Great lecture. He knows how to talk about phlosophy without putting you to sleep. One of the best I've come across.

Re. The Peculiar and bewildering ( to me, at least) negative comments about the use of humour in this lecture. “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

@FreeFromAllThings

5 жыл бұрын

Zizek took it literally

I've listened to this lecture so many times that I can jump in and recit many of the lines. :)

This lecture was really enjoyable, I'm glad you delivered it Wes. Wittgenstein's life was really fascinating. The shift in his perspective from the tract to aesthetics reminds me about what Emerson wrote: being willing to 'zig zag' in life - that is, saying what you felt to be true one day, and if you felt the opposite to be true the next - you express that fact without worrying about being perceived as inconsistent - you and those close to you can see the greater context and for Wittgenstein it was always his search for Truth. With a capital T.

@Sidiciousify

8 жыл бұрын

mmmm

@Sidiciousify

8 жыл бұрын

mm

@bluegiant13

8 жыл бұрын

+Kunal Mandalia you just described my life !

@obediencetoflow4653

7 жыл бұрын

Kunal Mandalia as Walt Whitman said, " do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes"

@ocamtille9114

7 жыл бұрын

Kunal Mandalia Witt was the opposite of Pangloss.

Another amazing tuition free lecture. Hurrah!

@bryanmelton5538

4 жыл бұрын

HAHAHAHA YOU TUBE IS GREAT FOR FREE STUDIES.

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

I can't believe I can go take an English class with you this quarter if I wanted to. I can't believe there are 8 seats left. Too bad I live in Lynnwood. For now. Thank you for uploading these lectures.

So droll, I can't stop laughing! This professor is fantastic! I never thought learning about Wittgenstein could be so entertaining!

All these lectures by Dr. Cecil are excellent. Wittgenstein seems the most brilliant and empathic person. I also like Simone de Beauvoir and William James.

@ndmath

4 жыл бұрын

Empathic, except when he punished that pupil in rural Austria.

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Do you mean sympathetic? It’s just that these days people invariably use “empathic” when they mean the other. Genuine question.

You are an amazing teacher!!! please continue to do so and to post your lectures here for the world to enjoy!!! it's inspiring.

Extremely engaging and lively lecture. And very informative, giving an interesting background understanding to the cultural milieu and historical context to the Wittgenstein family. Great job!

These lectures are great! So accessible. I hope you do more on individual philosophers.

Amazing. Amazing professor and amazing life and thoughts of Wittgenstein. Thanks!

Professor Cecil, that was a beautiful and compelling presentation. Thank you.

This is a fantastic lecture, owing not only to its fascinating content, but also -- and perhaps more so -- to it having been given by a fantastic lecturer.

This is amazing! Had so much fun listening to this

Thank you so much, will order a Ray Monk introduction before I conquer the Tractatus. Subscribed and watching every video you uploaded when possible.

Wittgenstein is fascinating.

Great upload! Thanks.

@aMulliganStew

9 жыл бұрын

fancy meeting you here! I found Dr. Cecil only about 3 weeks ago. Great Stuff.

@kekero540

5 жыл бұрын

Oh nice didn’t think you’d watch these. Although it’s been a long time since you posted this.

I am the Hong Kong a citizen when I listen to this lesson I think the Hong Kong people need to listen often in this lesson I wish to The Westerner who is willing to teach the Hong Kong students and people to learn more about the Western philosophy thank you very much for the attention

@firstal3799

5 жыл бұрын

Read Aristotle and Plato for 500 years, then read medieval euro philosophy for 300 years. Then read Wittgenstein, good luck

So pleased to find this channel. ThanX

best lecture I found so far about Ludwig. Congrats.

I love all your lectures. Thank you, Wes.

Very nice. I am spending a bit of time trying to "get" this guy, and your lecture helped.

43:00 mathematically rooted philosophy has always fascinated me

I love alll your lectures! they are insightful and well preformed.

How does this man not have his own TED talk series?

so awesome. he conveys history well..with humor

I love you lectures. I'd like to hear more about his language insights like family resemblance and word games. That part seems a bit loose and unclear.

Wes, I would love the material that you had to your class for this lecture. Especially the examples (and where to find the rest) of those 200 pages of language game questions. Is it possible for you to send them to me? Thank you for these lectures, I would love to be a student of yours!

great talk! interesting and funny. Thank you Wes

Magnificent!

Agian, ty for the upload. Made mee smile.

Very entertaining and insightful lecture. Fun can be learning and learning can be fun.

Thanks for the upload! Also could you set subtitles, because it would be much easier for the non-english speakers to understand!!

