored in the Back to the Future film series. Wallace even uses potential terrorist attacks as means of explanation. The first film was released on July 3, 1985.
Wallace’s academic outrage with Taylor is evocative of my personal outage with the Red Sox signing David Price and not updating his Facebook social media website with his current team.
A former mentor of Wallace, Jay Garfield concludes, “I cannot understand what drove David to take his own life; his ending is a source of great sadness; but the memory of our brief time as colleagues is one of pure joy.” (221)
This was one of the most engaging texts I’ve read in quite some time and forced me to review my Intro to Logic notes from my senior year of college with the legend, Professor James Goetsch.
James Ryerson’s intro was far more interesting than anything I’ve read by D.T. Max about Wallace and provides an inviting arena where complex ideas and invented symbols begin to make sense. Symbols and concepts in Wallace’s writing are just as important as variables in mathematical logic proofs to accomplish the divine “click.” Perhaps this is the closest academics can come to a time machine in order to understand Wallace’s undergraduate psyche and trajectory as both an intellectual and literary powerhouse.
“One of the few giveaways in their exchange that Wallace is also a goofy college kid is that he alludes to Descartes as ‘Monsieur D’ and Kant as ‘the Big K.’” (9)
I believe that Wallace was often in the shadow of his father James, which also simultaneously motivated him to strive for excellence. Though their literary and career palettes perhaps mesh like a Venn diagram, his actual thesis was dedicated to both of his parents, James and Sally. Wallace’s father’s dissertation for his PhD at Cornell was on the topic of pleasure.
“‘I am not interested in logic,’ James explained to me, ‘I have been amused by the way that logicians move into an area of philosophy, try to axiomatize it, and end up focusing on logicians’ problems instead of the other problems that other philosophers are concerned about.’” (4)
David’s academic pursuit was focused on situational modality, whereas modality can be seen as a variable or clause in a larger equation:
“Unlike logical modality and plain-old physical modality, situational physical modality, he observed, is not eternal and unchanging but rather highly sensitive to details of time and place (as the Eiffel Tower example illustrates).” (11)
According to Ryerson, “One of Wallace’s assets as a philosopher was his instinct for collaboration.” (9) Wallace also demonstrated a fear of metacognition: “He was perpetually on guard against the ways that abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real.” (1)
Personally, I think metacognition is wicked important for self-improvement.
Ryerson’s analyses of Wallace’s literary works expose alternative philosophical perspectives that I was previously unaware of:
“Indeed at the simplest level, Lenore just is Wallace.” (20)
“The story ‘Good Old Neon’ invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the ‘fraudulence paradox.’” (18)
“Few readers of Infinite Jest will forget the lonely fate of Hal Incandenza, who becomes so alienated from the world that his speech becomes unintelligible to others, or the lifeless zombiehood that befalls anyone who watches the novel’s eponymous film, which is so entertaining that its viewer becomes incapable of doing anything other than watch it.” (33)
Ryerson does fail to explore the role of drug usage in Wallace’s opus during his intro. Is there a morality to using drugs to function at a “higher level”? Perhaps Wallace’s Infinite Sierpinski idealism could be a series of checks and balances between the three points of 1) COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS 2) PHYSICAL HEALTH and 3) MIND EXPANSION.
“In Wallace’s view, Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact with the outside world.” (30) Perhaps David addressed this in fiction through JOI. Jim’s Wraith contradicts Wallace’s “factual” ideas of situational modality because there is an entirely new set of rules, boundaries, and interpretation of what time is. I.e.: the physical Asian Coke can with condensation. Then again, it is fiction. The author is God.
Maureen Eckert prefaces the actual thesis with bountiful praise: “For here Wallace demonstrates more than the deep familiarity with philosophical ideas, themes, and texts shown in the works he published during his life. This essay isn’t merely about philosophy; it is philosophy.” (138)
Condensed solipsism can be viewed as the ideal that nothing exists apart from your own mind and mental states. I’d hate to completely summarize the actual thesis, because it's a fun challenge to try and wrap your own mind around it, but I will end my review with several points that may serve as a codex or inspire further constructive logical questioning.
* Presuppositions are challenging...
* In my personal understanding, Taylor’s presuppositions are similar to “pleading the fifth” in America. Coincidently, Wallace affirms that, “the Taylor-presupposition which has come in for the most sustained vigorous attack is his fifth.” (152)
* The order of words are important because they influence both meaning and metaphysical value (if you’re into that sort of stuff) of modalities.
* Wallace’s 5th citation from the Metaphysics text that defines what a fatalist is focuses on the pronoun, “he.” Females can be philosophers too!
* How did Wallace create his symbols on a typewriter in the 1980s?
* Wallace’s use of Kripke and Montague models utilizes the assumption that the reader is familiar with them, but unfortunately I am not.
* Wallace creates a matrix to represent different language sets.
* Wallace’s explanation of his created J-analysis including “mother-relation” and “daughter-relation” is fairly similar to the concept of time travel/space time continuums as explored in the Back to the Future film series. Wallace even uses potential terrorist attacks as means of explanation. The first film was released on July 3, 1985.
Wallace’s academic outrage with Taylor is evocative of my personal outage with the Red Sox signing David Price and not updating his Facebook social media website with his current team.
A former mentor of Wallace, Jay Garfield concludes, “I cannot understand what drove David to take his own life; his ending is a source of great sadness; but the memory of our brief time as colleagues is one of pure joy.” (221)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 19, 2013
I never knew I had it in me to follow formal philosophical logic, not to mention ENJOY it.... I should by now just learn to trust David Foster Wallace to make any topic equal parts fascinating and accessible.
This book collects together a history of publications, replies, and counter-replies on the topic of fatalism, the idea that one is rendered incapable of doing anything other that what one does do by the constraints of future realities. For example, if there will be no puddles on the ground tomorrow, it is impossible for it to rain today.
It's an unintuitive idea that demands time to operate with bidirectional symmetry and presents "troubling" realities about free will (air quotes because I'm a determinist-- though with regard to a string of past causation, rather than future constraints-- and so don't find the negation of free will troubling). Although these dialogues were interesting to read, I found the academic replies to Richard Taylor's original argument for fatalism severely lacking, to the point that without any formal training in philosophy, I could see how badly they missed the mark. The collection culminates in a reproduction of David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis in philosophy, some 20 years after the original debates, in which he applies reasonable constraints of unidirectional time to Taylor's arguments to show that fatalism does not follow.
I've seen arguments that his thesis was not that impressive, that it could have been boiled down to 3 pages of argumentation instead of its 40-some pages of formal systems, diagrams, and deconstructions of the historical publications. To those dissenters I point out the night-and-day difference in clarity and style between the original papers and DFW's refutation; the marvel of his work is that he managed to produce such a thorough, compelling, lucid, and articulate piece of formal philosophical theory AS AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS, while simultaneously writing the preeminent Broom of the System as an English thesis. That his work would not have served as a strong standalone academic publication is as irrelevant to its impressive and preternatural quality as it is to the talent he showed from a very young age for translating even the most opaque topics into good writing.
Aside from my undying DFW admiration, I enjoyed comparing the emergence of formal mathematical logic in philosophy to the emergence of the same in cognitive science, both of which occurred around the same time. The impact of formal theory is plain in Wallace's treatment of fatalism: where professional philosophers spent countless journal volumes riposting to and fro with verbal reasoning, Wallace destroys the notion swiftly and cleanly with the use of symbolic logic. Providing formal frameworks sets definitions for terms concretely, allows the derivation of predictions to be tested, and puts an end to the sort of "talking past" into which academic dialogues can so quickly devolve in the humanities. It was a joy to see one of my favourite authors come to the same conclusions so early in his career :)
This book collects together a history of publications, replies, and counter-replies on the topic of fatalism, the idea that one is rendered incapable of doing anything other that what one does do by the constraints of future realities. For example, if there will be no puddles on the ground tomorrow, it is impossible for it to rain today.
It's an unintuitive idea that demands time to operate with bidirectional symmetry and presents "troubling" realities about free will (air quotes because I'm a determinist-- though with regard to a string of past causation, rather than future constraints-- and so don't find the negation of free will troubling). Although these dialogues were interesting to read, I found the academic replies to Richard Taylor's original argument for fatalism severely lacking, to the point that without any formal training in philosophy, I could see how badly they missed the mark. The collection culminates in a reproduction of David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis in philosophy, some 20 years after the original debates, in which he applies reasonable constraints of unidirectional time to Taylor's arguments to show that fatalism does not follow.
I've seen arguments that his thesis was not that impressive, that it could have been boiled down to 3 pages of argumentation instead of its 40-some pages of formal systems, diagrams, and deconstructions of the historical publications. To those dissenters I point out the night-and-day difference in clarity and style between the original papers and DFW's refutation; the marvel of his work is that he managed to produce such a thorough, compelling, lucid, and articulate piece of formal philosophical theory AS AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS, while simultaneously writing the preeminent Broom of the System as an English thesis. That his work would not have served as a strong standalone academic publication is as irrelevant to its impressive and preternatural quality as it is to the talent he showed from a very young age for translating even the most opaque topics into good writing.
