>KH:
> >Well, the Tractatus was in the empiricist >tradition and combined that
>with
> >the propositional logic developed by Russell >and Whitehead among others.
> >But it is hardly any inheritance of Russell. The >Tractatus influenced
> >Russell as I understand the matter
Russell wrote a moving introduction to it; W told him that he understood nothing. Thee is nothing "empiricist" about the T, and not only because of the mysticism that Charles comments on ("That whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent"; it's beautiful in German: Wovon man nicht schrechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen."), but because it is high metaphysics. "Facts" and "picturing," all sorts of strange stuff. You mustn't think that just because it uses(and develops) math logic that it is empiricist; it was the logical positivists who put Hume together with Frege.
>
>When Russell and Wittgenstein were hot on the topic, the term 'logical
>atomism' was used a lot.
>Russell (though not an empirical scientist) made appeal to 'direct
>acquaintance' for getting at the 'atomic units' of meaning.
Whatever made anything that acquaibtance has anything to do with empirical science?
>
>Some of this was passed on to the logical positivist movement. The LPs saw
>the Tractatus, at least some of it, as their starting point.
More Kant than W, as Michael Friedman has shown.
Wittgenstein
>did maintain contact with some of the LPs and the Vienna Circle(especially
>Neurath and Waismann, though the names Carnap and Ayer are more famous
>now),
>so there must have been some mutual understanding there.
I doubt it. The LPs shared some preoccupations with W, but none of his obsessions. He thought their work misguided and dull.
>
>If you take the time to read the Tractatus (the much later work,
>Philosophical Investigations is read much more), you see that it is a far
>more mystical and transcendental work than anything Russell or the VC were
>capable of. Even German-speakers who didn't understand that approach to
>philosophy and logic, upon reading it in German, found its use of the
>language breathtaking and groundbreaking (as groundbreaking as Musil, a
>fiction writer).
It is a literary masterpiece. It's German _glows_.
>
>I believe the post-modern episteme finds in Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard
>and Nietzsche, a far more amenable mind than either Russell or Popper.
Well, sure, though pomo irony finds the mysticism of W and K,w ho influended him, sort of quaint and silly.
And
>Feyerabend is a true post-modern.
>
Oh, no. He's a hard boiled realist (for a relativist), really serious about science, about which he knows a lot--he'd have utter contempt for the Social Text crowd and would never have fallen for a second for the Sokol hoax; he's serious about politics; he writes gorgeously; and while capable of brilliant sarcarism, he has no irony at all.
jks
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