If you have ever seen a dog looking up at you while you eat a slice of pizza--the look in the dog's eyes cannot be misunderstood for anything but hope.

In that kind of family you become a philosopher

An entertaining and instructive lecture,

I've become a fan of your KZread corpus, still working through it, looking forward. I'm super expert on Wittgenstein, have like forty books on the guy in my collection at the moment (some titles on loan). Under the heading of Forgotten Thinkers, I'd file R. Buckminster Fuller, whom I also consider a Great Philosopher (capital G, capital P), a minority view. I argued with Dr. Suber of Earlham College (Quaker) whether the guy was a philosopher at all. You're in Seattle? We should meet. I'm Portland (OR) based.

Greatest Philosopher Ever.

Wes, I am glad you did this lecture. Reading the Tractatus for History of Analytical Philosophy, so it was useful background. My only worry is the bs you spewed about ADHD/ADD. I can correct you as a patient of this disability. Although I don't take Ritalin, I take Stratera, there is a demonstrable difference in how people react to the psychiatric/neurological drugs.

@cindigo

4 жыл бұрын

@Nightwatchman: I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, because I can't definitively discern his personal beliefs on the subject. That being said, I don't think that anyone that had direct experience with or a deep understanding of this condition would have ever chosen to use it as an example in this way. I can grasp what he was trying to get at, but I sincerely wish he would have used another vehicle to get his point across.

@sotetsotetsotetsotetsotet2379

Жыл бұрын

Considering how good Wes can be at understanding an argument, It's hilariously sad how poorly he understands the difference between a singular "event" that occurs such as a failure of executive function and a repeated pattern of events that significantly and negatively effect someone's life such that we would classify it as a disorder. OCD is a good way of illustrating this; Everyone has obsessions or compulsions, Not everyone washes their hands until they bleed.

Hi Wes, I'm wondering if there is a Wittgenstein biography that you would recommend? Thank you.

Thank you.

As Wittgenstein suggested, WES is employing one of the most effective tools of Philosophy : humour ;-)

Incredible

I liked the style of the Dr Cecil Im a student of life dipping a toe in the water of philosophy and apart from Alan Watts this was a first taste of mainstream philosophy . . I enjoyed it very much and felt that it looked at life through the eyes of Wittenstien so yes many thanks

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Watts is nothing like academic philosophy.

Very good

Please post class materials for reference. Thank you Dr. Cecil

Did Wittgenstein ever read Saussure's General Course in Linguistics (1916) and/or influenced by other early Semioticians?

Wow ! Such a beautiful mind he has !

I realize this is fairly old, but any chance that the lecture handout is still floating around somewhere? The link in the description no longer works.

This has to be the best video on Ludwig Wittgenstein on KZread.

0:21 1:11 Life 11:42 Motivation 15:50 18:52

His questions are relevant more than ever now with the advent of ai.

interesting video

Beautiful lecture. My old teacher once told me if you think you know Wittgenstein you don't know Wittgenstein.

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Paraphrasing Einstein on quantum physics as I am sure you know. Less impressive when one knows this.

@AF-mq4pw

2 жыл бұрын

@@garymorgan3314 Um, actually

Oh no big deal, ya know. It just sounds way over the top like they're high or something. BUT I *love* the lectures by this professor and I applaud him for bringing philosophy to the public, makin' it come alive like he so brilliantly does, fleshing out these strange, brilliant philosophers' humanity, making them real and giving a solid overview of their profound work. AND I respect these people that went to hear philosophy lectures -if only more people would take an interest!

What a lecture 😂 Wittgenstein ❤️ What a Man 🙏

The way you describe Wittgenstein’s later thinking (about action being the manifestation of thought) seems a lot like what Sartre talks about in Being and Nothingness. Was there influence there one way or the other?

do Albert Camus please

Is this an intro class? If so great job! However, as a philosophy student I would have a hard time justifying sitting though this class for any reason other than entertainment after my 2nd year.

@gamer-ff6mh

3 жыл бұрын

Yes so true. Must be an introduction. I don't really understand why people are enjoying this 'lecture'.

Also, how much of Wittgensteins thoughts were influenced by the context of his time and place? 'Loose Lips Sink Ships' and other Orwellian constructs.

Dr. Cecil, I like your videos and appreciate your efforts to popularize philosophy and philosophers. However, there are some factual inaccuracies in this video that I noticed. For example, Popper and Quine never worked on Wittgenstein's problems in the manner you mentioned; I doubt Quine even met W. On the contrary, Popper and Wittgenstein did not really see eye to eye after their incident at the Cambridge Moral Society (google 'Wittgenstein's poker'). His Tractatus did influence the founders of the Vienna circle (Carnap, Schlick etc.), but Carnap misunderstood W.'s views, especially the last sentence ('whereof one can not speak, thereof one must remain silent'). For anyone interested in Wittgenstein, I would highly recommend the biography 'Wittgenstein - the duty of genius' by Ray Monk.