Aside from my undying DFW admiration, I enjoyed comparing the emergence of formal mathematical logic in philosophy to the emergence of the same in cognitive science, both of which occurred around the same time. The impact of formal theory is plain in Wallace's treatment of fatalism: where professional philosophers spent countless journal volumes riposting to and fro with verbal reasoning, Wallace destroys the notion swiftly and cleanly with the use of symbolic logic. Providing formal frameworks sets definitions for terms concretely, allows the derivation of predictions to be tested, and puts an end to the sort of "talking past" into which academic dialogues can so quickly devolve in the humanities. It was a joy to see one of my favourite authors come to the same conclusions so early in his career :)
Read
May 20, 2017Popping in here only to confirm that two years hence (since reading Wallace's thesis) I have finally gotten around to reading Richard Taylor's piece "The Problem of Future Contingencies," published five years prior to Wallace's thesis, and which presumably lays to rest what must have been some of the cause of Wallace's anxiety about future determinism.
I'll mark myself down in that column along with those others who find themselves impressed with this essay. DFW-ites without a background in the philosophical sciences are urged great caution.
I'll mark myself down in that column along with those others who find themselves impressed with this essay. DFW-ites without a background in the philosophical sciences are urged great caution.
May 13, 2019
First, this title is definitely a publisher's version of click bait. You see Wallace and this amazing title, and you're drawn in. However, the book is not really about any of the metaphysical concepts in the title or subtitle any more than To Kill a Mockingbird is about someone killing a mockingbird. But there is mention of a mockingbird in Harper Lee's famous book, and, of course, the mockingbird is also a symbol. In that sense, this Wallace book is about metaphysics. It's actually not even a Wallace book, which is also "click bait."
What is it, then? And what is it about? Well, it's a collection of essays, one of which is Wallace's Bachelor's thesis. One of his theses, sorry, because he wrote two: this one for his Bachelor's in Philosophy, The Broom of the System for his Bachelor's in English. Yes, both his BACHELOR'S theses have been published. What a jerk. Anyway, what is this one about? It's more about Richard Taylor, a well-known philosopher, who wrote a very controversial (and seemingly innocuous) essay called "Fatalism." In this essay, Taylor posits six logical presuppositions that he says can't be argued. Then, he uses two examples to show that, following these presupps through to their logical conclusions, our future is as unchangeable as our past, which means that our future is predetermined. This essay angered a bunch of philosophers because nobody except fatalists and determinists want to believe that our futures have already been decided. That's where the "fate" and "free will" come in. This book includes Taylor's famous essay and then the most significant replies, rebuttals, and defenses that followed its publication. Wallace's thesis is a response to Taylor and to some of the other philosophers who also responded to Taylor.
In his essay, Wallace establishes a system for discussing tensed modalities that depend on physical, not logical, possibility. His "System J" helps him prove that Taylor's presupps don't actually lead us to fatalism but that Taylor was equivocating phrases that, semantically, do not equate. This is where the "language" comes in. To Wallace, Taylor used a semantic argument to prove a metaphysical concept. Wallace uses semantics to prove that Taylor's semantics do not lead to fatalism. The "time" comes in because Wallace argues that the types of modalities he's discussing depend on time as much as they do on physical possibility and that, without discussing causality, you can't really make the kind of argument that Taylor makes. Time is an essential component of the "indices" that make up Wallace's "System J."
You can see that the book isn't about the above concepts. It's about semantics and logic and what certain presupps can lead to if you're not careful with wording, more than anything else. It's about philosophers philosophizing and proving each other right or wrong because logic is about proofs, and philosophers want to question truths. Honestly, the rest is just a byproduct of the argument, and really, it's only such a big deal because Taylor's essay seemingly calls into question our free will, which we as humans are very protective of, almost to the point of rabidity.
All of that being said, the book itself. I like the introduction and the Wallace content, which is meant to appeal to the Wallace fan, not to the philosophy fan, who actually benefits more from this volume than the Wallace-novel-lover. The problem is that Taylor didn't actually believe in Fatalism. All he did was say that, if we accept certain presupps as incontrovertible, we have to accept that the combination leads to fatalism. He was almost asking others to prove him wrong. How do I know this? Well, it's kind of in the famous essay itself, but there's also an earlier Taylor essay included at the back of the book wherein Taylor discusses his belief in the possibility of multiple futures due to future contingincies. I feel like this essay should have been first after the intro and everything. Putting it in the back makes it seem like Taylor actually did believe in Fatalism but also doesn't make sense chronologically. Also, the essays that follow Taylor's famous one become repetitive. I feel like the editors could've just included the essays that Wallace mentions to avoid repetition. If I have to hear about that naval battle one more time... I was glad Wallace, at least, used his own examples to contradict Taylor and not Taylor's own, which everyone else just reused.
Why am I rating this book four stars? It's fun! I love when people in a specific field disagree via published essays. It's engaging and makes me feel like part of the debate. I had fun deciding whose side I was on and taking notes. I learned a lot. I don't know much about the logic/semantic side of philosophy, and what I do know about philosophy is mostly via history and a few books I've read by philosophers (my favorite of which is A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time and not just for the great title). I had to look up words and symbols, but once I got the hang of it, it was easy to follow. A common critique of Wallace's essay is that it's unreadable. It really isn't. With the background of the earlier essays by Taylor et al, Wallace's essay is not unreadable. It's actually engaging and easy to follow because the editors set up the argument so well. By the time I got to Wallace's paper, I felt comfortable with the concepts and jargon.
Why not five stars? The minor issues with setup as explained above. But I loved this book and really got into the philosophy and logic and semantics. I do think the title is romanticized as everything is when it comes to Wallace, but it's fairly accurate (even though Wallace's essay is really called "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality," which is...EXACTLY what his essay is about, go figure).
I guess critiquing Wallace's essay isn't really the point, but I do have to say that he attacks Taylor's essay on semantic grounds and says that Taylor should stick to metaphysics, not semantics, but the problem is that Wallace is using semantics to prove that we DO have free will, which is still metaphysical. He's also creating a system that he even admits sounds like fatalism. He even says, "an actual-world situation can obviously have only one actual daughter," meaning that even though there are possible situations now and possible future situations, the "now" we actually experience can lead to only one future (daughter), which sounds like fatalism to me. And his whole defense is semantics, but he uses the word "can" without limiting it, which was everyone's problem with Taylor's argument. You can see that I'm on Taylor's side here because even Wallace doesn't prove that the logic doesn't lead to fatalism. He just builds a fancy system to say the same thing Taylor says but to use different words. The problem with Taylor's argument wasn't semantics, like Wallace says. It was that the logical presupps have real-world consequences that lead to fatalism. And that's exactly what Wallace's System J leads to as well. To really disprove Taylor's point, you'd have to disprove all the presupps, and nobody has done that.
Now, I recommend this book highly if anything above sounds remotely interesting to you. I knew from the title that I would love this book, and even though the title is misleading in some ways, it is accurate enough that I did love this book. I'm not a Wallace fan, per se, though I've read some short stories and Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, so I'm not biased and just reading everything he wrote as if it were holy text. I'm genuinely interested in the concepts discussed and the setup of the book itself.
tl;dnr: this book contains interesting and lively philosophical and logical debates. Read it if that's your thing!
What is it, then? And what is it about? Well, it's a collection of essays, one of which is Wallace's Bachelor's thesis. One of his theses, sorry, because he wrote two: this one for his Bachelor's in Philosophy, The Broom of the System for his Bachelor's in English. Yes, both his BACHELOR'S theses have been published. What a jerk. Anyway, what is this one about? It's more about Richard Taylor, a well-known philosopher, who wrote a very controversial (and seemingly innocuous) essay called "Fatalism." In this essay, Taylor posits six logical presuppositions that he says can't be argued. Then, he uses two examples to show that, following these presupps through to their logical conclusions, our future is as unchangeable as our past, which means that our future is predetermined. This essay angered a bunch of philosophers because nobody except fatalists and determinists want to believe that our futures have already been decided. That's where the "fate" and "free will" come in. This book includes Taylor's famous essay and then the most significant replies, rebuttals, and defenses that followed its publication. Wallace's thesis is a response to Taylor and to some of the other philosophers who also responded to Taylor.
In his essay, Wallace establishes a system for discussing tensed modalities that depend on physical, not logical, possibility. His "System J" helps him prove that Taylor's presupps don't actually lead us to fatalism but that Taylor was equivocating phrases that, semantically, do not equate. This is where the "language" comes in. To Wallace, Taylor used a semantic argument to prove a metaphysical concept. Wallace uses semantics to prove that Taylor's semantics do not lead to fatalism. The "time" comes in because Wallace argues that the types of modalities he's discussing depend on time as much as they do on physical possibility and that, without discussing causality, you can't really make the kind of argument that Taylor makes. Time is an essential component of the "indices" that make up Wallace's "System J."
You can see that the book isn't about the above concepts. It's about semantics and logic and what certain presupps can lead to if you're not careful with wording, more than anything else. It's about philosophers philosophizing and proving each other right or wrong because logic is about proofs, and philosophers want to question truths. Honestly, the rest is just a byproduct of the argument, and really, it's only such a big deal because Taylor's essay seemingly calls into question our free will, which we as humans are very protective of, almost to the point of rabidity.
