i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.

at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).

i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.

i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.

Labels: math, literature, philosophy

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