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Yep, Monk is excellent, he’s invariably a good guide. Compare RJ Clark’s wretchedly written book on Russell.

really nice job. worth listening to again and again. I never knew Wittgenstein had a female love interest -- who was it? I hope anyone who questions Cecil's comedic approach does so in the spirit of good humor. I liked it!

Anyone else notice this picture makes him look like two-face? Hold your fingers over one half, then switch.

Where and when that lecture took place?

A picture is worth a thousand words. About breathing a different air of life...

Imagine the poor soldiers who just got a concussion getting lectured by your ARTILLERYMAN how math doesn’t exist and how terrible the beds are.

It is not the punch that knocks you out!

fucking loved this

@hamooon

2 жыл бұрын

keep coming back to this, but this lecture on wittgenstein is absolutely brilliant. so engaging

My love!!!!!!

Mental (spoken) chess is still chess. Maybe chess is dance chess iff: There is a 1 to 1 correspondence of human actions to board positions (nodes), means of transitioning between them (edges), etc… More-so, the structure is the same. For example the graph of the states and transitions are the same. Maybe it's ok to reduce/simplify in the "can be reduced to"/"simplifies to" sense. Maybe it's still equivalent or more or less on adding superfluous bits, for example each node becomes a cycle. More-so, maybe it's ok to include extra states that aren't chess positions, even such that the chess positions are vanishingly small proportion of all nodes, as long as players return to a valid position before the end of the turn, for example moving a castle forward one into an empty space. But then this seems like just including extra safely removable waffle.

At 57:15, he names Quine (Willard Van), Popper (Karl), and a third. Anybody have a guess who that third was? Couldn't quite make it out, myself.

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

He says “Firebrand” which is obviously wrong. Is he thinking about Feyeraband? Can’t be correct and likely a Freudian slip.

16:15 - "I want to set the limits on what is knowable." Nothing is knowable in the strict sense - we only have degrees of certainty, what we are willing to gamble on, risk/reward equation. Wittgenstein is just moving the goal posts, the criteria for what counts as "knowledge". Wittgenstein is creating a model and plotting "knowledge" somewhere on that model. It might be a good model or a bad model, a more useful model or a less useful model, but a mere model nonetheless. No knowledge, truth, reality, is final, exclusive, complete. They are all provisional man-made conceptions we will use as heuristic tools, mnemonic devises, until something better comes along. Even the most exacting, like Relativity Physics and Quantum Mechanics. RP and QM are the best we have at the moment and we will keep using them - until something getter comes along. In our human endeavours - fuelled by an underlying self-preservation and perpetuation-of-the-species drive - we use all kinds of conceptions to try to predict and control the future: from the most spacious and flexible to the most narrow and rigid. None of these mirror a free-standing reality in the sense of the correspondence theory of truth. All of them prove their worth by how they function, how they deliver the results we are - consciously or unconsciously - looking for. We only know their value by the consequences of acting on them. "By their fruits ye shall know them." Or, as Heisenberg put it, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." And "Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments." And "The obvious difficulty in this argument is the lack of any general criterion as to when a sentence should be considered meaningless. A definite decision is possible only when the sentence belongs to a closed system of concepts and axioms, which in the development of natural science will be rather the exception than the rule. In some case the conjecture that a certain sentence is meaningless has historically led to important progress... new connections which would have been impossible if the sentence had a meaning. An example... sentence: "In which orbit does the electron move around the nucleus?" But generally the positivistic scheme taken from mathematical logic is too narrow in a description of nature which necessarily uses words and concepts that are only vaguely defined."

42:03 - It's not a lie, it's an abstraction. We have 1) direct feelings and 2) words, music, dances, paintings, movies, etc., about feelings. When we are communicating, we are always operating on SOME level of abstraction. We are never reproducing the immediate experience 1:1 in its entirety, subtlety, depth, breadth, incongrueties, etc., etc., etc. 2) is still helpful even though it does not reproduce 1) in its manifold entirety, it is not a lie about 1), it's an abstraction of 1). From the most intensely emotional discussion of lovers who are breaking up but don't want to break up, who are doing their utmost to convey their feelings to each other and save their relationship, to the cold, hard, logical, tautological, abstract language of mathematics. It's not a lie just because it doesn't cover EVERYTHING. It's impossible to cover EVERYTHING - see The Tao Te King. A lie is a conscious intention to mislead.