All of that being said, the book itself. I like the introduction and the Wallace content, which is meant to appeal to the Wallace fan, not to the philosophy fan, who actually benefits more from this volume than the Wallace-novel-lover. The problem is that Taylor didn't actually believe in Fatalism. All he did was say that, if we accept certain presupps as incontrovertible, we have to accept that the combination leads to fatalism. He was almost asking others to prove him wrong. How do I know this? Well, it's kind of in the famous essay itself, but there's also an earlier Taylor essay included at the back of the book wherein Taylor discusses his belief in the possibility of multiple futures due to future contingincies. I feel like this essay should have been first after the intro and everything. Putting it in the back makes it seem like Taylor actually did believe in Fatalism but also doesn't make sense chronologically. Also, the essays that follow Taylor's famous one become repetitive. I feel like the editors could've just included the essays that Wallace mentions to avoid repetition. If I have to hear about that naval battle one more time... I was glad Wallace, at least, used his own examples to contradict Taylor and not Taylor's own, which everyone else just reused.
Why am I rating this book four stars? It's fun! I love when people in a specific field disagree via published essays. It's engaging and makes me feel like part of the debate. I had fun deciding whose side I was on and taking notes. I learned a lot. I don't know much about the logic/semantic side of philosophy, and what I do know about philosophy is mostly via history and a few books I've read by philosophers (my favorite of which is A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time and not just for the great title). I had to look up words and symbols, but once I got the hang of it, it was easy to follow. A common critique of Wallace's essay is that it's unreadable. It really isn't. With the background of the earlier essays by Taylor et al, Wallace's essay is not unreadable. It's actually engaging and easy to follow because the editors set up the argument so well. By the time I got to Wallace's paper, I felt comfortable with the concepts and jargon.
Why not five stars? The minor issues with setup as explained above. But I loved this book and really got into the philosophy and logic and semantics. I do think the title is romanticized as everything is when it comes to Wallace, but it's fairly accurate (even though Wallace's essay is really called "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality," which is...EXACTLY what his essay is about, go figure).
I guess critiquing Wallace's essay isn't really the point, but I do have to say that he attacks Taylor's essay on semantic grounds and says that Taylor should stick to metaphysics, not semantics, but the problem is that Wallace is using semantics to prove that we DO have free will, which is still metaphysical. He's also creating a system that he even admits sounds like fatalism. He even says, "an actual-world situation can obviously have only one actual daughter," meaning that even though there are possible situations now and possible future situations, the "now" we actually experience can lead to only one future (daughter), which sounds like fatalism to me. And his whole defense is semantics, but he uses the word "can" without limiting it, which was everyone's problem with Taylor's argument. You can see that I'm on Taylor's side here because even Wallace doesn't prove that the logic doesn't lead to fatalism. He just builds a fancy system to say the same thing Taylor says but to use different words. The problem with Taylor's argument wasn't semantics, like Wallace says. It was that the logical presupps have real-world consequences that lead to fatalism. And that's exactly what Wallace's System J leads to as well. To really disprove Taylor's point, you'd have to disprove all the presupps, and nobody has done that.
Now, I recommend this book highly if anything above sounds remotely interesting to you. I knew from the title that I would love this book, and even though the title is misleading in some ways, it is accurate enough that I did love this book. I'm not a Wallace fan, per se, though I've read some short stories and Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, so I'm not biased and just reading everything he wrote as if it were holy text. I'm genuinely interested in the concepts discussed and the setup of the book itself.
tl;dnr: this book contains interesting and lively philosophical and logical debates. Read it if that's your thing!
July 18, 2016
Why are you reading this? Are you (a) a Wallace-obsessed completist, or (b) are you a semantic philosophy enthusiast?
Those are the only reasons to read this.
Really, I have mixed feelings about everything Wallace ever wrote being published posthumously. Sure, I want to read it all, like any other obsessive completist, but some of it really is just not meant to be read. At least the case with this is different from that of the Pale King; the fact that that was published and that so many people have read it feels wrong; Wallace implicitly didn't want it read as it is, unfinished, or he would have finished it and had it published. What writer wouldn’t be mortified to have their unfinished manuscript published without their permission? Whereas with this (collection of) essay(s), he’d just intended a limited circle of professors and philosphers to read. Still, what writer wouldn’t be embarrassed to have their college essays widely read?
Apologies for the rambling tangents.
No, I didn’t enjoy this; arguments of semantic philosophy can be interesting for up to maybe twenty minutes, then they spiral into masturbatory pedantry.
Yes, I’ll probably cave and read Pale King eventually; I’m no less a vulture than anyone else.
Those are the only reasons to read this.
Really, I have mixed feelings about everything Wallace ever wrote being published posthumously. Sure, I want to read it all, like any other obsessive completist, but some of it really is just not meant to be read. At least the case with this is different from that of the Pale King; the fact that that was published and that so many people have read it feels wrong; Wallace implicitly didn't want it read as it is, unfinished, or he would have finished it and had it published. What writer wouldn’t be mortified to have their unfinished manuscript published without their permission? Whereas with this (collection of) essay(s), he’d just intended a limited circle of professors and philosphers to read. Still, what writer wouldn’t be embarrassed to have their college essays widely read?
Apologies for the rambling tangents.
No, I didn’t enjoy this; arguments of semantic philosophy can be interesting for up to maybe twenty minutes, then they spiral into masturbatory pedantry.
Yes, I’ll probably cave and read Pale King eventually; I’m no less a vulture than anyone else.
July 14, 2012
David Foster Wallace (DFW) was a certified “genius” (a MacArthur grant recipient) who became famous as “one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation” in the words of philosopher Jay Garfield. Garfield contributes an appreciation of DFW in the posthumous book; Fate, Time, and Language. Garfield thought that DFW missed his calling. Instead of becoming a novelist, famous for manic novels like Infinite Jest and The Pale King, Garfield suggests that he could have been an even better philosopher. Garfield says that DFW’s essay contained in Fate, Time, and Language; ‘Richard Taylor’s “Fatalism” and the Semantics of Physical Modality’; which was one of DFW’s senior theses at Amherst, proves that “. . . had he lived, he would have been a major figure in our field.” The other senior thesis became The Broom of the System, which started DFW onto his career in literary fiction in 1985.
DFW’s philosophy thesis is directed against the modern philosopher Richard Taylor, whose article ‘Fatalism’ (The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71, No. 1, 1962) made the claim that six “presuppositions”, commonly accepted by modern day philosophers, lead to the conclusion that fatalism is true. The presuppositions:
1) Any proposition whatever is either true or, if not true, false.
2) If any state of affairs is sufficient for, though logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some further condition at the same or any other time, then the former cannot occur without the latter occurring.
3) If the occurrence of any condition is necessary for, but logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some other condition at the same or any other time, then the latter cannot occur without the former occurring also.
4) If one condition or set of conditions is sufficient for another, then that other is necessary for it and conversely, if one condition or set of conditions is necessary for another, then that other is sufficient for it.
5) No agent can perform any given act lacking some precondition for it.
6) Time does not enhance or decrease an agent’s powers.
Taylor’s other writings (including the article “The Problem of Future Contingents” included in Fate, Time, and Language) make clear that Taylor didn’t think that fatalism was true. Like Aristotle (and Lukasiewicz) he thought that proposition 1) above, a paraphrase of the Principle of Bivalence (PB), didn’t apply to future contingent events.
DFW takes a different approach: to demolish Taylor’s fatalism argument in support of an overall conclusion that “if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics.” How we get there is a longish story, all of which I won’t tell here, but the story follows a path through Aristotle, Lukasiewicz, and Hobbes to contemporary commentators on Taylor’s paper and finally to invention of a system to evaluate physical modalities based on the possible worlds modal logic of Kripke modified by Montague to include time. DFW calls this “System J”, presumably in honor of his thesis adviser, the above-mentioned Jay Garfield.
Fate, Time, and Language is about fatalism. Fatalism comes up in a very old argument in the never-never land between logic and metaphysics, Aristotle’s argument about the problem of future contingents: “For example, a sea-fight must either take place on the morrow or not. No necessity is there, however, that it should come to pass or should not. What is necessary is that it either should happen tomorrow or not.” (On Interpretation, IX, 19a, 29, Loeb translation by Harold P. Cooke). In Aristotle’s analysis of the problem, he appears to conclude that contingent future events are an exception to the normal rule that has come to be known as Principle of Bivalence (PB): “In regard to things present or past, propositions, whether positive or negative, are true of necessity or false.” (On Interpretation, IX, 18a, 28). He is led to that conclusion by an argument that finds that that if we assume PB for the case of future contingent events then fatalism is proved, a conclusion which Aristotle finds absurd (http://notesfrommylibrary.wordpress.c...).
PB is a crucial concept here, since Aristotle’s argument was not that fatalism is true, but that since it is obviously false, there seem to be some “things” (propositions, statements, or sentences) which are neither true nor false, thus contradicting PB. DFW goes to some pains to point out the difference between PB and the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). He refers to Susan Haack in Deviant Logic (p 65): “I shall approach the question . . . by investigating . . . three principles: the principle of bivalence, the principle that every wff (well-formed formula) is either true or false (hereafter PB); the law of excluded middle, the wff ‘p or not p’ (hereafter , LEM); and Tarski’s material adequacy condition for the definitions of truth, the principle that ‘A’ is true iff (if and only if) A (hereafter, (T)).” (T) is not in scope here. But PB and LEM are at the heart of the issue that Aristotle and Taylor tried to address.
