NAW Durham 6 -- The Secret to my Genius :-)

Notes from my days at Durham continue...

38. I mentioned that Helen Fox was another one of the Residential Tutors in John's. She was from the Isle of Wight and I forget how far removed she was from the throne. It might have been in the high 90s. They track these things. How many people are in line to the throne ahead of me?

I joked to her once that she had helped me understand the French Revolution. She actually was quite nice and unpretentious. But there was also something about her that made saying she was 98th or something from the throne make a lot of sense to me.

She told me a story about some extended family member on the Isle of Wight that seemed to express it all. Apparently, some men were working on the sewer system that ran in front of this relative's house. But the aunt (or whatever the relation) was afraid that if she used the restroom while they were working, they would see the results.

So she invited them in for tea and "biscuits" (bread sweets) so she could use the restroom in peace.

39. At some point, I believe she had invited Neil and me to her flat up the Bailey. I'm not even sure if I was serious, but I said something like "I'll just make up my own definitions for the words in my own private language."

"Ah, but isn't that exactly what Wittgenstein said you couldn't do -- have a private language? Meanings come from the language games we play in a certain form of life." Something like that.

I'm not sure how much I knew about Wittgenstein at that time. But I didn't really know much about Wittgenstein at the time, and there's nothing like feeling embarrassed to get you to do a little research. I think I may have also had conversations with David Mossley about Wittgenstein after that (PhD student in philosophy).

40. Wittgenstein blew me away. He had lived in the first part of the twentieth century and died in 1951. A very colorful figure. Almost certainly on the spectrum. Think Sheldon.

His early life is quite amusing at points. Wealthy but gave away his inheritance. Had himself put on the front (Austrio-Hungarian) lines of WW1 to see if his philosophy could take it. Argued with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge over whether there was a rhinocerus (in the room?). Wrote a treatise in seven points that he thought had solved all the problems of philosophy. Then wanted to go work in a factory in communist Russia (They would have been glad to take him as a professor, but weren't interested that he work in a factory.)

His seventh point was interesting, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent."

At some point, Russell wanted him to come to Cambridge. Unfortunately, he didn't have a doctorate. As an indication of his personality, he suggested that if his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was really that good, they should give him a doctorate for it. OK, fine. Just write a preface. Wittgenstein refused. They gave him a doctorate anyway.

41. It's really his later work, though, that brought such insight. Wittgenstein's earlier work assumed something he called a "picture theory of language." It is essentially the way most people think about language -- including most pastors. Going back to Augustine, it assumes that words picture things. I say "house"; you picture a house.

This works to a point. Words often do relate closely to things. But you might say that's only a portion of our language. For example, what does "is" picture? What does "righteousness" picture? What does a "wild goose chase" picture? (Don't say someone chasing a wild goose, because almost no one pictures that when they use that expression.)

The Wittgenstein story is typical. An Italian friend of his said, "Hey Ludwig, picture this" and playfully gave him a rude gesture. But alas, Wittgenstein couldn't say what the equivalent of giving someone the finger pictured. Its meaning is not some "thing" it pictures.

42. That was the beginning of a revolution, and the secret to much of my insight is that I know it and you don't. :-) The meaning of language is in how words are used. Words don't have meaning "in them" per se. They take on meanings in "language games" we play in different "forms of life."

Take the word fire. You light a fire and your Augustinian picture theory seems to work. I say, "fire," and you picture red stuff.

But what if a solider says "fire"? What if a boss says, "You're fired"? What if I play a song called, "Come on baby light my fire"?

Each one of these expression is playing a different "language game" in a different setting. And the meaning is different. Since Wittgenstein, these insights have been extended. Words don't simply inform. They do things. If I yell "Fire!" I'm probably suggesting that you're in danger and should probably leave the building quickly. If a couple says, "I do," they are marrying each other.

By the way, this is why I always roll my eyes when someone says, "Don't say, 'How are you?' unless you really want to hear the answer." The words "How are you?" perform a social function in most cases. Sure, if someone starts to answer, listen to them. But when that happens, the language game has changed. The normal game for that phrase is social and affective, not cognitive or "logos."

Sheez. 

43. This secret knowledge has tremendous implications for understanding the Bible and all sorts of things. When you take a Bible study course and you learn about word fallacies, they mostly are simply playing out these insights on language. Has anyone ever told you that the church is made up of the "called out ones" because ekklesia comes from ek and kaleo.

Nope. The meaning of ekklesia at the time of the New Testament depended on how people were using the word at the time. It doesn't have to have any obvious relation to the history of the word or the parts of the word (etymological fallacy). Baptizo doesn't have to mean immerse just because its root meant to dip (root fallacy). The meaning of words wanders over time and space.

Frankly, half the things preachers say about Greek and Hebrew words from the pulpit are wrong because they don't understand this principle. Kittel's theological dictionary -- not only spearheaded by a former Nazi but riddled with word fallacies that don't understand how language works. Ironic that the philosophy of a Jewish man would unravel it.

44. You might see how this problematizes a narrow understanding of sola scriptura and explains why there are thousands of Protestant denominations. Words don't have fixed meanings in them. When Luther said, "The authority for Christian belief and practice alone," he set in motion the inevitable fragmentation of Christianity. Since texts can have many meanings, the Bible has taken on countless different meanings not only for all the different Christian groups but all the individuals reading the Bible.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem also comes to mind here. I first learned about Gödel from Paul Herman I think in high school. Certainly didn't understand him then and may not even now. By the way, I saw Paul maybe three years after high school graduation. He told me Kant changed everything in philosophy. As with Helen Fox, I was a bit embarrassed inside because I didn't really understand Kant. I really learned Kant my first year of teaching. 

And I more or less agree with Paul now. Don't tell him. I responded something about Aquinas at the time.

Gödel's theorem suggests to me that no system can internally provide its own foundations. An ideological system requires grounding principles from outside it. 

This is especially true with Scripture. Scripture does not and could not tell me what the canon is. That is a decision that must be made from outside the text. I need a set of language games and at least one form of life to interpret the words of the Bible. "Orthodoxy" presents a set of such. Denominations often do. 

Bible scholars generally try to read each biblical text in relation to its original languages games and forms of life. But this also results in a fragmented text because there are so many of them. This is why some in the past have said that it is not even possible to identify a biblical theology. (It also seriously threatens the idea of a biblical worldview.)

So much is going on under the hood of our Bible reading, and most of us -- including most pastors -- don't have a clue. Again, Wittgenstein is my secret weapon to see such things.

