J.N. Findlay

Quotations

On Wittgenstein

Philosophy by rhetorical question, backed up by vividly pictured experiences and accounts of imagined tribal usages, is not easy to counter: often the only possible response to an appeal framed by Wittgenstein in such words as 'But aren't you always experiencing something different when you say X?' or 'Do you know of an experience characteristic of pointing to X', etc. is simply 'Yes' when the answer 'No' is expected, and 'No' when the expected answer is 'Yes'. (Wittgenstein: A Critique, p. 6)

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Wittgenstein, it may be observed, combined an original philosophical genius of the highest order, with a narrowness of philosophical scholarship which in some cases amounted to illiteracy (Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 367).

Could There Very Well Have Been Nothing?

“The notion that there are some facts of existence that cannot be thought away reveals no intrinsic absurdity” the alternative to it is the supposition that there might very well have been nothing, which does not seem to be a deeply illuminating supposition. Certain eastern sages have simply opined that before there was anything there was nothing, and that all there is came out of this nothing: whatever can be said of this opinion, it cannot be said to fill the mind with a flood of light.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 86-87.)

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“It is arguable that our inability to talk about the total absence of anything is merely a speaker-centric predicament, since there are always at least ourselves, our speech and the presuppositions of our speaking, but it is equally possible to regard this as an unwarrantable dogma.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 87.)

On the Coherence of the Phenomenal World

The phenomenal world is like some immense cocktail party, at which we and others are making our own contributions to the deafening clamour: it is only by qualities of voice and coherence in what is said, that we can sort out distinct speakers and conversations, and give each its appropriate due. (Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 26)

Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein on the Escape from the Cave

“Kant, however, tried to do away with philosophical theses, controversies, and antinomies in much the same manner as Wittgenstein, though Wittgenstein performed the slaughter more thoroughly than Kant.  For, if Plato placed men in a cave from which egress was with effort possible, Kant placed them in a cave from which escape was impossible in this life, though it remained thinkable and desirable.  Wittgenstein, however, constructed a habitation for hermits (or for a single hermit) from which escape was not only impossible, but neither thinkable nor desirable, except owing to a confusion.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p.376.