Wallace complains that Taylor commits an “equivocation” between two sorts of non-logical, physical implications: 1) “necessary-of” and 2) “necessary-for” implications. “I give Order -> Sea-battle tomorrow” is a “necessary-of” implication. “Combustion -> Presence of fuel” is of the other variety. “Battle B is a necessary consequence of order O. But would we want to say with regard to 2) that the presence of fuel is a necessary consequence of combustion?” Why is this important? Because, according to DFW, 1) and 2) can be shown to “behave differently under a modus tollens operation (a deny-the-consequent-and-see-what-happens-to-the-antecedent operation.” Wallace follows the criticism of Charles Brown’s “Fallacies in Taylor’s Fatalism” (reprinted in Fate, Time, and Language) that Taylor’s propositions 2, 3, 4 and 5 are invalidated by this “equivocation.” But, importantly, not (like Aristotle, Lukasiewicz, and Taylor) proposition 1, PB.
But we are still a long ways from Wallace’s final argument here. In the course of this argument he shifts from the sea battle of Aristotle to a nuclear explosion on the Amherst campus. (See the manic mind at work here?) “Suppose that the day before yesterday a group of terrorists brought a completely assembled and fully functional nuclear weapon onto the Amherst College campus. Suppose further that yesterday the head terrorist, completely healthy and physically functional and not constrained in any way, sat next to the weapon, with his finger on the weapon’s fully functional triggering mechanism, all day, but did not press the trigger and so did not cause a nuclear explosion to occur, and so a nuclear explosion did not in fact occur on campus yesterday. Suppose further, since we’re trying to be as Taylor-ish as possible, that a nuclear explosion on the Amherst campus yesterday would be an occurrence causally, physically sufficient for the presence of radiation in excess of, say 20 rads on the Amherst campus today.”
But there is no radiation today. This is the condition (R>20) that in Taylor’s sense is “necessary for” the occurrence of the explosion yesterday. But, Wallace insists, that rather R>20 is a “necessary consequence of” an explosion yesterday. Does this matter? Wallace thinks yes. “What it means in a nutshell is that the denial of the consequent’s obtaining today means only that it cannot today be the case that yesterday the explosion did occur, not that it was the case yesterday that the explosion could not occur.” To this reader, we have here reached the end of the argument, but DFW does not stop here.
He says, “. . . we have granted everything that Taylor would seem to want us to grant. But we are still able to reasonably deny the fatalistic conclusion. This is because we can point out that in the absence of radiation today we evaluate P1E’s (“E” at some past time) possibility relative to what occurs now, today, at a time later than that designated by P1. We can say that this allows us to conclude only that, given what obtains today, it is not possible that P1E. Were we, however, to say something different, that at P1 it was not possible for E to occur, we would be evaluating the possibility of E at and relative to P1, not at or with respect to any other time, viz., now. But it is this second sort of conclusion that Taylor seems to want us to derive from everything we have been willing to grant to him thus far. It means basically that we would be saying that, given the set of circumstances that obtained yesterday, E was not physically possible yesterday. We would be saying not that it is not now possible that E occurred at P1, but rather that at P1 it was not possible for E to occur. And this would have as a consequence our buying the following: that yesterday, during the whole time the healthy and efficacious terrorist sat unconstrained with his limber finger on the fully functional triggering device of the fully operational nuclear weapon, it was somehow physically impossible for the explosion to occur. And this is clearly wrong . . . . “
Are we done yet? Not by a long shot. We haven’t even gotten to ‘System J'. And we are not going to go there. The interested reader will need to consult the book, for ‘System J’ involves typography and “math logic” not available to the current author. Suffice it to say that one of the virtues of this approach in Wallace’s mind is that it can be used to invalidate not just Taylor’s argument about future contingent events, but his further argument about past events as well. A more cynical reviewer might say that 'System j' gives him a chance to show off his math logical virtuosity and to impress his advisor, Garfield. But this reviewer won't go that far.
I have already quoted Wallace’s ultimate conclusion: that we cannot derive metaphysical conclusions by semantic means. But this is perhaps the place to mention the conclusions of Lukasiewicz in an article contained in the book Polish Logic 1920 – 1939, edited by Storrs McCall. This book is referenced in Wallace’s thesis, but for the famous article on “Many-valued systems of Propositional Logic.” The article that I want to mention is the article “On Determinism” that precedes the article quoted in Wallace’s thesis. For in this article Lukasiewicz addresses the same issue as Wallace and comes to the same conclusion as Taylor in his subsequent work: that the principle of bivalence “cannot be proved. One can only believe it, and he alone who considers it self-evident believes it. To me, personally, the principle of bivalence does not appear to be self-evident. Therefore, I am entitled not to recognize it, and to accept the view that besides truth and falsehood there exist other truth-values, including at least one more, the third truth-value. . . . I maintain that there are propositions which are neither true nor false but indeterminate.” My own preference would be to extend the courtesy also to propositions that are both true and false; not all propositions, of course, but only those that lie on the margins of thought, iteration, and language.
DFW’s philosophy thesis is directed against the modern philosopher Richard Taylor, whose article ‘Fatalism’ (The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71, No. 1, 1962) made the claim that six “presuppositions”, commonly accepted by modern day philosophers, lead to the conclusion that fatalism is true. The presuppositions:
1) Any proposition whatever is either true or, if not true, false.
2) If any state of affairs is sufficient for, though logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some further condition at the same or any other time, then the former cannot occur without the latter occurring.
3) If the occurrence of any condition is necessary for, but logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some other condition at the same or any other time, then the latter cannot occur without the former occurring also.
4) If one condition or set of conditions is sufficient for another, then that other is necessary for it and conversely, if one condition or set of conditions is necessary for another, then that other is sufficient for it.
5) No agent can perform any given act lacking some precondition for it.
6) Time does not enhance or decrease an agent’s powers.
Taylor’s other writings (including the article “The Problem of Future Contingents” included in Fate, Time, and Language) make clear that Taylor didn’t think that fatalism was true. Like Aristotle (and Lukasiewicz) he thought that proposition 1) above, a paraphrase of the Principle of Bivalence (PB), didn’t apply to future contingent events.
DFW takes a different approach: to demolish Taylor’s fatalism argument in support of an overall conclusion that “if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics.” How we get there is a longish story, all of which I won’t tell here, but the story follows a path through Aristotle, Lukasiewicz, and Hobbes to contemporary commentators on Taylor’s paper and finally to invention of a system to evaluate physical modalities based on the possible worlds modal logic of Kripke modified by Montague to include time. DFW calls this “System J”, presumably in honor of his thesis adviser, the above-mentioned Jay Garfield.
Fate, Time, and Language is about fatalism. Fatalism comes up in a very old argument in the never-never land between logic and metaphysics, Aristotle’s argument about the problem of future contingents: “For example, a sea-fight must either take place on the morrow or not. No necessity is there, however, that it should come to pass or should not. What is necessary is that it either should happen tomorrow or not.” (On Interpretation, IX, 19a, 29, Loeb translation by Harold P. Cooke). In Aristotle’s analysis of the problem, he appears to conclude that contingent future events are an exception to the normal rule that has come to be known as Principle of Bivalence (PB): “In regard to things present or past, propositions, whether positive or negative, are true of necessity or false.” (On Interpretation, IX, 18a, 28). He is led to that conclusion by an argument that finds that that if we assume PB for the case of future contingent events then fatalism is proved, a conclusion which Aristotle finds absurd (http://notesfrommylibrary.wordpress.c...).
PB is a crucial concept here, since Aristotle’s argument was not that fatalism is true, but that since it is obviously false, there seem to be some “things” (propositions, statements, or sentences) which are neither true nor false, thus contradicting PB. DFW goes to some pains to point out the difference between PB and the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). He refers to Susan Haack in Deviant Logic (p 65): “I shall approach the question . . . by investigating . . . three principles: the principle of bivalence, the principle that every wff (well-formed formula) is either true or false (hereafter PB); the law of excluded middle, the wff ‘p or not p’ (hereafter , LEM); and Tarski’s material adequacy condition for the definitions of truth, the principle that ‘A’ is true iff (if and only if) A (hereafter, (T)).” (T) is not in scope here. But PB and LEM are at the heart of the issue that Aristotle and Taylor tried to address.
Wallace complains that Taylor commits an “equivocation” between two sorts of non-logical, physical implications: 1) “necessary-of” and 2) “necessary-for” implications. “I give Order -> Sea-battle tomorrow” is a “necessary-of” implication. “Combustion -> Presence of fuel” is of the other variety. “Battle B is a necessary consequence of order O. But would we want to say with regard to 2) that the presence of fuel is a necessary consequence of combustion?” Why is this important? Because, according to DFW, 1) and 2) can be shown to “behave differently under a modus tollens operation (a deny-the-consequent-and-see-what-happens-to-the-antecedent operation.” Wallace follows the criticism of Charles Brown’s “Fallacies in Taylor’s Fatalism” (reprinted in Fate, Time, and Language) that Taylor’s propositions 2, 3, 4 and 5 are invalidated by this “equivocation.” But, importantly, not (like Aristotle, Lukasiewicz, and Taylor) proposition 1, PB.
But we are still a long ways from Wallace’s final argument here. In the course of this argument he shifts from the sea battle of Aristotle to a nuclear explosion on the Amherst campus. (See the manic mind at work here?) “Suppose that the day before yesterday a group of terrorists brought a completely assembled and fully functional nuclear weapon onto the Amherst College campus. Suppose further that yesterday the head terrorist, completely healthy and physically functional and not constrained in any way, sat next to the weapon, with his finger on the weapon’s fully functional triggering mechanism, all day, but did not press the trigger and so did not cause a nuclear explosion to occur, and so a nuclear explosion did not in fact occur on campus yesterday. Suppose further, since we’re trying to be as Taylor-ish as possible, that a nuclear explosion on the Amherst campus yesterday would be an occurrence causally, physically sufficient for the presence of radiation in excess of, say 20 rads on the Amherst campus today.”
