Opinions?

[Boyan]

You mean the quote about Thales? I thought aphorisms are shorter than that.

So what was he trying to say?

I have a distaste for many things in analytical philosophy and logical positivism.

[ExpectantlyIronic]

Boyan,

First thing I read about Russel, which gave me a bad first impression, was how he 'discovered' that saying Scott and later addressing to this person as the author of Veyverly (or something like that), would not make obvious to a person who does not know that Scott is the author of this book that we talk about the same person - a fact that is obvious even to those not interested in philosophy.

You probably came away with a bad impression because you didn't understand the argument at all. Or, more likely, you just find modern logic rigorous and boring. Regardless, the basic idea of the argument you allude to is that Scott=the author of Waverly is not entailed by the fact that Scott is the author of Waverly. This is due to the fact that the proposition "George IV wondered whether Scott is Scott" doesn't mean the same thing as "George IV wondered whether Scott is the author of Waverly". So when we would say "Scott is the author of Waverly" we are making two distinct claims: there is a thing (x) that is the author of Waverly, and Scott is x.

I have a distaste for many things in analytical philosophy and logical positivism.

Russell wasn't a logical positivist. That school of thought was founded by the Vienna Circle who was inspired (though certainly not embraced) by Russell's former protégé Wittgenstein.

[Boyan]

I understood the argument but I say that what he said is very obvious.

To the king George the words Scott and author of Waverly do not necessarily seem like two names for the same person, even though Scott is the author of Waverly. Was that the meaning?

I also still fail to see the importance of his paradox. Is a class of all classes that are not their own members a member of its own class?

Who cares?

Isn't Russel one of the originators of analytical philosophy? I said logical positivism and analytical philosophy.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Boyan: call the aphorism a very cynical lament, disguised as a boring statement of fact.

[ExpectantlyIronic]

Boyan,

To the king George the words Scott and author of Waverly do not necessarily seem like two names for the same person, even though Scott is the author of Waverly. Was that the meaning?

Well no. What Russell was interested in was the logical form of the sentence. For a good long while, logicians figured that "Scott is the author of Waverly" would take the form x=x. I believe it was Frege who noticed that terms with identical referents should be able to be interchangeable in any sentence, and that what Russell would later call 'definite descriptions' didn't seem to work that way. Or, at least, Frege was the first to offer up a solution to the problem. He suggested that one had to distinguish between meaning and reference. Russell just wasn't going to have any of that, and suggested that definite descriptions like "the author of Waverly" simply have a more complex logical form when they appear in a sentence. This is due to the fact that any sentence that invokes them must also claim their existence (as demonstrated by such sentences as "the present King of France is bald"). So what Russell was saying was that instead of saying "Scott is Scott" when we say "Scott is the author of Waverly", we are saying "there is one and only one thing that is the author of Waverly, and Scott is that thing".

Edit: Just to drive the point home, if there were no author of Waverly, we would say that it is false that Scott is it. If the sentence were to say only "Scott is Scott" we would have no grounds for saying it's false due to there being no author of Waverly (if there were none. there is, and Scott is it, but that's besides the point). The sentence "God is the king of the heavens" is false due to the fact that it claims the existence of a king of the heavens, and there is no such thing.

I also still fail to see the importance of his paradox. Is a class of all classes that are not their own members a member of its own class?

If we take the class of all classes that are not a member of themselves, if that class weren't a member of itself it would be, and if it were it wouldn't. The paradox just demonstrated why naive set theory is... naive. It isn't that important if you aren't interested in math or the philosophy of math.

Who cares?

People interested in logic and math.

Isn't Russel one of the originators of analytical philosophy?

He kinda was the originator. Of course, nobody can quite define what it means to be an analytic philosopher or do analytic philosophy. I guess it just means your more like Wittgenstein than Sartre, Chalmers than Derrida, etc; and published a philosophical work during or after the time of folks like Frege, Russell, and Moore. There aren't really any particular views that all "analytic philosophers" share. Wittgenstein himself is known for developing two widely embraced and incompatible philosophical systems (in his later work he used views expressed in his own Tractatus as examples of the wrong way to go about things).

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Question for EI:
If that's the analytic school, what school does Genius forum represent? I'm very bad with -ism's, but there is definitely enough consistency among the views here that I'd be surprised if we didn't all fall into one or the other of maybe two schools. If not only one.

[ExpectantlyIronic]

Trevor,

That's an interesting question. The prevailing thought at this board seems to have an odd mix of influences that's quite unique to it. Particularly in the mix of Eastern and Western traditions. It's tough to shoehorn it into anything.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Okay, I did a second draft of the website. Still kept it simple. FP really helped.

Here 'tis

I waited until I had a second piece of writing to show how I might be able to add to it.

Does it need any more complexity than this?

[Steven Coyle]

Trevor,

It's got bite, but could use spice.

What if you tried moving the content to the far right, to open up the space.

With that, you could possibly insert an image in the left hand side.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Well, moving text to the right-hand side was too much spice, but adding a few images worked. Like Salt with a Pepper shaker...

...at least, I HOPE it worked... :P

[Steven Coyle]

Pass it when you've finished.

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