45. These insights also undermine what I have come to call the "Platonic fallacy." This is again the notion that ideological systems are real.

Let me share Wittgenstein's sense of "family resemblance." Let's say you came to a Schenck reunion, and I ask you what the essence of a Schenck is. You say, "Well, some of you have big noses. Some of you have big ears. Some of you talk pretty loud."

But then I push back. "Well, some noticeably have big ears or big noses, but not everyone does. Some are loud but some aren't." What Wittgenstein noted was that there isn't really an essential Schenck here. What there is, is a collection of traits or "family resemblances." Not every Schenck has all the characteristics. Two Schencks might not have the same characteristics at all but have some of the characteristics from the grab back of Schenckness.

When we apply this to Marxism or Wesleyanism, we see that two Marxists might look quite different from one another. Two Wesleyans might look quite different from each other. They each would likely have some features from the common cup, but they might not have all.

You can see how this wreaks havoc with the argument that says, "You have this piece in your thinking that is also in communism; therefore, you are a communist." That doesn't follow at all. Both cyanide and bread have carbon in them, but one is deadly and the other isn't.

Wittgenstein has been my secret weapon, mainly because most people are unreflective in the way they read the meaning of the world. Thanks, Witty.

46. I might note that my first year in England I learned that there was a group of Anglicans who called themselves "non-realists." Don Cuppitt's Sea of Faith was the key work here. The Anglican church was fascinating because it was held together more by the liturgy than by belief system. There were Anglo-Catholics that were high church. There were evangelical Anglicans like St. John's. There were even charismatic Anglicans.

Speaking of the charismatic Anglicans, that was the moment when the "Toronto Blessing" was taking place. An Anglican church in London--Holy Trinity Brompton--was part of the movement. So there were tongues-speaking Anglicans.

The non-realists, on the other hand, didn't believe that God was literally real. Rather, they believed he was real in the "language game" of Christian religion. They took this idea from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein believed that religious language performed a different function than traditional ontology. God was not "out there" literally.

But God was real! God was real because the idea of the existence of God "did things" among Christians. God existed in the language game in the religious form of life. In that sense, God is real even though they didn't literally believe God was real. I'm not expressing it well, but it was a spin on Wittgenstein.

At the time, I thought, "What's the point of that?" It seemed to me that if you didn't believe God was really real, why even believe in him at all? It seemed like sentiment trying to cling onto something you had lost. I wondered this about many non-realist pastors out there (e.g., some in the United Church of Canada). Why stay with the form of Christianity if you don't believe its heart is real? 

47. In my final year in England, Neil Evans was kind enough to go on a drive about England and Wales to several places One of them was Cambridge. We went down the Cam to the Orchard Tea Garden that Wittgenstein had once frequented. If I could have taught at any unversity in the world, I think I would have picked Cambridge.

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 1

Over the next few weeks I hope to work through Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I know its key ideas. They have deeply impacted my hermeneutics. I recently read a biography of Wittgenstein and I deeply resonated with his sense that a lot of debates result from hermeneutical confusion.

This is certainly true of the Bible. Why are there so many disagreements among Christians over the meaning of the Bible? It's because the overwhelming majority of readers have no sense at all how to read it in context, so they read it in the light of countless differing language games that are foreign to the texts.

Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an Austrian born philosopher who taught at Cambridge during his philosophical career. An extreme perfectionist, he published very little during his lifetime, yet was regarded as the most influential philosopher of his day. Most of his thought had to be published after his death, and he spent considerable time with some of his favorite proteges with a view to later publication.

The most important of these posthumous publications was his Philosophical Investigations. This work consists of two main parts. Part I is a series of numbered paragraphs or collections of paragraphs. These mainly concern his philosophy of language and meaning. Part I is largely as Wittgenstein wanted it, although he was perhaps only completely satisfied with the first 188 items. Part I was completed in 1945.

Part II is a less well-ordered collection of fourteen sections on the philosophy of psychology. Although he had originally planned for the second Part to be on the philosophy of mathematics, from 1946 to 1949 he became much more interested in the philosophy of psychology. The further one goes in this material, the more editorial work was required by his translator, G. E. M. Anscombe. Anscombe was a professor at Oxford, and Wittgenstein spent a good deal of time with her in expectation that she would later bring his work to publication. He spent some of his final days in her home.

Part I
The first 188 paragraphs of Part I reached their current form in 1938. They are the part of the Philosophical Investigations with whose form Wittgenstein was most pleased.

1. Wittgenstein begins with a quote from Augustine's Confessions in which he sees Augustine presenting a picture theory of language. Words name objects. "Every word has a meaning."

Someone goes to the store with a slip that says, "five red apples." The storekeeper finds a drawer that says apples. Looks at a chart with colors and matches certain apples with the color. He counts to five as he removes apples. But where did these meanings come from?

2. Wittgenstein calls this a "primitive idea of the way language functions." He suggests a complete primitive language of four words where, for example, one person says, "block," and another then brings a block.

3. So Augustine describes something real, but actually very limited.

4. This sense of language is as over-simplified as if the only purpose of a word was the pronunciation of that word.

5. A child may learn some language this way--as training. But it is not really explanation. It presents a rather foggy sense of language.

6. Let us say a child is learning the language of #2 above. A teacher points to a slab and says "slab." This "ostensive teaching of words" creates an association between the word and the thing, perhaps a picture in the mind that emerges with the word. But in #2, this is not the purpose of the word or really the real meaning of the word, which is to bring a slab, not give the name of an object called a slab.

7. So learning the name of the object is a step toward #2. We imagine a game, a "language game," in which someone points to the object and a child says, "slab." It is a kind of primitive language.

Here Wittgenstein has introduced one of his key concepts, the "language game." A language game is the whole set of the words and the uses to which they are put, here one person pointing at something and the other person saying its name.

8. Wittgenstein expands the language in #2. We have four words that refer to four things. Now we add a, b, c, and d, which stand for numbers. We add "there" and "this." And we add samples of colors to which a person can point.

So a person says something like "d - slab - there," points to a color and points to a place on the work site. The other person gets 4 slabs of that color and takes them to the place to which the first person pointed.

9. What does a child need to learn when learning this language game? One is the numerical meaning of a, b, c, d. But the meaning of "there" and "this" in this language game can only be taught while using those words.

10. Key point. The meaning of these words is really in the use they have. This use is what they truly signify. In this language game, the meaning of "slab" does not reduce merely to the name of the object but involves what you are to do with it. The kind of referring is more than just naming the object. And the use of the letters a, b, c, d is a different kind of use than than the objects "block," "slab," "pillar," "beam."