But there is no radiation today. This is the condition (R>20) that in Taylor’s sense is “necessary for” the occurrence of the explosion yesterday. But, Wallace insists, that rather R>20 is a “necessary consequence of” an explosion yesterday. Does this matter? Wallace thinks yes. “What it means in a nutshell is that the denial of the consequent’s obtaining today means only that it cannot today be the case that yesterday the explosion did occur, not that it was the case yesterday that the explosion could not occur.” To this reader, we have here reached the end of the argument, but DFW does not stop here.
He says, “. . . we have granted everything that Taylor would seem to want us to grant. But we are still able to reasonably deny the fatalistic conclusion. This is because we can point out that in the absence of radiation today we evaluate P1E’s (“E” at some past time) possibility relative to what occurs now, today, at a time later than that designated by P1. We can say that this allows us to conclude only that, given what obtains today, it is not possible that P1E. Were we, however, to say something different, that at P1 it was not possible for E to occur, we would be evaluating the possibility of E at and relative to P1, not at or with respect to any other time, viz., now. But it is this second sort of conclusion that Taylor seems to want us to derive from everything we have been willing to grant to him thus far. It means basically that we would be saying that, given the set of circumstances that obtained yesterday, E was not physically possible yesterday. We would be saying not that it is not now possible that E occurred at P1, but rather that at P1 it was not possible for E to occur. And this would have as a consequence our buying the following: that yesterday, during the whole time the healthy and efficacious terrorist sat unconstrained with his limber finger on the fully functional triggering device of the fully operational nuclear weapon, it was somehow physically impossible for the explosion to occur. And this is clearly wrong . . . . “
Are we done yet? Not by a long shot. We haven’t even gotten to ‘System J'. And we are not going to go there. The interested reader will need to consult the book, for ‘System J’ involves typography and “math logic” not available to the current author. Suffice it to say that one of the virtues of this approach in Wallace’s mind is that it can be used to invalidate not just Taylor’s argument about future contingent events, but his further argument about past events as well. A more cynical reviewer might say that 'System j' gives him a chance to show off his math logical virtuosity and to impress his advisor, Garfield. But this reviewer won't go that far.
I have already quoted Wallace’s ultimate conclusion: that we cannot derive metaphysical conclusions by semantic means. But this is perhaps the place to mention the conclusions of Lukasiewicz in an article contained in the book Polish Logic 1920 – 1939, edited by Storrs McCall. This book is referenced in Wallace’s thesis, but for the famous article on “Many-valued systems of Propositional Logic.” The article that I want to mention is the article “On Determinism” that precedes the article quoted in Wallace’s thesis. For in this article Lukasiewicz addresses the same issue as Wallace and comes to the same conclusion as Taylor in his subsequent work: that the principle of bivalence “cannot be proved. One can only believe it, and he alone who considers it self-evident believes it. To me, personally, the principle of bivalence does not appear to be self-evident. Therefore, I am entitled not to recognize it, and to accept the view that besides truth and falsehood there exist other truth-values, including at least one more, the third truth-value. . . . I maintain that there are propositions which are neither true nor false but indeterminate.” My own preference would be to extend the courtesy also to propositions that are both true and false; not all propositions, of course, but only those that lie on the margins of thought, iteration, and language.
November 7, 2022
Aaaaand with this, my read-through of all of DFW’s published work has come to an end 😌
Fittingly enough, this is his first work chronologically—an honors thesis written to refute an argument for Fatalism given by a prominent philosopher that no one else had successfully refuted yet. It’s gathered together very well, with 2/3 of the “book” consisting of the previous essays necessary to understand the current state of Taylor’s argument for fatalism and its reception and failed refutations, until Wallace’s essays and a brief epilogue end the book.
This is probably just more evidence of me having a desire for academic work in my life, but I found this all RIVETING as well 😤 It made me miss the intensity of research projects and essay-writing in college, and having like 14 essays to read to understand the minutiae of very specified, dense, difficult philosophic arguments was soooooo so fun; I was worried that a lack of formal training in Philosophy would make it difficult or impossible to access, but only a basic level of formal logic is needed to understand what’s being argued here.
Also, Wallace’s argument is brilliant, extremely clearly presented, often very funny, and totally compelling, I think 🤷♂️ I definitely won’t use more space than I already have explaining Taylor’s argument for fatalism, its many responses, and Wallace’s (I think successful) refutation of the argument, but if anyone is curious about it then I’d highly recommend giving this a read (or messaging me for a TLDR recap of it, which I’d be happy to give :-)).
I’m going to formally end my Wallace read-through with a re-read of The Pale King, his final work, so stay tuned for that 😌
Fittingly enough, this is his first work chronologically—an honors thesis written to refute an argument for Fatalism given by a prominent philosopher that no one else had successfully refuted yet. It’s gathered together very well, with 2/3 of the “book” consisting of the previous essays necessary to understand the current state of Taylor’s argument for fatalism and its reception and failed refutations, until Wallace’s essays and a brief epilogue end the book.
This is probably just more evidence of me having a desire for academic work in my life, but I found this all RIVETING as well 😤 It made me miss the intensity of research projects and essay-writing in college, and having like 14 essays to read to understand the minutiae of very specified, dense, difficult philosophic arguments was soooooo so fun; I was worried that a lack of formal training in Philosophy would make it difficult or impossible to access, but only a basic level of formal logic is needed to understand what’s being argued here.
Also, Wallace’s argument is brilliant, extremely clearly presented, often very funny, and totally compelling, I think 🤷♂️ I definitely won’t use more space than I already have explaining Taylor’s argument for fatalism, its many responses, and Wallace’s (I think successful) refutation of the argument, but if anyone is curious about it then I’d highly recommend giving this a read (or messaging me for a TLDR recap of it, which I’d be happy to give :-)).
I’m going to formally end my Wallace read-through with a re-read of The Pale King, his final work, so stay tuned for that 😌
July 21, 2014
The whole thing is mental masturbation, but it's done with such skill that it makes it worthwhile. Plus it covers a topic that I've been doing a lot of thinking about lately, and it's good to see I'm not alone in obsessing over fun but useless questions like these. Three and a half stars.
June 21, 2011
This book is really two books, and the title is misleading. First, it is a philosophical inquiry into the concept/idea of Fatalism (an argument that what happens is all that can possibly happen. This argument subsumes Determinism and Predestination.) by Philosophy professors and then, the then student Wallace’s critique of their arguments in his unpublished senior thesis: “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” (1984-1985.) Second, it is an incomplete, biographical look into the life and mind and death of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008.
I took Logic in college some 40+ years ago and, believe it or not, was able to follow the “Fatalist” discussion. On page 97 of the book I wrote in the margin “Idiots All.” I think that was Wallace’s position, too, but he was too nice a person to say that right out. AND, his father was a Philosophy professor and his mother an English Prof. I did get lost midway through Wallace’s paper when he got into “A FORMAL DEVICE FOE REPRESENTING AND EXPLAINING THE TAYLOR INEQUIVALENCE: FEATURES AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTENSIONAL-PHYSICAL-MODALITY SYSTEM J.” A device Wallace devised to question the professional Philosophy professors position’s. In his (DFW) paper he combines his parents’ two Fields, English & Philosophy, to pretty much prove the esteemed professors – fools. He shows how they bloviate to excess under the guise of learn-ed discourse and misuse words to try to show how smart they are (and justify their salaries, life’s, etc. and so on.) Ironically, something some readers and critics of his accuse him of, and a self-criticism he struggled with himself. I think he was mocking his professors. And maybe unconsciously, or not unconsciously, going after Mom and Dad. It seems his entire life, he suffered from being “too smart for his own good.” And couldn’t come to grips with how his super intellect set him apart from people, even people he wanted to hold in high esteem and/or be close to – parents, teachers, coaches, girlfriends (?) and then doctors and psychologists. His disdain for The Authority, as well as his discomfort with that, is evidenced in much of his writing. (Read his story “Good Old Neon,” for an example of what I’m speaking of.) He was not depressed. He was not depressed. He was not depressed. You can see this in his early writing, how he developed his unique writing style from the Fields of Philosophy and English. How he combined the formal language and style of Logic with that of English and came out and up with strange abbreviations, acronyms, invented words, repetition, and strong, potent modifiers – all jumbled up with irony, imagination, and black humor to become simply— a fantastic story teller of fiction and non-fiction. In The Pale King, the novel he was working on when he ended his life, or “eliminated his map”; he wrote that the secret to life was being able to be at peace and comfortable with boredom – to be able to quiet the mind and focus on just that which is right in front of you. A thing he could never do. His mind was expansive— so open, so creative.
I really can’t recommend this book for anyone other than Logic/Philosophy students, writers, and Wallace fans. But I’m not sure of that. Reading this book made me angry, and depresses me. In some ways, Wallace’s story can be an argument for fatalism—the decision to kill oneself based on a belief with no proof—that there are no choices—no way out. But then, I’m more of a determinist. I can’t stop myself from thinking– All it would have taken was one really competent therapist, or one really smart friend –and David Foster Wallace would still be alive.
