Ludwig Wittgenstein

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

He wrote two major works: The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. They're beautiful, austere books showing intellectual reasoning in all its basic purity and simplicity.

The Tractatus explores the relationship between language and the world, facts and propositions, reality and pictures. The first part of the Tractatus served as a foundation for the project of logical positivists and logical atomists who wanted to spell out all of reality in the form of true and false propositions bearing logical relationships to one another; to mathematicize all existence. But the Tractatus itself rejects such a project, saying "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."

By the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein has come to see language as even more radically limited. He argues that propositions' meaning is dependent on the situation in which they are used, the "language-game". Language is not seperate from the world, as the Tractatus had argued; it is meaningful only by virtue its use in the world of act and circumstance.

"Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silent."

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"The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is."

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"What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within."

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"How do we know that all our philosophical problems are not just bewitchment by language?"