11. He uses the analogy of a toolbox with a number of tools. The use of each tool is far bigger than just the name of the tool. The word hammer looks the same although you can use it to hammer a nail or prop up a book or countless other things. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of tools in a toolbox, even though each only has one name.

12, You could have several handles in a train. They are all called "handle" but do different things.

13. So to say, "Every word signifies something," does not really say much of anything. We have to distinguish each use of the word from its other uses to know what it signifies on any one occasion.

14. You can try to generalize the meaning of a word, but this venture typically ends up fairly artificial or abstract: "All tools modify something." What does a ruler modify? Our knowledge of how long something is?

15. "Naming is something like attaching a label to a thing." The word "to signify" is easy to understand in such cases.

16. What about the colors in #8 above--are they part of the language? They were not spoken but pointed to. It would seem they are. So language is more than spoken or written words.

If I say, "Pronounce the word the," the second "the" is part of our language game even though its sole purpose is to give the sound someone is to say. It doesn't point to anything or signify anything here other than a sound to say.

17. So in the language game of #8 there are different kinds of word. Those different categories depend on what we are using them for.

Wittgenstein 6: Story's End

Here is the final installment of my reading through Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, chapters 24-27.

Previously,

1. Childhood and Engineer
2. Student at Cambridge
3. World War I and Teaching
4. Between the Wars
5. During the War

Chapter 24: A Change of Aspect
The end of WW2 merely confirmed Wittgenstein's sense that humanity was headed for disaster. His resistance to the rule of science confirmed that science and industry decide wars. "Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid" (490). "Faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion."

In 1946, he fell in love with Ben Richards, although it is not clear that Richards ever knew it. His infatuation now was a little less solipsist. He wrote Fouracre alot, whom he had met in London during the war.

On October 26, 1946 there was the famous clash between W and Karl Popper at the Moral Science Club at Cambridge. There are legends that they came to blows or that W tried to hit Popper with a poker. Popper denied it. W was holding a poker and held it up, demanding an example of a moral rule. Then he stormed out.

By the way, W apparently boasted of never having read a word of Aristotle.

In May 1947 he addressed the Jowett society at Oxford, the only time he addressed philosophers at Oxford. He was responding to a paper evaluating Descartes' cogito. Predictably, he didn't answer the question, driving Joseph Pritchard crazy. He died about a week later.

Elisabeth Anscombe had been the catalyst for him coming. She would help translate the Philosophical Investigations and would for a time let him stay at her home near the end. By the way, she was the one that so critiqued C. S. Lewis that he went for novels rather than pure philosophy. W, who was somewhat sexist, considered her an "honorary male."

Iris Murdoch, who attended a few of W's last series of lectures, found his direct and unrelenting style unnerving. His lectures this year covered the material in the first part of the last third of PI. He would always redirect a question like "What is thinking?" to what the meaning of the word thinking is in this sentence.

The lectures W gave his last term in 1947 would become Part II of PI. This includes his duck picture that also looks like a rabbit. W argues that we change the aspect under which certain things are seen.

Some of his work from this final time at Cambridge was published as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1.

Chapter 25: Ireland
In early 1948, W was not feeling well physically or mentally. He initially spent time in Dublin, but eventually went to a cottage in Rosro on the sea. The locals thought him mad. He had birds eating out of his hand. He tamed them, which resulted in them being eaten by cats after he left.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. A lot of his scattered comments on such things were published as Culture and Value.

W said that philosophy leaves everything as it is. What it changes is the way we look at things.

He did return to Cambridge in late 1948 to dictate some of the notes he had written. These are published as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. He was done by October and returned to Ross' Hotel in Dublin for the winter.

The work W wrote that winter is called, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. It was not his last, however. Anscombe and Rhees came to visit him in Dublin. Rhees was designated the executor of his will, and Anscombe and Rhees would be his literary executors.

He felt ill again at the beginning of 1949. He read Livy's Punic Wars and Macaulay's Essays.

In April 1949 he visited his dying sister in Vienna. Upon return to Dublin, he was diagnosed with anemia. He did gradually improve with iron and liver extract.

During this time he probably finished material for PI, Part II. The part he was mostly satisfied with was Section X on "Moore's Paradox." Moore's Paradox was stating a proposition and then saying someone did not believe it. "There is a fire in this room and I don't believe there is."

He and Drury listened to a discussion on the existence of God between Ayer and Copleston. W thought Copleston missed the point. The existence of God is not something to be proved. It is a way of looking at the world. No surprises there.

W felt his mind was completely dull. He went to America to visit Norman Malcolm at Harvard, took a boat in the summer of 1949.

Chapter 26: A Citizen of No Community
Trump mostly lived with friends and former students for the last two years of his life. W suspected that his teaching had done more harm than good. He had made people drunk.

Malcolm took W to a meeting of the graduate students of philosophy at Cornell. Just before the meeting, Malcolm entered with W leaning on his arm. No one realized it was Wittgenstein until after a student gave his paper. Then the convener asked if Wittgenstein wanted to say anything. The crowd gasped.

The first 65 remarks of On Certainty come from W's discussions with Malcolm.

W fell ill again. He managed to come back to England in October, though fell ill in London. In November he finally made it to Cambridge where a friend of Drury's finally diagnosed him with prostate cancer. He flew to Vienna the day before Christmas, 1949, his last visit.

During this time he wrote what would become Part II of On Color. Anscombe happened to be in Vienna, where A was meeting with Feyerabend, who was then a student. W was convinced to come speak to their group, the Kraft Circle.

In On Certainty W argues that, "if the contrary of a proposition makes sense, then that proposition can be regarded as an empirical hypothesis; its truth or falsity being dependent on the way things stand in the world. But if the contrary to the proposition does not make sense, then the proposition is not descriptive of the world but of our conceptual framework; it is then a part of logic" (563). Framework propositions describe the way in which we understand the world.

In March 1950, he returned to London. Then he lived with his successor in Cambridge. There he wrote Part III of On Color. He also refused to give the John Locke lectures in Oxford. Then in April he lived with Anscombe in Oxford. Some of his remarks on Shakespeare in Culture and Value come from this time.

Late summer he completed paragraphs 65-299 of On Certainty.

Chapter 27: Storey's End
Although he had hoped to go again to Norway, he became too ill in January 1951, and would live out the rest of his life in the home of the doctor who had diagnosed him (Bevan). During the last two months of his life he wrote paragraphs 300-676 of On Certainty. He wrote the last remark of the book on April 27, the day before he lost consciousness.

