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So we're going to conclude our consideration of Emerson,
his anti-conformist thinking now,
what Stanley Cavell calls his aversive thinking,
that is against the grain, with just the end of the essay, Self Reliance,
where his injunction is,
his lesson if you will, was never imitate.
Now of course, as well we're imitating Emerson, but Emerson is well aware of that
and what he's trying to do is to break the cycle of imitation.
Towards the end of the essay he writes, we are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
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Even while we celebrate individualism,
we have this tendency to create a situation where
individualism results in everybody trying to be an individual in the same way.
And so even as we break towards individualism,
we create even more conditions for conformity and
standardized testing of individuals, you could put it that way.
Medicalization of individuals where you might see in your own time, and
what happens is that, to protect everybody's individual right,
we collapsed or constrained the borders of possible actions.
And our age yields no great and perfect persons.
Emerson is the enemy of conformity, he is the enemy of imitation,
imitation either of our past selves or of the people around us.
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The rejection of conformity can mean creating an environment for
learning that prizes inclusion and celebrates achievement,
while not caving into narrow professionalism,
the kind of environment that President Simmons has built at Brown.
The rejection of conformity can mean, as in the work of Richard Winslow,
an embrace of the sounds and the silences that have come to be valued by
people whose commonality with us must be discovered, not presumed.
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emerging from an extraordinarily wealthy, talented, and troubled family.
Three of his brothers actually commit suicide.
Wittgenstein was very troubled himself, and by
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all accounts a man of genius and
commitment, and who came upon philosophy as
possibly a rigorous science, he thought, that
would lead through logic to understand the foundations of language and mathematics.
He went from Vienna where he grew up as I say,
in this extraordinarily fertile culture ground.
We don't have time to get into that, but turn of the century Vienna
in 1900 is a subject of great fascination for cultural historians.
And my teacher actually, when I was enrolled in,
of course a little bit like this actually many years ago, was Carl Schorske,
whose book Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, gives you a glimpse into some
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Because Russell is engaged in the investigation of the systematic
foundations for language, and mathematics, for philosophy, can get rid of,
pare away the nonsense and focus on what we could know.
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And Russell sees in Wittgenstein an extraordinarily powerful mind,
someone who he admired greatly and who scared him as well,
with his intensity and commitment and
possibilities for intellectual domination, as he said.
>> He was queer and his notions seemed to be odd.
So that for a whole term,
I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric.
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At the end of his first term at Cambridge, he came to me and said,
will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?
If I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut, but if not,
I shall become a philosopher.
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>> Wittgenstein produced early in his life the Tractatus,
which is about 75 pages long.
Tried to show in detail what we can say sensibly,
what makes sense in language, and what we can't talk about sensibly.
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Things about which,
as he put, we should be silent because we can't speak sensibly about them.
Really defining, he thought, the parameters of reasonable discourse.
But after that and the beginning of the First World War,
Wittgenstein leaves philosophy, leaves England.
Goes to devote himself to work in the world, either driving an ambulance or
eventually teaching elementary school, and
then comes back to England many years later to do philosophy again.
And this later part of Wittgenstein's work seems
quite different to many philosophers, where he has a much more general
investigation of how we do use language.
Not how language should be founded, not on how it's basic system works,
but on how we actually use language.
And so people who emphasized the early Wittgenstein, as it's often called,
are emphasizing the logical structure of what can be sensibly said.
The folks who emphasize the later Wittgenstein are emphasizing
his commitment to understanding ordinary language and how, in fact,
we talk to each other and what we can understand by paying attention to that.
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That's not our issue in this course, and in fact,
we're really just skating on the surface of this enormously complex thinker,
Wittgenstein, to get a couple of key concepts in the reading today.
Some of you read the paragraphs from the text On Certainty
where Wittgenstein talks about how language really works when
someone's asking for objects during a construction project, as you recall.
And also how we learn languages.
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Some of you read similar material from
selections from the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein
also looks at how to understand the ways in which our words get meaning.
And that's why we are looking at Wittgenstein.
In the On Certainty example, he's looking at G.E.
Moore's response to the skeptic who claims
to wonder whether the external world exists.
Moore does something like this, where he says well, here is one hand,
here's another, I know I have two hands.
I know, and if I do have two hands, Moore says,
if I do have two hands, there must be an external world.
That's where they are, these two hands, in the external world.
Wittgenstein is intrigued by this presentation
of Moore's so-called reputation of skepticism,
but what does it mean to say, I know I have a hand?
Is it really knowledge that I have when I look at my hand?
Is that knowledge?
And this leads Wittgenstein to a consideration of what
we mean by using certain words, words like the verb,
to know, and how does that verb acquire meaning in what particular context?
And in this word context, we see the most important thing for our
purposes about Wittgenstein's contribution to the modern and the post-modern.
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From its seeming to me, or to everyone, to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so.
What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.
That is, can we actually make sense of the claim that I doubt that I have hands?
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Can I really make sense of the word, know, in a sentence?
I know that I am a human being.
Is that a question of knowledge, Wittgenstein is asking?
And he begins to impress on
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what the verb, to know, means in these contexts and whether it actually
has something to do with how we use the word, to know, in ordinary context.
Let's say, outside of a philosophy class.
>> Listen to me.
We imagine the meaning of what we say is something queer, mysterious,
hidden from view, but nothing's hidden, everything is open to view.
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>> And what he comes to, and you see this in paragraphs 45, and 46, and 47,
by looking at this is that we come to understand a word, let's say the word,
to know, by it's repetitive use in ordinary situations.
Just like we learn how to calculate in mathematics, not
by studying the meaning of calculation, but by practicing calculation.
You learn to add not by doing the philosophy of mathematics.