My impressions of analytic philosophy
This semester I’ve been in a seminar on 20th Century Analytic Philosophy, and have been participating generally poorly (as I do in most seminar classes when I’m not that familiar with the subject material). My impressions of Analytic Philosophy are somewhat varied: at times I’m DEEPLY disappointed, as if reading the piece was like slowly and bitterly swallowing down mashed sweet potatoes. Each bite is as bad as the last, and when close to finishing one feels the urge to vomit…
At other times I am truly inspired and in awe. Such as the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap (Carnap basically just extends and systematizes what Wittgenstein said in a very disorganized way), and to a lesser extent W.V.O. Quine. The common thread being that these thinkers illuminate the idea that our language and logic is just like the rules in a game. But like games, there is more than one game that exists in the world, yet you can’t play two games interchangably and simultaneously. That would be like declaring “checkmate” when you acquite Boardwalk and Park Place in monopoly - it can’t be done.. you are confusing the rules. Like so with our language and logic. When we say “X is wrong” what we are really saying is “X doesn’t fit into the rules of our system like that”. But is there hope of translation of the rules of one game into another? No, says Quine anyhow.
Often times I’m fed up with Analytic Philosophy getting into matters of language. It just turns into linguistics, not philosophy classically conceived, which is how I think of philosophy. That is, philosophy as being in the end practical or leading to wisdom of some sort. The field of linguistics, which so much of what analytic philosophy ends up being, is generally uninteresting. Philosophy ends up being how we define the rules for terms such as “meaning”, etc. So in the end you just learn a new game, as Wittgenstein would say anyhow. Great, I have learned the rules to a game like chess. But I haven’t learned about why I agreed to play the game in the first place, or why I should continue playing that game or quit in favor of another.
This is the general attitude I started with when reading articles - and I do still have this attitude. But only after reading Wittgenstein (and THINKING I understand what he’s getting at) can I see its usefulness. But overall much of analytic philosophy is just boring. I would almost like to take certain aspects of language on faith and then running with them from there, to see where I’m lead. That seems a lot more useful than constantly focusing on the language and meanings of words themselves.
I don’t know.