I took Logic in college some 40+ years ago and, believe it or not, was able to follow the “Fatalist” discussion. On page 97 of the book I wrote in the margin “Idiots All.” I think that was Wallace’s position, too, but he was too nice a person to say that right out. AND, his father was a Philosophy professor and his mother an English Prof. I did get lost midway through Wallace’s paper when he got into “A FORMAL DEVICE FOE REPRESENTING AND EXPLAINING THE TAYLOR INEQUIVALENCE: FEATURES AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTENSIONAL-PHYSICAL-MODALITY SYSTEM J.” A device Wallace devised to question the professional Philosophy professors position’s. In his (DFW) paper he combines his parents’ two Fields, English & Philosophy, to pretty much prove the esteemed professors – fools. He shows how they bloviate to excess under the guise of learn-ed discourse and misuse words to try to show how smart they are (and justify their salaries, life’s, etc. and so on.) Ironically, something some readers and critics of his accuse him of, and a self-criticism he struggled with himself. I think he was mocking his professors. And maybe unconsciously, or not unconsciously, going after Mom and Dad. It seems his entire life, he suffered from being “too smart for his own good.” And couldn’t come to grips with how his super intellect set him apart from people, even people he wanted to hold in high esteem and/or be close to – parents, teachers, coaches, girlfriends (?) and then doctors and psychologists. His disdain for The Authority, as well as his discomfort with that, is evidenced in much of his writing. (Read his story “Good Old Neon,” for an example of what I’m speaking of.) He was not depressed. He was not depressed. He was not depressed. You can see this in his early writing, how he developed his unique writing style from the Fields of Philosophy and English. How he combined the formal language and style of Logic with that of English and came out and up with strange abbreviations, acronyms, invented words, repetition, and strong, potent modifiers – all jumbled up with irony, imagination, and black humor to become simply— a fantastic story teller of fiction and non-fiction. In The Pale King, the novel he was working on when he ended his life, or “eliminated his map”; he wrote that the secret to life was being able to be at peace and comfortable with boredom – to be able to quiet the mind and focus on just that which is right in front of you. A thing he could never do. His mind was expansive— so open, so creative.
I really can’t recommend this book for anyone other than Logic/Philosophy students, writers, and Wallace fans. But I’m not sure of that. Reading this book made me angry, and depresses me. In some ways, Wallace’s story can be an argument for fatalism—the decision to kill oneself based on a belief with no proof—that there are no choices—no way out. But then, I’m more of a determinist. I can’t stop myself from thinking– All it would have taken was one really competent therapist, or one really smart friend –and David Foster Wallace would still be alive.
December 15, 2014
This collection of essays has a misleading title in my opinion, because more than the concept of Freedom and the self in David Foster Wallace, there are here some critical articles on his doctoral thesis in philosophy in which the author debunked the theory of Taylor on fatalism; the first essays discuss DFW's thesis, but I can not judge how well because it is too far out of my ability, while the following articles deepen some of his ideas, such as those on hedonism or irony. The last essays are more easily understood, but remain difficult parts.
Questa raccolta di saggi ha un titolo fuorviante perché piú che del concetto di Libertá in David Foster Wallace, ci sono degli articoli di critica alla sua tesi di dottorato in filosofia in cui l'autore smontava la teoria di Taylor sul fatalismo; i primi due saggi discutono proprio della tesi di D.F.W., ma non posso giudicare quanto bene perché é troppo al di fuori delle mie capacitá, mentre i successivi articoli approfondiscono alcune delle sue idee, come per esempio quelle sull'edonismo o sull'ironia. Gli ultimi saggi sono di piú facile comprensione, ma restano ostici.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW!
Questa raccolta di saggi ha un titolo fuorviante perché piú che del concetto di Libertá in David Foster Wallace, ci sono degli articoli di critica alla sua tesi di dottorato in filosofia in cui l'autore smontava la teoria di Taylor sul fatalismo; i primi due saggi discutono proprio della tesi di D.F.W., ma non posso giudicare quanto bene perché é troppo al di fuori delle mie capacitá, mentre i successivi articoli approfondiscono alcune delle sue idee, come per esempio quelle sull'edonismo o sull'ironia. Gli ultimi saggi sono di piú facile comprensione, ma restano ostici.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW!
December 13, 2016
Very stimulating book. As wildly impressed as I've been with DFW since I read his magnum opus Infinite Jest some years ago, I am -- hard to believe there's room still -- even wildlier impressed for having just read this slim compilation of essays, beginning with a brief paper that set a generation of philosophers scurrying to shore up modal logic against the persistently unyielding claim that some of its essential premises imply fatalism; ending with DFW's own highly persuasive counterargument -- this, in the form of a philosophy senior thesis he wrote in college at the same time that he was also writing an English senior thesis, namely, a novel that was eventually published as his first novel. Seriously amazing guy -- so much the more tragic that he checked out so young. I greatly enjoyed this book and the opportunity it offered me to think seriously about the relationship between language, thought, action, and reality. RIP DFW.
October 14, 2018
Being a fan of David Foster Wallace I was excited to see this new book. However, I soon realized I was in way over my head when I saw that this was a compilation of philosophy papers in addition to David Foster Wallace‘s final thesis in undergraduate philosophy. David’s voice is still there in and around his theories and formulas. Not any easy read if you never studied philosophy!
Read
September 18, 2025more or less impenetrable gibberish for academics only but grateful for it's publication for posterity, regardless
September 13, 2020
“I’m not a fatalist. But even if I were, what could I do about it”? – Emo Phillips
Say you’re standing on a diving board. Noted philosopher Richard Taylor, standing behind you in line, remarks: “I can make two statements about the near future. Statement 1 is that you jumped off the board. Statement 2 is that didn’t jump off the board. Only one of these statements is true. Therefore, you don’t really have any control over the future. And, oh, I can prove this to you using logical statements that you would never disagree with”.
Taylor made this argument in the mid-60’s. And while annoying several of his colleagues and spurring debate, it apparently was a mild enough problem in analytical philosophy to be ignored until an undergraduate named David Foster Wallace refuted it in his honors thesis two decades later.
Wallace’s refutation used abstract, formal tools common in analytical philosophy to prove that Taylor was confusing himself, which I take to be a not unusual problem for philosophers. Wallace would have pointed out to the Taylor at the diving board that the statements “It was the case that I couldn’t jump off the diving board” and “It cannot be the case that I did jump off the diving board” are two different statements. Taylor thought he was proving the former, while the logically (and linguistically) correct statement was the latter, which doesn’t make any claims about our fate.
Some bloke named James Ryerson spells all of this out in the first essay of the book, along with much more on Wallace. Ryerson’s essay is only the first 40 pages, and it was the only part of the book I could get through.
I found Ryerson’s essay to be worth the cost of the book, it’s fabulous. After dispatching with the subject of the book, Ryerson turns his attention to the other (much more famous) honors thesis that Wallace wrote simultaneously – his first novel, < i>Broom of the System. I remember finishing Broom years back, knowing that much of it had gone right over my head. Ryerson’s essay makes a fabulous coda for Broom, spelling out some of the critical associations Wallace was making between his characters and Early Wittgenstein philosophy. Ryerson goes on to compare Broom to Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Both were efforts to dramatize Wittgenstein’s philosophy, a project which Wallace realized he failed at, after reading Markson.
Why would someone want to dramatize a book like the Tractatus? Wallace (and I suppose others) found Early Wittgenstein to be a lonely, solipsistic perspective to hold of the world. Early Wittgenstein believed that any claims that don’t directly describe the experienced world are nonsensical and should be ignored. This includes statements about the “Cartesian” self, or at least it’s relation with the physical, experienced world. But there presumably is a “Cartesian” self, it’s the one doing the thinking, therefore a statement like “I am my world” (Tractatus 5.63) should be interpreted to mean that we’re trapped outside of the world we experience, because no sensible / meaningful statement could be made to connect them.
Ryerson doesn’t mention it, but Early Wittgenstein’s solipsistic conclusions seem to be already made by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason; that things “in themselves” in the world are unknowable to us, as is the transcendental ego that Wittgenstein also rejects. The only distinction I can see is W. reached this conclusion through formal language, while Kant was thinking phenomenologically.
But Wittgenstein is a much sexier philosopher than Kant, so I guess we give him the credit. Or maybe I just don’t get either of these floating brains.
July 10, 2019
Five stars! Fatalism: Are our present actions controlled by the future, as they are by the past? I "read" this one, but it really requires "study." (138)
". . . . if Taylor and the Fatalist want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics" (213). I am inclined to agree.
The answer would seem to be different for Christians, since time does not pass for the Christian God nor does time pass in Heaven (Paradiso).
I am 70. Mr. Wallace was a college-age student when he wrote his essay. I would be delighted to have a beer with who he was then.
"when these assumptions are granted, one can prove, Taylor argued, that certain actions are occasionally not within one's power, not just because of what has happened in the past, but also because of what will happen in the future" (70).
The "law of the excluded middle" is Taylor's first assumption. Taylor suggests that challenging this law offers the best hope for escaping fatalism. There is a "language" being used that I do not know. "(p)(p v -p)" (69). Is this logic?
"Preface" (vii) by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert
"Part I: The Background"
"Introduction: A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace" (1) by James Ryerson
"Part I: The Background",
". . . 'click' vs. the box that would not close" (p. 5, 14, 21)
Depression on p. 14, 16, 28 (suicide).
