Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.
From Plato to Moore and since, there are usually … only passing references [in moral philosophy] to human vulnerability and affliction and to the connections between them and our dependence on others … We are invited, when we do think of disability, to think of the disabled as ‘them’, as other from ‘us’, not as ourselves as we have been, sometimes now are and may well be in the future.
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Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, quoted by Chris Dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling: Celebrating diversity. (via johnthelutheran) |
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
There’s a great story of Wittgenstein being a lover of shoveling dirt and hard labor…..
Some Wikipedia readers have observed that clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. As of June 05, 2011, 99.99% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy. The rest lead to an article with no wikilinks, links to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.[1] There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a “classification chain.”[citation needed] According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy. The Philosophy article itself links to reality which links back to Philosophy.
Bayle’s footnotes buzz with the salacious twaddle of the Republic of Letters, with every pornographic interpretation of a biblical passage and every sexual anecdote about a philosopher or a scholar. We owe to him the preservation of Caspar Scioppius’ description of the sparrow he watched, from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt, having intercourse twenty times and then dying—as well as Scioppius’ reflection, ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?’
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| — | Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, discussing Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique |
‘I am most truly (said Bayle) a protestant; for I protest indifferently against all Systems, and all Sects.’
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| — | Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, quoting from Edward Gibbon’s memoirs, in reference to Pierre Bayle |
He disliked overhead lights, in which category he included the midday sun, but he loved the horizontal rays at the two ends of the day. He waited for hours, reading a book, for the right sort of light and the right sort of weather.
When he came home, he developed his photographs and sorted them. Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.
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| — | From Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Derek Parfit in The New Yorker |
