Word: logico
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Hofstadter's model of the self occupies a middle ground, hard won via logico-philosophical reasoning: it's neither spiritual--he's not a religious man--nor is it locked into the cold neurological materialism of cellular mechanics. To Hofstadter, the human mind is a bright, shimmering, self-sustaining miracle of philosophical bootstrappery: "vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful...
...mathematical logic, and rushed to Cambridge to become the protege of Bertrand Russell, whose monumental Principia Mathematica (1913), written with Alfred North Whitehead, was an attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein's first book, published in England in 1922, the even more grandly titled Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, went even further, and was thought by him, and by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key problems definitively solved once and for all. Some "philosophical" propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated within his system, and those that couldn't--among them, metaphysical riddles...
...then along came Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus redefined and reduced the scope of the discipline. Says Martin: "As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein it seemed pointless. Then I realized that in the arts you don't have to discover meaning, you create it. There are no rules, no true and false, no right and wrong. Anyway, these were the musings of a 21-year-old kid." A 21-year-old kid who was ready...
...reality and the question of whether language clouds rather than defines what is actual. To the question, "What is your aim in philosophy?", he answered, "To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle." He was the fly, and words the sticky trap. In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he used a rigorous logic to enclose the boundaries of language. What lay outside, he concluded, was a reality that could not be named, let alone explained. He became the patron saint of logical positivism, that dry, scrupulous wing of modern philosophy most concerned with linguistics, most scornful...
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