josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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29 Jan '16 07:17:31 AM

'Wie weiß er aber…' (§1): the two points the interlocutor focuses on in Wittgenstein's example, about which Wittgenstein says that he just assumes the shopkeeper acts as described, also seem to lend themselves to construal in terms of an idea of rules (cf. the use of a table as a rule in §86, and the effort to establish rules for actions or names' meanings in §§82–3).

27 Jan '16 01:30:19 AM

—As if readers became skeptics through reading too much.

26 Jan '16 06:41:43 PM

If Descartes' Meditations were a longer book, it wouldn't be believable.

26 Jan '16 06:51:51 AM

One of those nights where you remember every lover. Not by trying, nor not trying, just one, then another, and another.

26 Jan '16 01:34:20 AM

Celan the aphorist

26 Jan '16 01:33:02 AM

Showing up

25 Jan '16 05:07:03 PM

'… and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 'We have no thoughts.''

24 Jan '16 08:41:44 PM

'Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The studious classes are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption, —pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain, —they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.'

23 Jan '16 07:05:43 PM

A sudden urge to read the dictionary.