r0b’s Reviews > Philosophical Analysis: It's Development Between the Two World Wars > Status Update

‘...an article [Philosophical Perplexity] by Wisdom was the first which throughout embodied the new philosophical outlook, it is something of a landmark in the history of philosophy...it is the first manifesto of a new way of doing philosophy. In philosophical method it is far more similar to present-day work than to anything which has preceded it.’

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~francisp/N...

‘The second misunderstanding of language to be considered is the view that language had the same characteristic as a logical calculus, with constants replacing variables....Thus Russell said of Principia Mathematica:”It is a language which has only syntax and no vocabulary whatsoever. Barring the omission of a vocabulary I maintain that it is quite a nice language....’

What a maroon! :/

‘So in the end the purification of the language led to something which was admitted to be but doubtfully obtainable in practice and in theory could not be used for any communication. The difficulty is to know why such an oddity should be called a language at all, and what to do with it when one has got it.’

‘Philosophical method can be taught as well, or better, by example as by precept.’

Quoting Wittgenstein:

‘“The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality coordinated with it.”

But this appears to be the cold comfort of being consoled for having no friends by the fact that I have no transcendental ego either.’

For an analytical philosopher this guy (Urmson) can be quite funny!

Quoting Wittgenstein:
‘“In fact what solipsism intends is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but shows itself....
The world and life are one.
I am my world (the microcosm).”
It is true that Wittgenstein went on:
“The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an....

...satisfactorily clothed in the vocabulary of existing languages. The claim that analysis of statements into its forms would reveal the structure of the world had therefore to be looked upon with the greatest suspicion. Logical positivism was free from at least this sort of difficulty.’

[a few pages of semi-intelligible (to me) arguments later and then:

‘Thus in the discovery of new logical calculi and in the discovery of comparatively simple statements of ordinary language which resisted a truth-functional interpretation we have grounds for doubting whether the calculus of Principia has any right to be regarded as the one and only skeleton of a perfect language, and even whether it could be...

...a perfect language into which ordinary language could be translated since it differed only in doing the same kind of thing in a less clear, efficient, and explicit way.”

Whoa, now that’s a sentence!

‘It will be recalled that the metaphysics of logical atomism is, in effect, an account of what the structure of the world must be, granted that the symbolic calculus of Principia Mathematica, the great logical system of Whitehead and Russell, can be regarded as in principle, if not in every detail, as the skeleton of the one perfect language, lacking only the flesh constituted by a vocabulary,..