The incompleteness arguments are rather daunting, but they can be criticized.Quine wasn’t completely convinced Goedel had accomplished what he said he had accomplished. Goedel’s numbering system itself questionable: admit a statement like “this statement can’t be proven to be true”, put into a reductio, it seems still similar to Russell’s paradox, or the Liar. The real problem of formal logic arises a bit more concretely with the Einscheidungproblem, as discussed by Church and Turing: some shit is not computable.

That said, even the Einscheidungproblem does not seem to pose much of a problem in computing (I imagine it could in some contexts). Your OS works: so much for Turing or Goedel. The pragmatic logician–or programmer–can usually find an ad hoc solution (say, eliminate self-referential statements, algorithms that look Liar-like, etc), and at the same time, get “meta” and ask what does Computability really entail? say in political terms. Programmers are usually glorified accountants (like Java Guru Gosling, who coded …….e-bay).

I like W’s writing, mostly in the PI, and many of his specific points. I doubt that I agree with him about most things, and don’t claim to fully understand him. I think that he was wrong in his apparent belief that “the ethical” can only be spoken of, as it were, poetically, but that he was right to make the separation from science, etc.

The belief that, one way or another, “the ethical” is undiscussable is common to avant-gardists, liberationists, transgressivists, positivists, Marxists, Freudians, structuralists, Nietzscheans and postmodernists. It’s like the conventionalism of our time.

“The ethical” is the wrong name for what they’re talking about.

That said, his points on logic, while important, not that revolutionary: Whitehead/Russell (if not Frege) had already done most of the work for first order logic. Witt’s a philosopher of language–not really a great logician, metaphysician, or political/ethical writer. His writing–the apothegms–itself arrogant, reductionist, guru-like ( Don Barthelme described the mad Guru Ludwig fairly effectively in The Genius).

Between Adorno, Russell, and Wittgenstein, I find Wittgenstein philosophically the most interesting by far, and none of them a source of insights into historical and political reality.

Wittgenstein’s daddy was one of the wealthiest of European industrialists; they were jewish, kultur-vulture sorts (Brahms, Mahler stopping by on occasion, etc) though they converted to xtianity–when the Anschluss started, the sisters barely escaped being, er, Anschluss’d–probably because of the Wittgenstein gold. I believe the Witts were given the “Mischling” stamp: mixed, ala mestizo. Misschling were not treated too well, but generally allowed to live.

Read about Witt’s time at Cambridge (not to say the Poker incident): an eccentric, unstable hysteria case, flitting from atheism to Kierkegaard, philosophy, to engineering, psychology, schoolteaching, etc, a member of the Apostles, at least bi-sexual (rumors there are the LW was, until like the 40s, sort of into hard trade, possibly including pedophilia: at one time he accosted a boy in one of his classes in Austria). And tho’ the Witt-types say otherwise, LW was routinely rude and condescending to Bertrand Russell, who more or less granted him gave him carte blanche and admitted him to a Cambridge PHD, though LW did not have a background in philosophy. Russell may have been glib or a bit pompous: he was hardly Anubis (as Wittgenstein seems on a closer reading).

The Tractatus may be brilliant to some extent (though most variations on Frege and Russell)–k Wittgenstein was more of a constructivist than many realize, and suggested that the tautologies of formal logic don’t really count for much, regardless of the great mirror and so forth

The TLP, mad inconsistent, if not slightly sinister–like the statement at the end, that the TLP was merely ein Spas, and you really didn’t need to bother reading it at all. Adorno also felt that Witt. was a rather monstrous figure, referring to the “What one cannot speak about one must pass over in silence” as a type of “indescribable spiritual vulgarity inasmuch as it ignores the whole point of philosophy”

in cali-code, 5150.

Popper considered Wittgenstein an imposter, if not closet nazi (St. Ludwig in fact knew Der Fuhrer and had attended the same school. I doubt they were pals–LW a bit older: but I suspect LW, who fought for the Kaiser in WWI, would have joined his schoolmate Adolf and the nazis, but had a bit too much jew in him–though there were nazis–even officers– with as much jewish blood as Wittgenstein. Goebbels, Der Fuhrer himself had a speck of two ).

I agree somewhat with Popper’s anti-Wittgenstein perspective, but doesn’t mean I accept Popper as a guru. He was sort of like the late Russell at times: given to grand pronouncements, “position statements”, methodology. The Phil. of Science people, such as Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos were overrated. They might chart out the history of sciences, make pronouncements, talk about paradigms, verification/falsification, etc etc. but it’s all rather vague. Feyerabend doesn’t worship western science, or scientists as did Popper (or Kuhn really). He acknowledges good work–say in medicine, or engineering–and then points out the monsters, even those heroes of America such as Oppenheimer and Einstein.

Too expensive for me, too, but the Googlebook gives you the idea. Munz gets into ev psych etc. in what looks to be a very interesting way.

That’s the topic at hand, isn’t it? Historical continuity–at least in terms of human history– seems to suggest something like hegelian process, with Ideas as motivating factors, and something like dialectic (yet the Hegelian jargon, not to say inconsistencies a problem: the Science of Logic is a bit more obtuse than Aristotle or propositional logic).

Popper claims that process is BS, more or less and suggests that history concerns individuals, not ideology or some vague world spirit; events are not really connected, dialectical thinking and class struggle are illusory etc. Obviously something was at stake with the Popper-Adorno spat.

Ideologies do seem to function to some degree, however though I don’t believe Hegel’s term logic captures the ideology battles, except in a vague sense–we might note something like one historical Force (a Being of some type) negated–say via warfare–and that results in a synthesis of some type, or at least alterations, but that’s hardly predictable: the socio-historical process being more akin to a polylectic, or factionalism, of some sort, which includes history, language, economic, technological (ie materiel), and nationalist factors. Language barriers themselves more significant historical factor than most yokels realize: mutter a few words of french or even spanglish around the usual ‘Merican, watch his eyes roll, and one begins to understand that the socio-linguists were not completely mistaken.

Reality’s more of a plurality than the germans–or their greek masters–realized, though I am not suggesting we automatically reject Hegel’s insistence on totality, and universalization (though Hegel’s more Aristotelian, than platonic–Hegel is read as idealist or mystic, but he never doubts the reality of phenomena, and of history, Time itself. His position closer to aristotelian mechanism–or maybe it’s spinoza materialism– than most college boys realize).