Before he lost consciousness he told Mrs. Bevan to tell his friends he'd had a wonderful life. He died the next day.

He was not Catholic, but Anscombe and Smythies were. He was given a Catholic burial, based on Drury's interpretation of something he had once said about Tolstoy.

Appendix: Bartley's Wittgenstein
In this appendix, Monk addresses the claims of a work by Bartley claiming that W had wild sex when he was a teacher in Austria. Monk plausibly argues both that Bartley probably did have some unknown source material but that he likely misunderstood what the notes he was reading meant. Monk suggests that W probably did have very lustful thoughts that he recorded. However, given W's pattern throughout his life, probably the people he was lusting at had no idea.

Wittgenstein 5: During the War

I've finished Wittgenstein's biography. It will annoy me if I don't finish blogging on it in some way. So here's the first installment, chapters 19-23.

Previously,

1. Childhood and Engineer
2. Student at Cambridge
3. World War I and Teaching
4. Between the Wars

Chapter 19: Finis Austriae
It was completely predictable at the end of 1937 that Hitler would annex Austria. In December Wittgenstein made a visit in the calm just before the storm. The Jewish population in Vienna was slow to realize or admit to themselves the consequences of annexation. This was true of W's sisters, apparently.

On March 10, 1938, Austria was an independent state. On March 11, it was an independent state under Nazi rule. On March 12 it was part of Nazi Germany. In one day, Wittgenstein had gone from being an Austrian citizen to a German Jew.

W was in Dublin at the time. One of his students, Drury was finishing his work to become a psychiatrist at the time. W had chosen Drury over Francis. In general, W saw love as something dirtied by actual sexual relations.

Another former student, Straffa, helped give W good personal advice in light of the situation. Wittgenstein would secure an academic job at Cambridge and then apply for British citizenship. W asked for Keynes' help, and W was given a lectureship for the following term. It was quite difficult to see Neville Chamberlain return from Germany proclaiming "peace in our time."

As for his family in Vienna, their tactic was to argue that one of their grandfathers had been a bastard rather than a Jew. This would make them of mixed blood. They had some significant assets in Switzerland that the Nazi's wanted. In the end, their grandfather would be declared an Aryan, and even though they were of mixed Jewish blood, the regulations concerning Mischlinge were not applicable to the descendants of Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (the supposed bastard).

In June 1939, Wittgenstein became a British citizen.

Chapter 20: The Reluctant Professor
Wittgenstein found a new generation of disciples. Three of the most important were Rush Rhees, James Taylor, and Yorick Smythies. Repeatedly, W continued to try to talk his students out of becoming professional philosophers.

W didn't want notes taken on his lectures. Thankfully, taken they were. They were posthumously published as Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. They are a great source for Wittgenstein's Weltanschauung. W does not like theory. "What I do is describe different things..."

Here we find his idea of family resemblances. He also was somewhat enamored with Freud.

In the summer of 1938, W had a typescript of the earliest version of Philosophical Investigations. Rhees worked on the translation. The second half was supposed to be on the philosophy of mathematics (didn't end up being). In the three terms of 1939 he gave lectures on mathematics.

He was particularly critical of Georg Cantor and his sense of infinity. in Easter term of 1939, Alan Turing sat in on many of his lectures. "A proof in mathematics does not establish the truth of a conclusion; it fixes, rather, the meaning of certain signs" (418). The class was basically them discussing. Turing was also teaching a course in the Foundations of Mathematics at the time.

He was taking a different path than logicism, formalism, and intuitionism. He disagreed with the Law of Contradiction. Most of the students didn't really understand what was going on, except for Alister Watson. He tried to convince Norman Malcolm (a Harvard student who had come to study with Moore a little) not to go into philosophy. Then W would go see a Western.

During this time, W's eyes strayed from Francis to Keith Kirk, who had no idea. He would be racked with guilt for the rest of his life after Francis died of polio in October 1941.

Chapter 21: War Work
As with WW1, Wittgenstein found it intolerable to be doing philosophy while a war was being fought. Through Gilbert Ryle (philosopher) at Oxford, he was able to get work at a hospital with John Ryle, a Cambridge Physics professor who worked at Guy's Hospital in London during the war (1942). There was an understanding that no one was to know who he was at the hospital.

He continued his interest in dreams and Freud during this time. During his time at Guy's he filled three notebooks with remarks on mathematics. They were posthumously published as Parts IV, V, VI, VII of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. W rejected the idea that a proof in math established the truth of a conclusion. Rather, it is a set of pictures meant to establish the usefulness of a technique.

One friend from this period was Roy Fouracre.

While there, he came across the work of one Basil Reeve, who was investigating shock. Reeve suggested that the very notion of wound shock should be abandoned as unhelpful. W agreed.

W considered Hertz method of approaching force as a model. Instead of asking about force, he tried to describe phenomena without this theoretical construct. This was W's own approach. "In my way of doing philosophy, its whole aim is to give an expression such a form that certain disquietudes disappear" (446).

Let me say this resonates with me as well when it comes to hermeneutics. Discussions are highly confused because they do not get this simple premise--"The meaning of words is always to be found in a context." There are only two basic contexts: the ones in which words were originally uttered and other contexts against which those words are read. I have deeply drunk from W in this assessment but it removes countless confusions.

Wittgenstein moved to Newcastle when Reeve and Grant went. He thought about Bishop Butler's saying as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations: "Everything is what it is, and not another thing." And understanding can consist in seeing connections.

Also during this time he invented a better apparatus for recording pulse pressure.

He felt like his brain was gone (1943). He was about 54. I felt like my brain was gone earlier this year at 51. I can see what's coming. Reeve left in January 1944. W had no friends. In February he returned to Cambridge. There was an expectation of publishing PI with CUP. It didn't happen.

Chapter 22: Swansea
In March 1944, W was given leave of Cambridge to work on his book. Rees found lodging for him in Swansea. After two months his attention turned from the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of psychology. So while the second half of PI was originally going to be the philosophy of mathematics, it ended up being the philosophy of psychology.

During the summer of 1944, he formulated his "private language argument," namely, that there never is one. So W extended what used to be the Part I of PI, about double its previous length, with what are considered its central parts on rule following (paragraphs 189-242) and the private language argument (243-421).

The war was winding down. W anticipated that "the peace after this war will be more horrible than the war itself."