I don't know but if it goes with a live video or subtitle, it would be better for a non native english speaker.

Some philosophers are not so easy to understand, even for highly educated people. And Wittgenstein is not one of the easiest philosophers to comprehend. Professor Cecil is to be commended for his work. I can see why he would use humor and a whimsical approach, because young people, college kids, are not accustomed to reading something like the work of Wittgenstein. Using a bit of humor helps them to access the work of a difficult writer.

Can anyone point me to where Wittgenstein talks about his views on love and that sex can perverse love

Please Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyereband

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

What about them, Ricardo?

He knows very little about Wittgenstein's work. For anyone interested in learning about Wittgenstein I would recommend Anthony Kenny's book "Wittgenstein" and Ray Monk's excellent biography to get a decent overview of Wittgenstein's life and work.

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

‘Wittgenstein’s Poker’ is a quick, enjoyable read.

I wish I could find the excerpt from Wittgensteins work mentioned here where he tries to prove the existence of God. If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be fantastic.

@Pointingtothereality

10 жыл бұрын

Rick Grafton Thank you very very much :)

@couperin221

10 жыл бұрын

Pointingtothereality You're quite welcome. And the backstory regarding his notebooks may interest you. Most of LW's speculations about God occurred in the late spring and summer of 1916 during his service in WWI. On April 29th he was shot at for the first time. Then on May 4th he requested and was granted dangerous night duty. So it's during this period of 1916 when he's acutely aware of his own mortality, that he writes most openly about the nature of God, life, and happiness. Mid-August he's sent to the relative safety of officer training, and the discussion ends.

@Pointingtothereality

10 жыл бұрын

Rick Grafton That's genuinely interesting and insightful, Wittgenstein is such a flamboyant character so he's always fun to find out about, but more than that, in the way he breaks ground and does his own thing, not just philosophically but in life too, he's kind of inspirational. I'd like to learn more about him, where did you get your information from?

@couperin221

10 жыл бұрын

Pointingtothereality The biography from which I learned the most was Ray Monk's "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius". It's a long book, but Monk writes in a straightforward style and manages to present Wittgenstein's life and ideas quite clearly. I'm not sure what scholars think of it, but it was a considerable help to me in understanding LW.

@Pointingtothereality

10 жыл бұрын

Rick Grafton Cheers!

On Sunday "the day of rest" does a dog have to go to work?

Not bad for the little fella whose big brothers + sisters called the "clown of the family" who had bizarrely succeeded in taking in the world and becoming an intellectual giant. 'Tis indeed a strange world ...

Any chance of an Alan Watts life and philosophy? Curious.

@cosmo9287

10 жыл бұрын

Yes, yes, yes on Cecil going all in on Alan Watts, great suggestion. Please Prof. Cecil.

subtitulos?

Wittgenstein seems to have the desire for people to experience things identically almost pre-ontologically. That they obviously don't, creates a void or Otherness that appears to be very difficult for him. He overcomes this with silence - nothingness. Isolation. Which clearly contradicts his appeal to Act, as in communicate.

Yeah but still there is no one single Philosophy Clinic established yet :-( SlumLandLord generated viruses are still hanging in languages especially around their Concept of Meaning.

Vodka not water (walks off)

I think most infj's can relate to Wittegensteins problems.

31:00 Sounds like Wittgenstein is one of the Romantics.

Interesting mixture of accuracy and total error.

so besutiful. like if u cry everytime u watch dis.

Why did he recant his theory on the verification of logic?

@Combostoked

7 жыл бұрын

Jacob Fry idunno

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Kurt Godel’s work, possibly.

@jacobsadler2898

2 жыл бұрын

@@garymorgan3314 oh that might explain it, yeah

58:58 Doesn't the idea of "correctness" - _'unlived' = wrong_ - totally contradict his entire school of thought that says just because you can think or act as if something were true doesn't mean that it is?

Underlying mysticism? It was open and explicit. In fact, the fundamental idea of the Tractatus. 6.552 - There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. Meaning is ....the "function" ...!? That is exactly was exactly the idea of the Tractatus, namely the "function" of picturing the world". Later he showed that meaning is the "use". BIG difference. The WHOLE difference. Lastly, W never "argued". Arguments originate in the use of words outside their meant language game.

Just to be petty; he didn't write the tractatus in the trenches throughout the war but in imprisonment and, as he admits in the preface to philosophical investigations, it was actually mathematician Frank Ramsey who later helped him see the errors in it.

13:01

Wrong on a few points and time line is a bit off but all in all not bad.

I m inspired to write something of my own now.

What about philosophical investigations, isnt that a second work?

@garymorgan3314

2 жыл бұрын

Posthumously published.