Wittgenstein’s Fly bottle
“What is your aim in Philosophy?”
“To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) - Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly who constantly tries to escape a transparent bottle by banging against the side. Wittgenstein saw it as his job to show these tenacious philosophers out of the top of the fly-bottle and to see philosophy for what it really is - a futile attempt to find an all-encompassing logical form of thought behind the mess that is ordinary language…
Sounds more and more plausible every day, especially after all that Epistemology… I still came out knowing nothing o.O;
Well, some philosophers don’t quite see eye-to-eye with Wittgenstein… ^_^;
“Wittgenstein very fittingly compares a certain type of philosopher with a fly in a bottle, going on and on, buzzing about. And he says it is the task of his philosophy to show the fly the way out of the bottle. But I think it is Wittgenstein himself who is in the bottle and never finds his way out of it; and I certainly don’t think he has shown anybody else the way out.”
–Karl Popper (1902-1994), author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies. (Quoted from Modern British Philosophy, edited by Bryan Magee [St. Martin's Press, 1971])
Source: Philosophy Confidential
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Wittgenstein image from:The D.B. Weldon Library
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Filed under: English, Philosophy by Mike on Monday, January 21st 2008 @ 8:32 pm | Trackback |
