On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:08 PM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:59 PM, ravi <[email protected]> wrote:
A more coherent and less oedipal Wittgenstein might have come close,
oh, you mean Anscombe, then? ;-)
;-) I must confess I don't know much Anscombe other than that she
translated Wittgenstein, was one of his favourites, and is a
significant philosopher in her own right (I have not read "Intention"
or anything else).
ps - i still say hegel, but i'll give russell #2. :)
I don't know... I tried reading Hegel a long time ago and it seemed to
be just the sort of impenetrable stuff that the poor
deconstructionists and pomos were to get vilified for a couple of
centuries later! Of course Aristotle's syllogisms, some of Boole's
expressions, all of Kant's writing (including what are considered his
important contributions to logic), absent symbolic expression, are
often equally (and in hindsight, unnecessarily) dense. At least with
Foucault or Heidegger I get the occasional (false, as critics would
claim) sense of gaining a valuable insight ;-).
When I read Russell I thought all that had to be said in analytical
philosophy had been said pretty well (though I agree with George
Steiner that Russell's History of Western Philosophy is a "vulgar
book" -- quoting from memory), expressed and solved in the most
beautiful atomic fashion (that might also mean that Hegel was so
successful that those who stood on his shoulders could entirely mask
him from later readers). If a philosopher's task (and I believe it is
one of his or her primary tasks) is to pave the way for clear
thinking, I cannot imagine a single other human being who can even
closely approach Russell.
In a separate poll, Leiter also polled his readership on which non-
philosopher being treated as if he/she were one by the media pissed
them off the most: the winner by an easy margin: Ayn Rand, who came in
at 60+%, beating out Derrida and Leo Strauss. I am surprised Deepak
Chopra didn't make the list ;-). Or Dubya's favourite, JC!!
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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