Time on p. 12, 13, 44, 47, 48.
p. 18.
an·tin·o·my
[anˈtinəmē]
NOUN
a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.
"The Limits of my Language mean the limits of my world" -- Wittgenstein (26)
"There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one's own head, in all its loneliness" (33).
"1 Fatalism: Richard Taylor" (41)
"A fatalist, in short, thinks of the future in the manner in which we all think of the past" (41).
"All that is needed, to restrict the powers that I imagine myself to have to do this or that, is that some condition essential to my doing it does not, did not or will not occur" (47-48).
"2 Professor Taylor on Fatalism:. John Turk Saunders" (53)
"3 Fatalism and Ability: Richard Taylor" (57)
"It is less obvious when one considers necessary conditions which are lacking in the future, as Saunders does" (58).
"4 Fatalism and Ability: Peter Makepeace" (61)
"5 Fatalism and Linguistic Reform: Jonn Turk Saunders" (65)
"6 Fatalism and Processor Taylor: Bruce Aune" (69)
"But if time cannot exist without change, then every temporal interval requires the existence of change--somewhere, somehow" (76).
"7 Taylor's Fatal Fallacy: Raziel Abelson" (79)
"In P2-P5, Taylor Systematically equivocates between the logical and causal senses of the modal terms 'necessary,' 'sufficient,' 'can,' 'power,' and 'efficacious' (80).
"8 A Note On Fatalism: Richard Taylor" (86)
"9 Tautology and Fatalism: Richard Sharvy" (89).
"Thus to say that the fatalist abolishes modal distinctions is simply say what a fatalist is--he is a person who abolishes modal distinctions" (90).
". . . . but I do not think that this tautologous sort of fatalism, i.e., the assertion that we lack the power to perform logically incompatible acts, can seriously be considered to be any limitation of our freedom" (91).
"10 Fatalistic Arguments: Steven Can" (93).
"It is in this sense, for instance, that oxygen is necessary for human life. No man can live without oxygen, although it is not logically impossible to do so" (94). This logically vs. not logically seems reminiscent of Hume's relations of ideas and matters of fact (see p. 147), or Kant's analytic and synthetic statements.
"11 Comment: Richard Taylor" (107)
"Now I have little inclination to accept this implication of my argument that is, to be a fatalist" (108).
"12 Fatalism and Ordinary Language: John Turk Saunders" (111)
"Thus we prove that, if language is used in its ordinary ways, which involves PF's being a synthetic statement, then PF is false" (114). I would argue that PF is an analytic statement, and that Saunder's argument is not responsive to Taylor's claims.
I do not see much to p. 116 & 117 other than that Saunders does not like Taylor's conclusion.
"Fallacies in Taylor's'Fatalism': Charles D. Brown" (127)
"Part II: The Essay" (133)
"14 Reviewing the Fatalist Conversation" (135)
a·leth·ic
/əˈleTHik,əˈlē-/
Learn to pronounce
adjectivePHILOSOPHY
denoting modalities of truth, such as necessity, contingency, or impossibility.
"II. The Taylor Literature: Some Prominent Replies to Taylor, and Why They Haven't Worked Very Well" (150).
"III. Introduction to the Taylor Inequivalence" (159).
"IV. Argument for the Taylor Inequivalence" (168).
. . . . this essay's analysis of physical modality will understand physical possibility in terms of a relation between physically compatible situations through time, joined in the appropriate causal relations" (180).
"VI. Further Applications of System J to Analyses of Problems Involving Physical Modality and Time" (198).
"One advantage of system J and the tools of analysis it affords us is that we can use them to demonstrate the non-validity of the fatalism-about-the-future argument, while at the same time showing easily that Taylor's past-fatalism argument goes through perfectly" (199).
VII. Conclusions for the Modern Fatalistic Argument (210).
"A determinist is simply, if he is consistent, a fatalist about everything; . . . . that it is never up to any man what he does or what he becomes, and that nothing can ever happen, except what does in fact happen" (212).
"Taylor's claim was never really that fatalism was actually 'true,' only that it was forced upon us by proof from certain basic logical and semantics principles. This essay's semantic analysis has shown that Taylor's proof doesn't 'force' fatalism on us at all" (212).
"Part 3: Epilogue" (217)
"16 David Foster Wallace As Student: A Memoir: Jay Garfield" (219)
I was on a flight from Durham to Salt Lake City, and I wept.
People
Aristotle, p. viii, 6, 38, 49, 142.
Augustine, p. 6, 85.
Boethius, p. 6, 85, 86.
Chrysippus, p. 157.
Derrida, p. 20.
Descartes, p. 9, 25.
Garfield, p. 7.
Hobbs, p. 153.
Hume, p. 147.
Kant, p. 9.
Kripke, Saul, p. 137.
Leibinitz, p. 21.
Malcom, Norman, p. 4.
Montague, Richard, p. 137
Plato, p. 3.
Rorty, p. 18.
Russell, p. 3.
Sarte, p. 21.
Spinoza, p. 107.
Taylor, p. 5-7.
Voltaire, p. 21.
William of Occkam, p. 6.
Wittgenstein, p. 3, 4, 19, 20, 24-33.
Books
Everything and more: a brief history of infinity by David Foster Wallace on p. 17.
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson on p. 22, 23, 27.
". . . . if Taylor and the Fatalist want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics" (213). I am inclined to agree.
The answer would seem to be different for Christians, since time does not pass for the Christian God nor does time pass in Heaven (Paradiso).
I am 70. Mr. Wallace was a college-age student when he wrote his essay. I would be delighted to have a beer with who he was then.
"when these assumptions are granted, one can prove, Taylor argued, that certain actions are occasionally not within one's power, not just because of what has happened in the past, but also because of what will happen in the future" (70).
The "law of the excluded middle" is Taylor's first assumption. Taylor suggests that challenging this law offers the best hope for escaping fatalism. There is a "language" being used that I do not know. "(p)(p v -p)" (69). Is this logic?
"Preface" (vii) by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert
"Part I: The Background"
"Introduction: A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace" (1) by James Ryerson
"Part I: The Background",
". . . 'click' vs. the box that would not close" (p. 5, 14, 21)
Depression on p. 14, 16, 28 (suicide).
Time on p. 12, 13, 44, 47, 48.
p. 18.
an·tin·o·my
[anˈtinəmē]
NOUN
a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.
"The Limits of my Language mean the limits of my world" -- Wittgenstein (26)
"There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one's own head, in all its loneliness" (33).
"1 Fatalism: Richard Taylor" (41)
"A fatalist, in short, thinks of the future in the manner in which we all think of the past" (41).
"All that is needed, to restrict the powers that I imagine myself to have to do this or that, is that some condition essential to my doing it does not, did not or will not occur" (47-48).
"2 Professor Taylor on Fatalism:. John Turk Saunders" (53)
"3 Fatalism and Ability: Richard Taylor" (57)
"It is less obvious when one considers necessary conditions which are lacking in the future, as Saunders does" (58).
"4 Fatalism and Ability: Peter Makepeace" (61)
"5 Fatalism and Linguistic Reform: Jonn Turk Saunders" (65)
"6 Fatalism and Processor Taylor: Bruce Aune" (69)
"But if time cannot exist without change, then every temporal interval requires the existence of change--somewhere, somehow" (76).
"7 Taylor's Fatal Fallacy: Raziel Abelson" (79)
"In P2-P5, Taylor Systematically equivocates between the logical and causal senses of the modal terms 'necessary,' 'sufficient,' 'can,' 'power,' and 'efficacious' (80).
"8 A Note On Fatalism: Richard Taylor" (86)
"9 Tautology and Fatalism: Richard Sharvy" (89).
"Thus to say that the fatalist abolishes modal distinctions is simply say what a fatalist is--he is a person who abolishes modal distinctions" (90).
". . . . but I do not think that this tautologous sort of fatalism, i.e., the assertion that we lack the power to perform logically incompatible acts, can seriously be considered to be any limitation of our freedom" (91).
"10 Fatalistic Arguments: Steven Can" (93).
"It is in this sense, for instance, that oxygen is necessary for human life. No man can live without oxygen, although it is not logically impossible to do so" (94). This logically vs. not logically seems reminiscent of Hume's relations of ideas and matters of fact (see p. 147), or Kant's analytic and synthetic statements.
"11 Comment: Richard Taylor" (107)
"Now I have little inclination to accept this implication of my argument that is, to be a fatalist" (108).
"12 Fatalism and Ordinary Language: John Turk Saunders" (111)
"Thus we prove that, if language is used in its ordinary ways, which involves PF's being a synthetic statement, then PF is false" (114). I would argue that PF is an analytic statement, and that Saunder's argument is not responsive to Taylor's claims.
I do not see much to p. 116 & 117 other than that Saunders does not like Taylor's conclusion.
"Fallacies in Taylor's'Fatalism': Charles D. Brown" (127)
"Part II: The Essay" (133)
"14 Reviewing the Fatalist Conversation" (135)
a·leth·ic
/əˈleTHik,əˈlē-/
Learn to pronounce
adjectivePHILOSOPHY
denoting modalities of truth, such as necessity, contingency, or impossibility.
"II. The Taylor Literature: Some Prominent Replies to Taylor, and Why They Haven't Worked Very Well" (150).
