h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I too was judging Descartes's project on its finished state, not its starting point. And he is a good read, and a brilliant mathematician (I loved co-ordinate geometry at first sight) and a challenging philosopher. May we all crash and burn so elegantly, when our time arrives.

So am I off the hook about attacking his personality?

I like Descartes, until he starts waffling on about clear and distinct, and I don't think much of his version of the ontological argument.

Descartes' *big* error was to doubt representation and reality, and then to use the claim that some ideas have more "representational reality" than others to justify his idea of God, which he then uses to justify representational reality...

Noggin

Right on Noggin and the rest of you guys. 'Clear and distinct' and 'the truth is manifest' don't sit well with methodological doubt. And the idea of God argument is what I was thinking of earlier. Still, the guy was a genius: maths, optics etc and a military man to boot. If someone is to go wrong, philosophy is, perhaps, the most excusable area!

toxx

There must be Somebody's Law to the effect that in stating any great truth, the one thing guaranteed is that you get it wrong.

If not, I offer Recumbentman's Law. Its upshot is that truth is greater than language. Which is unstateable, as language does not encompass "greater than language".

RMan,

You may have been being ironic on purpose and I'm just being a bit slow, but isn't it a great truth that when stating a great truth the one guaranteed thing is that one gets it wrong? In which case it falls foul of itself.

Unless it's a "Great Truth", capital letters needed, one of those sweeping generalizations or an impossibly obscure metaphysical statement, of course.

I'm not sure if it has the full force of a Law, but it certainly happens quite a lot.

Noggin

It's as good a law as most of 'em dammit!

RMan. As a law, if does have a flavour of Godel about it. Tarski, too.

toxx

That's the kind of thing: incompleteness, undecidability . . . as Tarski has rather less epigrammatically said, "the solution of the decision problem in its most general form is negative".

The young Wittgenstein said "anyone who understands what I am saying will recognise that it is nonsense". The older Wittgenstein said "the appearance of profundity is an illusion". Or words to that effect.

Which reminds me -- there is a site which gives humorous accounts of the fate of various philosophers. E.g. Wittgenstein -- "became the late Wittgenstein". An enormous and witty list. Will I ever find it again?

Why here it is: http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/DeathIndex.html

Google, you are a wonder!

Rman. Agree with you about Google. It's probably the most powerful informational source that has ever existed in the universe - well, certainly the planet, anyway. I have long suspected that not only 'truth' but also 'justification' is a word in a metalanguage. Apols to Tarski, old buddy.

toxx

A morbid seasonal thought:

What has Christ to do with Christmas trees?
A younger, more attractive Socrates
Who, rather than hemlock, took a death on wood
As his earthly reward for being good

RMan. I thought Christmas was supposed to be about the *birth* of Jesus. Anyway, I celebrate Yule which is all about logs and stuff. Yule and Solstice are the real festival before it was ripped off by Christianity.

Hey, a cool yule to all our readers.

toxx.

Sure. Happy Saturnalia.

First philosopher: "What do you mean?"
Second philosopher: "What do you mean, what do you mean?"

Ouch! Touché.

A more or less true story from the good old days of Trinity College Dublin, when it had endearingly eccentric professors, such as the philosopher La Touche Godfrey, in whose lecture a cat once crapped.

( His expression was much more succinct than the version necessitated by the limerick form, below.)

A philosopher, Godfrey, La Touche
Observed a cat crap, said, "How louche...
Ah well, so that's that,
I suppose cats will cat."
And presumably pooches will pooch!

<>

Sounds like a very good law to me. Apart from its succinct and epigrammatic "upshot," what is its full expression? Oblige us, O Recumbent one.

Meanwhile, might not Lud Witt have said that what we can know is defined by our language? So where does that leave our intuitions of greater-than-language truths? They are no less real ( as Lud Witt acknowledges ) for being inexpressible, ( "...whereof we cannot speak..."etc.) Or where would great poetry and drama be? And indeed music, perhaps our most profound language, whose great truths can only be intuited, felt, experienced, but never satisfactorily expressed through the logical restraints of mere words?

Is it not a delicious irony that music such as J.S.Bach's "Art of Fugue," which adheres to extraordinarily exacting logical rules of counterpoint succeeds in expressing a "truth" which is utterly beyond the logic of words? What exactly that truth is, I cannot say, other than that I feel it keenly whenever I listen to the "A of F."

...thereof, perforce, I must be silent...

Truth resides in the language of silence, the ultimate goal of all speech and music.( Chaiwallah.)