All my Words are Silent

6 thoughts on “”

1. If you build it, they will come. 🙂

   March 2, 2015 at 10:49 am

2. However, what you can or cannot speak of is not fixed. Language and thought are extensible, so it may be possible in some cases to speak of things that could not be expressed before. That is how language came about (and I think that might be one of the things Wittgenstein might have understood in the time separating the Tractatus from the Philosophical Investigations).

   March 2, 2015 at 3:11 pm

3. Maybe the job of the philosopher could even be defined as extending the language and the expressive power of thought. Analytical philosophers, in their attempt to reduce everything to one fixed formal system, might be on the completely wrong track then.

   March 2, 2015 at 3:36 pm

4. Agreed :). In fact, I have come to think of the closing sections of the Tractatus as Witt indicating that if you accept or operate within a system of logic or mathematics or the sciences or a specific discipline and its definitions, terms, practices, assumptions…then you must only speak within that system…but there is so much more for us to address as humans…

   March 4, 2015 at 8:29 am

5. And I SO so so agree with this…in the manner of Blanchot, Deleuze / Guattari, Derrida, etc –

   March 4, 2015 at 8:30 am

6. Plus, there actually is always the possibility to extend the system. The extended system might in turn be a formal one, but it will again be incomplete. And there is no formal system that includes all these extensions and processes of extension, i.e. a formal bird’s eye view on the mind is not possible. Creativity is this ability to step out of the current system and there is no complete formal theory to describe this. Thought processes are always different. It is possible to describe each single one exactly, but there is no exact and exlicit formal theory about all of them.

   March 4, 2015 at 11:35 am