"III. Introduction to the Taylor Inequivalence" (159).
"IV. Argument for the Taylor Inequivalence" (168).
. . . . this essay's analysis of physical modality will understand physical possibility in terms of a relation between physically compatible situations through time, joined in the appropriate causal relations" (180).
"VI. Further Applications of System J to Analyses of Problems Involving Physical Modality and Time" (198).
"One advantage of system J and the tools of analysis it affords us is that we can use them to demonstrate the non-validity of the fatalism-about-the-future argument, while at the same time showing easily that Taylor's past-fatalism argument goes through perfectly" (199).
VII. Conclusions for the Modern Fatalistic Argument (210).
"A determinist is simply, if he is consistent, a fatalist about everything; . . . . that it is never up to any man what he does or what he becomes, and that nothing can ever happen, except what does in fact happen" (212).
"Taylor's claim was never really that fatalism was actually 'true,' only that it was forced upon us by proof from certain basic logical and semantics principles. This essay's semantic analysis has shown that Taylor's proof doesn't 'force' fatalism on us at all" (212).
"Part 3: Epilogue" (217)
"16 David Foster Wallace As Student: A Memoir: Jay Garfield" (219)
I was on a flight from Durham to Salt Lake City, and I wept.
People
Aristotle, p. viii, 6, 38, 49, 142.
Augustine, p. 6, 85.
Boethius, p. 6, 85, 86.
Chrysippus, p. 157.
Derrida, p. 20.
Descartes, p. 9, 25.
Garfield, p. 7.
Hobbs, p. 153.
Hume, p. 147.
Kant, p. 9.
Kripke, Saul, p. 137.
Leibinitz, p. 21.
Malcom, Norman, p. 4.
Montague, Richard, p. 137
Plato, p. 3.
Rorty, p. 18.
Russell, p. 3.
Sarte, p. 21.
Spinoza, p. 107.
Taylor, p. 5-7.
Voltaire, p. 21.
William of Occkam, p. 6.
Wittgenstein, p. 3, 4, 19, 20, 24-33.
Books
Everything and more: a brief history of infinity by David Foster Wallace on p. 17.
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson on p. 22, 23, 27.
January 20, 2011
This is a well constructed book. One might be forgiven wondering whether the publication of DFW's undergrad philosophy thesis is anything other than an attempt to wring a bit of money out of the name. ("Think we can fool some people into buying a book on modal logic since it's got David Foster Wallace's name on it?") That's not what this is.
At first I was tempted, I'll admit, to simply skip straight to Wallace's work, but I was seduced by the inclusion of various papers that Wallace read in preparation for his project. They are rather readable, though there were definitely times I was glad had some familiarity with symbolic logic. Having read the background, I was able to enjoy Wallace's work much more deeply, and to shake my head with better considered amazement at his level even as an undergraduate. This was actual theoretical movement forward, helping to settle arguments that had been rattling around for years. And amidst the heavy modal logic going there are various recognizably clever and mischievous DFW touches.
Even if you don't end up too jazzed about the modal logic, the opening essay "A Head that Throbbed Heartlike" and the closing remembrance from DFW's advisor for that senior thesis make this book well worth the price.
After reading this, it is also true that I am both grateful that DFW chose to pursue his project in fiction and convinced that he was in fact continuing a philosophical project as he did so.
At first I was tempted, I'll admit, to simply skip straight to Wallace's work, but I was seduced by the inclusion of various papers that Wallace read in preparation for his project. They are rather readable, though there were definitely times I was glad had some familiarity with symbolic logic. Having read the background, I was able to enjoy Wallace's work much more deeply, and to shake my head with better considered amazement at his level even as an undergraduate. This was actual theoretical movement forward, helping to settle arguments that had been rattling around for years. And amidst the heavy modal logic going there are various recognizably clever and mischievous DFW touches.
Even if you don't end up too jazzed about the modal logic, the opening essay "A Head that Throbbed Heartlike" and the closing remembrance from DFW's advisor for that senior thesis make this book well worth the price.
After reading this, it is also true that I am both grateful that DFW chose to pursue his project in fiction and convinced that he was in fact continuing a philosophical project as he did so.
March 29, 2012
Upon further review of my previous review (which was blank) of the DFW book in question, I remember now giving the book one star because I was led to believe the goodreads rating system, which one star meant I did not like the book, which was completely true. But, in all honesty, I did not like the book mostly because I could not understand it. And besides not understanding it, I was having no fun while reading it. Much of the French, Italian, and local semi-contemporary philosophy I read I do not understand either, but I love reading it. It is fun for me reading Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, and Alphonso Lingis. And every now and then I get something happening to me while reading it which can only be explained as a sort of revelation, a good idea, or perhaps an inspiration. So, to be fair, the book of DFW's might have been great, but it was lost on me the reader. Just wanting to be honest with all of you here. I looked at some of these other reviews of the same book and realize I am so very very far out of my league of expertise.
August 20, 2017
This was an interesting little book. Ostensibly I bought it to complete my collection of DFW's works, not because I was particularly energized by physical modalities or fatalism. And what I got here was a great package that included both biographical (Ryerson's intro. is a more complete bio. of DFW's early life than even Max provides) and academic context (all the relevant publications on fatalism starting with Taylor's infamous article) that makes the material provided by Wallace far more accessible than it otherwise would have been. That said, without the requisite training in formal logic, I was left a little bewildered by the content of Wallace's contribution (sort of like the feeling of reading Everything and More). But, also like Everything and More, it wasn't totally inscrutable, and his claim about the relativity of physical modalities was particularly apt. My guess is that this will appeal pretty much exclusively to hardcore DFW fans for whom I'll say it's worth it and will, as always, leave you wanting more.
December 5, 2016
"Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will" or as it should be known as "When Philosophers Attack (Each Other)" is thoroughly and utterly engaging. It is thrilling to be able to start from one premise, Taylor's infamous "Fatalism and Ability", and read the succession of philosophers applying philosophical inquiry and challenging each other to attempt to define the concept of free will and the hope that underlies that very concept -- because that is what this collection really is. Its arrival at Wallace's measured analysis of free will, and its relation to what it means to be genuine and real is so painfully beautiful in its want of truth and authenticity.
The only reason this book didn't get full marks is entirely due to my own intellectual inadequecies. Hard, logical philosophy (i.e. Rule 1: "[{Tnp}]w=1 iff[{p}]w,tn=1") has always been difficult for me to grapple with therefore it's impossible for me to mark this as perfect if I can't fully digest all its material.
The only reason this book didn't get full marks is entirely due to my own intellectual inadequecies. Hard, logical philosophy (i.e. Rule 1: "[{Tnp}]w=1 iff[{p}]w,tn=1") has always been difficult for me to grapple with therefore it's impossible for me to mark this as perfect if I can't fully digest all its material.
January 9, 2014
This is a book probably best left to those who are a) interested in all things DFW, and/or b) into highly technical philosophical writing. I am mostly of the former but have a little experience with the latter - not nearly enough though to keep up with some of DFW's essay (not to mention the others).
What was very interesting to me though was the backstory on Richard Taylor's essay on Fatalism and the resulting arguments and defenses leading up to DFW's essay. Also, it's amazing to think that while DFW was writing this as his undergrad thesis in Philosophy, he was also writing his thesis for English which turned out to be his first novel, "Broom of the System." Compared to DFW, we were all slackers in college.
What was very interesting to me though was the backstory on Richard Taylor's essay on Fatalism and the resulting arguments and defenses leading up to DFW's essay. Also, it's amazing to think that while DFW was writing this as his undergrad thesis in Philosophy, he was also writing his thesis for English which turned out to be his first novel, "Broom of the System." Compared to DFW, we were all slackers in college.
December 20, 2016
This is basically a sequel to 'Everything And More' to me because it a. continues to prove that David Foster Wallace is a genius beyond the bounds of fiction literature, into mathematics and philosophy b. and in that it's a book that I maybe understand 10% of it, but I respect its level of thinking. I mean, I can't entirely connect with the book because I really don't care that much about philosophy (and definitely not to the astronomical levels that Wallace did) so these questions posed and the fighting back on theories by Wallace just seem pointless to me in the breaking down of these phrases into their literal and metaphysical parts just doesn't do too much to engage me, although I do see how it can be fascinating and all encompassing to others.
March 23, 2020
Not just DFW’s philosophy thesis, this book also contains a wealth of other essays, including the original essay his thesis set out to disprove, as well as myriad other arguments for and against that fatalism. I went into this expecting something as dense and bland as Everything and More, but was pleasantly surprised by the readability of both DFW’s thesis and the supporting materials. A first spark from a true literary and philosophical genius.
November 3, 2011
"A life is words and nothing else."
"The world is all that is the case."
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
"The only events which it is within one's power to produce are those which occur."
"What I do is necessary, what I do not do is impossible."
"Every truth is a necessity and every falsehood an impossibility."
"The world is all that is the case."
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
"The only events which it is within one's power to produce are those which occur."
"What I do is necessary, what I do not do is impossible."
"Every truth is a necessity and every falsehood an impossibility."
July 28, 2017
Ho-ly-sh-it, I love D.F.W. academically. The cheekiest of bastards. A loving editor scraped this thesis from the ashes of time, gave wonderful framing subtexts and summaries, and even included the text the thesis is responding to. If anybody wants to delve into deep philosophy responses, here's a wonderful point of entry.
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