Chapter 23: The Darkness of Time
This chapter begins with a discussion of Bertrand Russell. W appreciated his intellect but thought his work should come in two colors, one for his stuff on ethics and politics (which shouldn't be read) and the other his logic (which should be). W didn't like his popular work, like his History of Western Philosophy. Of course Russell also saw no merit in Wittgenstein's later work.

G. E. Moore was in bad health. His wife only let W visit for 1.5 hours. Soon he would pass.

W's aim for philosophy was to "show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."

W used Augustine to illustrate the confused picture of language, Russell to illustrate confusions in the philosophy of mathematics, and William James to provide similar ones in the philosophy of psychology.

The final stages of WW2 were darkness for W (e.g., the bombing of Dresden). In the Michaelmas and Lent terms of 1945-46, W finished Part I of PI. So this part was created as follows:

• Paragraphs 1-188 in 1938 in Norway
• Paragraphs 189-421 in Swansee
• Paragraphs 422-693 in Cambridge, from notes in manuscripts from 1931-1945

In May 1946, Straffa no longer wished to have conversations with W. I don't know if I've conveyed the repeated sense in the book of how difficult W was as a person.

Wittgenstein 4: Between the Wars

I'm continuing to read Wittgenstein's biography. My first two posts are

1. Childhood and Engineer
2. Student at Cambridge
3. World War I and Teaching

I'm on course to finish this 580 page biography by the end of next week. Don't feel like going into great detail but here are some highlights of chapters 10-18.

Chapter 10: Out of the Wilderness
Wittgenstein had failed as a teacher. On June 3, 1926, his mother died. This produced a profound change in his attitude toward his family. From now to the Anschluss of 1938, he would spend Christmas with them. At first he returned to gardening with the monks in Huttledorf.

Then his sister Gretl had him design a house for her. So he became an architect for a time. He sounds horrible. For example, made them raise a ceiling three inches after it was done. She moved in in 1928. Then there was the market crash. Then she moved to New York after the Anschluss. It is currently used by the Bulgarian Embassy.

He fell in love during this time with one Marguerite Respinger. He must have been horrible because he believed that physical contact destroyed love. He did kiss her though. He would have been a horrible husband, he was so Sheldon-esk.

In this time period he began a good friendship with Moritz Schlick, the key member of what would become the Vienna Circle. This group, for example, discussed a paper by Frank Ramsey trying to restore the credibility of Russell and Frege's sense that mathematics could be reduced to logic. The Vienna Circle, by the way, was surprised to find that Wittgenstein did not fully agree with them, even though he had greatly stimulated their ideas.

A counter proposal we might call "intuitionism" was advocated by Brouwser in Holland. Brouwser did not believe mathematics needed to be grounded in logic. Wittgenstein did not fully agree with Brouwser, but it may have suggested to him that there was more work to do in philosophy. During this time also Wittgenstein developed a desire to go work in manual labor in Soviet Russia. He wasn't a Marxist. He just admired what he thought the way of life was.

Part III: 1929-41 Chapter 11: The Second Coming
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 to work with Ramsey. Keynes was instrumental in getting him to come back. He was still not on good terms with Russell. He visited the Bloomsbury group in London. He was not pleasant because of his argumentative style. W's official status was that of an advanced student reading for a PhD.

A key moment was when an economist friend, Piero Sraffa, made a rude Italian gesture and asked W to picture it (a la his picture theory of language). This moment began to break Wittgenstein of the notion that a proposition and what it describes must have the same logical form. Sraffa would lead W to look at philosophical problems from a more "anthropological" perspective.

Wittgenstein's relationship with G. E. Moore was resumed. It had broken after a rude letter W had sent from Norway.

At this time began W's first real student circle of influence. Maurice Drury would become a doctor rather than a priest because of W. A close foolish friend of W's was Gilbert Patterson--the two would write nonsense back and forth to each other. The word "bloody" was sure to be in almost every letter.

Having given away all his money. He needed some. He ended up applying for a grant. He was awarded a PhD for the Tractatus. Russell came up to be his external examiner. They hadn't seen each other for 7 years. In November 1929 he gave the only popular lecture of his life, on ethics.

Chapter 12: The Verificationist Phase
Christmas 1929 Wittgenstein began to realize that Marguerite did not want to marry him. W met with the Vienna circle. One of them Waismann was going to write a book on the Tractatus. Unfortunately, W was a perfectionist and was quickly abandoning some of his earlier ideas. Also, he believed that many of its key ideas needed to be shown and couldn't be told. The book would never be published.

During this time, though, W did come up with a principle of verification. If a proposition is to have a meaning, we must have some idea of what would be the case if it were true. "The sense of a proposition its means of verification." Funny that W would inspire these logical positivists even though he didn't agree with where they took the concept at all. In any case, his thinking would quickly move on.

In 1930 he returned to Cambridge, and Frank Ramsey died. The following day, W gave his first lecture. His courses were usually titled simply, "Philosophy." At the end of term, W needed funds again. He asked for Russell to look at a manuscript and vouch to Cambridge that his work was worthy of support. These notes would become Philosophical Remarks, his most verificationist work and most phenomenological (published after his death).

Chapter 13: The Fog Clears
In 1930, he came to the crucial conclusion that a philosopher has nothing to say but instead something to show.

He received a five year fellowship on the basis of the work he showed Russell.

He rejected Hilbert's metamathematics. Anticipating post-modernism, he suggested that Hibert's language was not an explanation but "another calculus just like any other one" (307). "You cannot gain a fundamental understanding of mathematics by waiting for a theory." The connection between a word and its meaning is not in a theory but in a practice, namely, in the use of the word.

Chapter 14: A New Beginning
We hear the end of some of the threads I've already mentioned. The end of his relationship with Marquerite. The end of his collaboration with Waismann.

"What replaces theory is grammar" (322). In 1932, he has collected notes that would be posthumously published as Philosophical Grammar. Wittgenstein tries to undermine the logicist school of the philosophy of mathematics (Russell, Frege), the formalist group (Hilbert), and the intuitionist group (Brouwer). To him, math does not need foundations at all. The search for such foundations is the cause of confusion.

Chapter 15: Francis
In my opinion, W would ruin the life of one Francis Skinner. Skinner was utterly infatuated homosexually by W. He could have been a mathematician but ended up working on a factory because W did not think the academy was healthy. There is no air. You can't breathe. But he manufactured his own air.

They tried to go to Russia together to work at a factory. W even went to Russia to explore. Once he had seen it, he never tried again.

