Wittgenstein's Games (A. C. Grayling)

Professor A. C. Grayling discusses the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the intellectual context surrounding his life and work. Note, the audio has been slightly improved. I increased the volume and tried to reduce some of the cell phone interference that occasionally shows up. In any case, the talk was given by professor A. C. Grayling in 2016 at the University of Cambridge.

#philosophy #wittgenstein

[languagegame]

more A.C. GRAYLING lectures too, please... i very much enjoy listening to this speaker thusly... indeed.

[ludwigwittgenstein]

44:10 "...and at that time homosexuality wasn't wildly appreciated" What an extraordinary and insightful statement. Ha, ha, ha....lmbo 😀😀😀

[jon]

Extremely lucid, eloquent and illuminating lecture. While I understood the significance of later Wittgenstein, I had struggled with understanding why the Tractatus was important until i listened to this lecture, which succinctly clarifies so much.

[charlesgrimshaw]

Thank you so much - very very helpful for me in understanding this brilliant thinker!

[michaelcollins]

Brilliant! A tour de force through the complexities of Wittgenstein, thank you.

[tristanreynolds]

Is it just me or did he not really talk about the rule following paradox? It's like he mentions it and then never finishes

[anthonystrefwick]

Ontological slums perhaps are result of being able to say ( by mathematical convention) "...quantify over X - subs- i , for each index "i"..." . Which runs to infinity in a very precise way without the discipline of identifying any indexed object - qua-referent .But the ideas of defined sets, counting and cardinality won't go away even if they need to be regarded as auxilliaries or theoretical background, indeed for their value alone as instruments or objects of pure knowledge ?.For what little my own views are worth I suggest that Wittgenstein broke of into his unique effusions of free thinking not only in view of the foregoing, but to avoid driving into the morass of formalized thinking education and work practices which we in fact have done...

[languagegame]

more WITTGENSTEIN, pleaszzze... gimmegimmemoremore.

[markantrobus]

Philosophers give the appearance of dealing with abstruse matters when in fact they are quite simple things couched in difficult language. The language is difficult because the subject matter refuses to yield that easily to the type of seeing and thinking in such an approach. Wittgenstein was in a sense a parody of this while underneath he was a pure mystic.

[kodfkdleepd]

Mathematicians have had a solid structure of language and just about anything else since the 50's.

[Three-Chord-Trick]

Can someone explain why everyone thinks Wittgenstein was so bleedin' clever? 😲 I've always thought he was doing, in his later phase, no more than paraphrasing Protagoras and the other Sophists (or even Berkeley). And in his first phase he was reviving the enterprise of the early Socrates/Plato. 🤔 What do "all" rivers have in common? Or flames? Or human beings?

[evinnra]

That was an excellent presentation, clear and concise to the extent that now I can pinpoint where exactly did XXth century philosophy 'run off the tracks'. The claim that meaning exists only and exclusively as the outcome of language games is just wrong. The same way how concepts can form in the mind even without language, the concept of meaning can and does emerge as well. Babies form concepts of good, bad, light, dark, etc. way before they use or even silently understand words. Of course this is not to say that language has no influence on concept use later but initially concepts must be formed without language. If our goal is to be precise about how the human epistemological progress works, we can not build our understanding on purely what is accessible for scientific scrutiny yet only half true.

[misterprogressive]

Its too long. It could have been shortened to 15 minutes.

[damianbylightning]

Youtube censors so much and that is distressing.
Youtube doesn't censor this video and that is also distressing.
I will say that Professor Grayling does have great hair - but he is a lousy public intellectual. Sadly most PIs are pathetic now.
They ache to conform and want us all to conform too.
We're breeding a strange bunch of intellectuals now.