On Mon, 4 Feb 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > OK lets duke it out. Are you a Popperite of a Wickstensteinian? It seems to > > me that although the authors felt the tug of Wickstenstein ' charisma, that > Popper was the more influential of the two in the general world and that this > is exactly as each would have it.
That's sort of the feeling I got from the book, too. For me, personally, I'm really not sure. My instinct is to agree with Popper, to say that there really are philosophical problems (morality, metaphysics, etc.). On the other hand (don't ya love this about me? I always have two or three or four hands for any argument) --- On the other hand, charisma aside, I can imagine a person making an argument that all philosophy regarding morality, for instance, simply involves the codification of social norms into a metaphysical structure with invariably fails. I haven't read enough of Popper or Wittgenstein to do anything more than speculate, but I wonder if a synthesis or reconciliation are possible? For instance, if science is grounded in the falsifiability of theories, would it make sense to restrict philosophy to those spheres in which it can be verified in some way? W. might have been aiming at something like this when he insists that philosophy is about the puzzles created by language. If one restricts philosophy to a technical study of language, something that (at first glance, anyway) is more tangible and real than, say, a given moral imperative, then perhaps one takes a big step towards making philosophy more of a science. Sort of. Maybe. The problem with doing that is that you take a bunch of human problems, which are quite real IMO, and deprive them of a discipline devoted to their study. Part of Popper's project was to prove that we can meaningfully say that Nazis are bad, IIRC. Seems obvious, of course, but if one accepts an argument that philosophy must remain silent on such matters, then suddenly it becomes very hard to talk about such things at all except in religious terms. That seems like abandoning one's post, to me. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