Chapter 16: Language Games: The Blue and Brown Books
In the term of 1933-34, Wittgenstein's lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics garnered to many students, maybe 30-40. So he proposed to dictate lectures to five students who would write up the notes and distribute them to the others. The result was the first publication in any form of W's new method of philosophy, published as the Blue Book.

In it, he develops his notorious sense of the language game. And he replaces the notion of essence of things to that of family resemblances. These are the most important ideas for me in all of W's work. They have fundamentally formed my hermeneutic and epistemology.

From 1934-35, the Brown Book was produced. W dictated it to Skinner and Alice Ambrose. It is divided into method and application. Part I introduces language games. Alice presented the ideas in an article in Mind, much to W's wrath. The Brown Book wouldn't be published until after W's death.

Chapter 17: Joining the Ranks
This chapter talks about W's attempt to go to Russia. The previous chapter mentions that he did not believe in Marxism in theory, only in practice (343). They might have given him a lectureship in philosophy, but he lost interest in moving there.

W began to debate what to do next as his fellowship came to an end in 1936. Should he become a doctor? It was at this time that Moritz Schlick was murdered outside Vienna University. W decided to go to Norway for a year again. Francis did not go with him, which tormented Francis horribly.

Chapter 18: Confessions
In Norway, W formulated what would become the first 188 paragraphs of Philosophical Investigations, his most important work, also published posthumously. He also stupidly forced his key friends to listen to a confession he made. It seems horribly neurotic. Rather than simply pray or go to a priest. He made his friends squirm as he told them uncomfortable and generally insignificant sins of his life.

The most important was when he went back to Austria and asked forgiveness for the girl he hit so hard in the head that she bled. He told about having sex with a woman as a young man. He confessed that three of his grandparents were Jews and thus that, according to the Nuremberg laws, he was a Jew.

Despite his confessions, he still ended up inviting Francis to Norway, where they had a trist.

In the second half of his time in Norway, he wrote Part I what would later be published as Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The criteria for correct or incorrect reasoning are not provided by some external realm of Platonic truths but by "a convention, or a use" (381).

Wittgenstein 3: World War I and Teaching

I'm continuing to read Wittgenstein's biography. My first two posts are

1. Childhood and Engineer
2. Student at Cambridge

I'm not very motivated to summarize my reading in detail. I've read past chapters 6-9.

World War I changed Wittgenstein quite dramatically. Chiefly, it pulled him somewhat out of a pure interest in logic and into an appreciation of the mystical and the religious. When Bertrand Russell met him after the war, Russell wanted pretty much nothing to do with him thereafter.

Chapter 6: Behind the Lines
I'm getting ahead of myself. Wittgenstein joined the Austrian army, not for nationalistic reasons but because he thought the experience of facing death might improve him as a person. He requested to be placed on the front lines of the eastern front, a request that was eventually granted.

He was in contact by letter with his friends in England and elsewhere during the war. The family in Berlin, Frege, Pinsent. He discovered Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. It more than anything became a source of hope and faith. Not too long hence he would wonder if he should become a monk. A close friend in this regard was someone who would end up in Hungary after Austria lost its empire, a man named Paul Engelmann,

In 1915, he had a first version of the Tractatus. At this point it was still focused on logic. It had the following elements:

• Picture Theory of meaning
• metaphysics of "logical atomism"
• analysis of logic in terms of tautology and contradiction
• the distinction between showing and telling
• the method of using truth tables (to show whether a logical proposition is a tautology or contradiction)

Wittgenstein worked as an engineer for a time but then in March 1916 he received his wish to go the the front.

Chapter 7: At the Front
Wittgenstein wanted to look death in the eye without fear. "Only death gives life its meaning." "Fear in the face of death is the best sign of a false life."

It was during his time at the front that his work changed. It took on a more mystical quality. It became more Schopenhauerian. It became more ethical. "Logical form cannot be expressed within language." "Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic." These things could be shown but not told.

There are things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are sub specie aeternitatis, "under the form of eternity."

Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus at his uncle Paul's house. His uncle found him distraught at a railway station. Wittgenstein's best friend Pinsent had died in a plane crash. it had the theory of logic he worked out in Norway, the picture theory of language he worked out at the beginning of the war, and the Schopenhauerian mysticism from the second half of the war.

It is reassuring to me that few people could understand the Tractatus. Frege couldn't. Russell couldn't hardly. This was of course discouraging to Wittgenstein who thought the things they needed explained couldn't be told, only shown. Meanwhile, Russell was in trouble for his anti-war efforts, even imprisoned a little. He had been let go from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Chapter 8: The Unprintable Truth
Wittgenstein couldn't find a publisher in Germany after the war. He would spend the end of the war in northern Italy and then as a prisoner of war for a while. When he returned to Vienna, he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Then he dispensed with it all, gave it all away.

He met with Russell at the Hague in 1920. Witt was horribly depressed throughout this whole season.

Chapter 9: An Entirely Rural Affair
Russell and his people worked to get it published. After rejection after rejection they finally found an English publisher in 1921. Russell was in China when another student found a publisher in Germany. The version was abysmal. No proofs were shown him.

Meanwhile, Witt became an elementary school teacher. He was a failure. He boxed the ears of students when they couldn't get things. He even caused one girl to bled. This was in several places in rural Austria for about three years. He did write a moderately successful book of vocabulary for children.

Russell met with Witt in Switzerland. They would never be friends again. Witt disagreed with Russell divorcing his wife to marry his six month's pregnant mistress. He had become a mystic. Russell had gone on to publish his same old stuff that annoyed Witt. Russell had become a champion of democracy and Witt did not think people could rule themselves.

For a brief time a bright young student at Cambridge named Frank Ramsey had interaction with Witt about his work. As usual, it would eventually sour.

The chapter ends in 1926, with both of my parents alive. :-)

Wittgenstein 2: Student at Cambridge

Hard to believe that I am still on schedule to finish Ray Monk's biography on Wittgenstein by the end of the month. My first post is here.

Chapters 2-5 cover the days when Wittgenstein was in England and Norway.

