Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophy of Language 4)

He's sharp. He's cute. He's Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of modern philosophy!

In this video we look at his Tractatus, his first major work and only one to be published in his lifetime. Basically we could say that he wanted - just like Bertrand Russell - to find out how our thoughts relate to reality. In an attempt to answer this question he put forth the "Picture Theory of Language".

I try to give an easily approachable lecture that serves as an introduction to Tractatus. In the second part of the video I examine the task of his logical analysis and portray how exactly he imagined science to construct true sentences of the world by deriving at the so-called "simple objects", the elementary particles of reality. A true sentence, in this view, would be the stated relation between signs for those particles, that would reflect their relation in reality.

The logical empiricists, also known as the "Vienna circle", took the ideas of Tractatus and constructed a very interesting variation of Wittgenstein's ideas, that I will present in the next lecture - on the dispute between Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger.

Additional tags: Analytic philosophy, Metaphysics, Logical analysis, Philosophical Investigation, Infinite reduction, Philosophy of Science.

[MKPandaMan]

This is the best channel I have found in a long time... Good shit!

[Ardakapalasan]

"The book is on the table"

*Holds book on hand

Loving it!

[minaDesuDesu]

Production quality is just getting higher and higher. Also love your editing choices, haha

[egorka]

Oh what a feast for my eyes this video was. Pure beauty and you have taught me something about Wittgenstein which is also cool.

[calvinpeterson]

I think you misunderstood Wittgenstein's Atomism. The atoms are definitely not physical atoms, they are more like logical atoms, they are atomic facts, the smallest facts that can't be broken down into more facts and are totally independent when it comes to truth value. You might mean something closer to "Objects" in Wittgensteins terms, but Wittgenstein does not necessarily believe the objects are physical either, they are the smallest logical/linguistic objects that are named and them combined to form atomic facts, they could not be something like Quarks or fundamental particles. He purposefully withheld any real world example of an object, likely because he felt they were merely implied by his idea of the structure of language but did not have a definite example he could name.

[Rog]

Tractatus is pronounced Trac-tate-us, not Trac-tart-us.