• In chapter 2 he is in Manchester, still studying aeronautics. He attends some mathematics lectures in 1908.
• Here is a decisive point. A fellow student introduces him to Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics (1903). Russell's ten year project's goal was to reduce mathematics to a few fundamental principles.
• Ten years earlier Gottlob Frege had published something similar: Grundgestze der Arithmetik. Just before his second volume, Russell indicated to Frege a fundamental contradiction in his work.
• These problems piqued Wittgenstein's interest--a first.
• Chapter 3 is called "Russell's Protege." In 1911 Wittgenstein visited Frege with some of his thoughts. Frege "wiped the floor" with him. But Frege thought enough of him to introduce him to Russell. 
• Russell needed a protege. He was going popular in his writing (which Wittgenstein would soon eschew). Wittgenstein was supposed to go back to Manchester but went to Cambridge instead 1911. This shift saved Wittgenstein's life for he felt like if he couldn't do something spectacular, he shouldn't live.
• At first (and intermittently later), Wittgenstein was very annoying. They once had an argument late at night over whether there was a rhinoceros in the room. This anticipated Wittgenstein's first principle in the Tractatus: "The world is the totality of facts, not things."
• Wittgenstein came to believe you should be completely blunt. He hated English politeness, saw it as dishonest. 
• Russell came to see Wittgenstein as his successor in logic. For a short time he also had conversation with G. E. Moore. Perhaps his best friend was Pinsent.
• Chapter 4 is called "Russell's Master." From the fall of 1912 on, Russell soon began to get paralyzed if Wittgenstein criticized his ideas. They would eventually not talk about their work to each other by 1913.
• Wittgenstein became part of an elite group at Cambridge called "The Apostles." Apparently there was a lot of homosexual intrigue as part of this group. Wittgenstein of course did not really believe in sexual expression.
• Wittgenstein was looking for atomic propositions in logic.
• In January 1913, Wittgenstein's father finally died of cancer. 
• Wittgenstein became convinced that he was going to die. Russell promised to publish his work if he should die.
• Chapter 5 is called Norway. Wittgenstein determines that people are distracting him. He spends a year in Norway thinking and writing. 
• Notes on Logic are noted taken by Russell on W's thoughts, first philosophical work, just before he left.
• Wittgenstein wanted Moore to come to write down his thoughts (he had broken with Russell). Moore finally comes in spring of 1914 for two weeks, writes down Logik. A key distinction is between showing and telling.
• Wittgenstein wants it to count as his BA thesis. But it is not in the right form and lacks a preface. W writes a vicious letter to Moore, who never again corresponds with him.

Wittgenstein 1: Laboratory for Self-Instruction

I've returned for the next month or so to Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. Finished chapter 1 this morning. Man, what a depressing place Vienna must have been at the beginning of the twentieth century.

• Two of Wittgenstein's brothers committed suicide.
• Anguish over sexuality seems pretty widespread too. A racist, misogynist man named Weininger shot himself in the house where Beethoven died--he hated himself as a Jew and homosexual. Hitler called him the only good Jew who realized he must kill himself.
• Weininger's views only became significant because of his death--a bunch of junk.
• They all seemed to live under the shadow of earlier genius. They saw themselves as inferior, deteriorated.
• Wittgenstein overlapped with Hitler at Linz for a year (1904-05). No indication of a connection. Wittgenstein was there from 1903-1906. There Hitler had Leopold Poetsch as a teacher, who taught pan-German, folk ideology, in contrast to the degenerated Hapsburg dynasty.
• He pursued engineering type things to please his father. He pretended to be interested in things he wasn't interested in because of his father's desires. Very wealthy family, Jewish in background, though they converted to Christianity earlier.
• Wittgenstein couldn't bring himself to believe in Christianity.
• Schopenhauer influenced him. Weininger's view on men influenced him. Hertz and Boltzmann were Kantian, which influenced him.
• Boltzmann committed suicide in Vienna in 1906, thinking himself inferior.
• Wittgenstein went then from Linz to Berlin (he might otherwise have studied with Boltzmann). Continued technical training. In 1908, he went to Manchester to continue...

Religious Language and Misunderstanding

I don't know if I really understood where an anonymous commenter was coming from yesterday, but our exchange sparked some thoughts that were meaningful at least to me.  I believe that it can be very difficult for what I might call "evidentiary" thinkers and "religious" thinkers both to communicate and understand each other.

Wittgenstein, a mid-twentieth century philosopher, suggested that religious language was a special kind of language game, one that had an internal logic and coherence but did not really refer to supernatural realities at all.  That is to say, he didn't actually believe Christians were talking about God as a real being outside ourselves.  He believed that this language worked for Christians whether there was an actual God or not.  A key indication of this claim to him was his sense that no amount of evidence would be sufficient to convince a religious thinker that his or her core religious beliefs were false.

I don't fully agree with Wittgenstein, but he may have captured an element of truth.  It may very well be the case that many Christians use religious language at least  partially in this way.  I have observed, for example, that some Christians--even pastors--pray in a way that sounds more like they are talking to the congregation or themselves rather than to some Being with an objective existence beyond the church walls. And some people talk of belief in God as if it were a matter of personal choice rather than something that is either true or false.

I'm calling this way of thinking "religious thinking."  It is leans heavily toward a non-evidence or non-referential type of thinking that is largely non-falsifiable on the basis of external evidence or attack.  A lot of political thinking is of this sort too, especially when it comes to a rabid Democrat or Republican. Their ideas are not about what can be demonstrated, but data is used to reinforce what is already believed.

Evidentiary thinking, in this context, is thinking that can be modified on the basis of engagement with the data of the external world.  Ideas can be measured against the "real world," including whether a set of ideas seems to work in predicting outcomes or whether excuses and rationalizations regularly have to be made.

Religious thinking often involves a set of interpretations of scriptural texts.  These interpretations may have little relationship to the actual meaning of those texts, but nevertheless function within the overall language system of the group in question.  They have an internal logic rather than a referential one.

In the contemporary church, you may find evidentiary thinkers and religious thinkers sitting next to each other in the pew.  The evidentiary thinkers may find it very difficult to figure out what is going on or what exactly the preacher is saying.  The pastor may be using words in a way that is quite difficult for them to penetrate, like the sermon is speaking a foreign language (of which "Christianese" is a part). Meanwhile, the religious thinker may think the evidentiary thinker lacks spiritual depth, is like the seed that fell on the path and was snatched by the birds, or is even predestined to be damned.

An evidentiary thinker completely outside a religion may find its adherents unintelligible (e.g., Richard Dawkins).  Such individuals can speak condescendingly to the religious, completely unaware of the profound way in which religious language functions within a religious community. Unaware of their own assumptions, such individuals ignorantly try to throw a mountain of data at the religious, like the person that stupidly tries to communicate to a foreign speaker by shouting louder in English.

The only way to communicate to a religious thinker is to enter into his or her own language game, just as the only way to communicate to an evidentiary thinker is to speak the language of evidence. The most effective way to change a faulty religious language is to enter it and set it upon itself by demonstrating incoherence. The most effective way to change an evidentiary thinker is either to provide counter-evidence or uncover unexamined assumptions (such as the untenable assumption that anyone can evaluate evidence objectively).

But as it is, these two types of thinkers more often than not just talk past each other.  Of course, religious thinkers from differing "religions" also talk past each other.  We see this dynamic in the lead up to every presidential election...

Augustine's On Christian Doctrine Book 3 (Part 1)

What follows is the first part of a summary and comment on this classic hermeneutical work by Augustine.  If you want to read this classic Christian (and philosophical) piece, you will find it here.
__________
In Book 2 of On Christian Doctrine, produced in AD397, Augustine set out his understanding of how words indicate meaning.  Words are "signs" that point to meanings.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, a twentieth century philosopher, called this the "picture theory" of language.  You might think of it like a cartoon.  When I read a word, a picture that is the meaning for the word appears in the bubble above my head.

This only works some of the time. Wittgenstein pointed out that the meanings of a lot of words and "signs" can't be pictured.  For example, you can picture a rude gesture but you can't picture its meaning. Other examples I might give include the word "is" or the word "righteousness." I personally do not even picture a "wild goose chase" and yet understand the phrase perfectly well all the same.

Wittgenstein much more soundly proposed that the meaning of words is not in some pictured definition but rather in the way we use them in certain contexts. In certain contexts or "forms of life," as he called them, we play certain "language games" with words.  If I yell "fire" in a crowded room, you know that what I have really said is to leave the room as quickly as possible if you don't want to burn to death.  If I yell "fire" as the commander of a group of men with rifles pointing at a blindfolded criminal, I'm probably telling you to shoot the person to death.  More examples could be provided.

By the way, it is in Book 2 of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine that he gives what was no doubt becoming the consensus of Christians at that time concerning the books of the Old and New Testament. The canon of the Old Testament, as it is called, included the so called apocryphal books that Martin Luther would later remove from the Protestant canon. The canon of the New Testament corresponds to the list of books that had first appeared only three decades previously in the 367 Easter letter of Athanasius.

Book 3 deals with the question of Scripture's ambiguity and especially when we should read the Bible literally and when we should read the Bible figuratively. Some ambiguity can come from matters of punctuation (chap. 2). Here we need to keep in mind that texts of Augustine's day (and this was true of the original biblical texts as well) largely did not use punctuation to separate words from each other, let alone one sentence from another (it's called "continuous script," or scriptio continua in Latin). All the punctuation in our Bibles is a matter of interpretation.

Augustine of course teaches that decisions about punctuation should be guided by the "rule of faith" when one cannot resolve an issue on the basis of context.  For the Christians of the earliest centuries, the rule of faith was that sense of basic Christian beliefs, core Christian thinking, the "deposit" of faith left by the earliest apostles. For Augustine, it was this basic Christian theology that resolved issues of ambiguity.  We might put it this way: when in doubt, go with an interpretation that results in an "orthodox" meaning.

This approach brings out a crucial issue. It seems beyond question that the original meaning a biblical text had was a function of its historical and literary context. That is to say, the meaning a biblical author or a biblical audience would have understood by the words of a biblical text is a function of how words were being used at that point in time and place and that they would have understood the words of one verse in the light of the words that had come just previously.

What we will find repeatedly in Book 3 of On Christian Doctrine is that Augustine's decisions on the meaning of a text follow context unless that meaning bumps up against the rule of faith.  In that case, he will shift into a figurative meaning that fits with the rule of faith and consider that the meaning God intends the text to have. He is by no means unique in this approach. We can easily find it in other interpreters of the time (e.g., the first century Jewish writer Philo), not least the New Testament authors themselves.

Since the Protestant Reformation, there has been reluctance to interpret biblical texts figuratively unless it was clear that the biblical authors themselves were being figurative originally. For example, we can interpret the story of Sarah and Hagar allegorically in Galatians 4 because that is the way Paul takes the story there. An allegory is where someone interprets the characters or various elements of a story as representations of something else that is unrelated to the original sense.

So Sarah in Paul's interpretation becomes a symbol of the heavenly Jerusalem, while Hagar symbolizes the earthly Jerusalem. This interpretation has nothing to do with the original story of Sarah and Hagar, which was about two women who fought over their children.  Paul's interpretation is allegorical.

Evangelicals of the twentieth century have arguably tended to modify Augustine's approach. Follow what seems to be the most likely contextual meaning of the biblical text unless it comes into conflict with the rule of faith (that is, the "orthodoxies" of the evangelical tradition or the particular faith community of which one is a part). If they conflict, then find other possible ways to read the text in context such that it fits with the rule of faith. In this way, evangelical hermeneutics (the study of how to interpret texts) has avoided the kinds of non-literal interpretations of pre-Reformation interpretation while still trying to read the biblical texts in context. One of the purposes of this summary is to help us wrestle with these questions of hermeneutics.

Interestingly, Augustine considers some ambiguities of punctuation to be relatively unimportant.  If context is not clear, if the rule of faith does not dictate a particular interpretation, he leaves it up to the individual.  Punctuate however you like if neither the context nor the rule of faith give you a clear sense of how to punctuate...

The rest tomorrow

Harry Potter and Language Games

For whatever reason, my family follows Harry Potter closely. My two step-daughters are almost the age of the actors and actresses and so have grown up with them. When my youngest children are bored at a restaurant waiting for food, they often play "famous people" with the characters from Harry Potter a regular feature. My wife has already bought us all tickets for the 11:59pm showing Tuesday night and has been rereading the books and having Potter marathons in the evenings at home.

And I have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Rowling is quite brilliant. The narrative world she has created is phenomenally clever at point after point. I come at these movies with a little different lens since I consider myself a philosopher of language and not too shabby a narrative critic.

Last night we watched The Prisoner of Azkaban (the best, I think) and I turned off The Goblet of Fire just before the last challenge. There's a brilliant line from a philosophy of language standpoint in Goblet. Harry and Ron aren't speaking to each other, so at one point they have Hermione brokering a conversation.

Finally, exasperated, she exclaims, "I am not an owl!"

I love that line. In any normal conversation in the real world (read "language game"), it is completely meaningless. What do you mean? You're not wise? You don't stay up at night chasing rodents?

Rowling has successfully created an alternative universe, a narrative world. In the language games of that world, owls carry messages back and forth between people.

As I once said similarly of Jack Handy, frustrated at my own mediocrity, "She's a master!" Bill Patrick, are you out there?