David Rozema

The primary philosophical problem dealt with in this essay is familiar: What is the relationship between reality and thought or language? The conclusion offered is less familiar: conceptual activity cannot provide answers to these questions. Rather than being a problem that is solved by rational inquiry, it is resolved by each individual through their commitment to a characteristic way of life. I critique two important philosophical positions: Hegelian idealism, and its philosophical descendant, 'linguistic idealism,' as defended by Hilary Putnam. These philosophers attack the problem by trying to make sense of it. ;Hegel asks how it is possible for there to be any 'things'--any objects or concepts--for these necessarily make up reality. He concludes that there can only be 'things' if there is a way for distinctions to be made. The sense of the problem depends upon there being determinate 'things.' Similarly, Putnam's account begins by asking how it is possible for words and expressions to refer to 'things.' ;What makes such determination and reference possible? Hegel says it is Thought itself; Reason. He ultimately takes Reason to be completely constitutive of reality, because no 'thing' can be thought to exist apart from the activity of Reason. Similarly, Putnam says that a correct account of reference necessarily includes conceptualizing: understanding the use of words in accordance with a rational conceptual scheme. Consequently, truth can only be understood from the standpoint of our own conceptualizing capabilities, which are rational. Both views dismiss, a priori, the possibility of any 'thing' existing independent of a conceptual scheme. ;The difficulty is accounting for both the nonideal state of our current conceptual scheme, and the conscious evolution of an ideally rational conceptual scheme in history. Neither of these claims can be justified or understood without the other. After critiquing several attempts to solve this dilemma, I conclude that the status of our current conceptual scheme and our conception of ideality are objectively uncertain. Nevertheless, whenever we attempt to rationally solve the problem of the relationship between thought and reality, we necessarily take our resolution to be objective. This paradoxical result shows that our conceptual scheme or activity cannot fully determine individual existence

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 345-363 [Access article in PDF] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A "Poem" by Ludwig Wittgenstein David Rozema In the Fall term of 1911 the 22-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein presented himself to the Cambridge philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a prospective student of philosophy. Wittgenstein had left off his studies as a promising young aeronautical engineer because, in the course of his engineering studies, he had become obsessed with problems in the foundations of mathematics, the very problems Russell himself had tried to solve in his Principia Mathematica, a work he had completed just the year before. Wittgenstein, it seems, did not consider Russell's work to be the end of the matter, and so he had planned a book of his own on the subject. Although this work never materialized, Wittgenstein's interest in philosophy grew under his studies with Russell. And although Wittgenstein's early work in the philosophy of mathematics and logic were the initial impetus for his interest in philosophy, the events of his life soon led him back to the concerns which have always been central to the spirit of philosophy: How ought a man to live? What constitutes the good for man? What sort of life is a worthy or a beautiful one?It is likely that Wittgenstein's concern with these questions was heightened by what he saw in Russell, who followed a notoriously loose way of life outside of his academic studies. 1 If Wittgenstein ever wondered whether or not there was any connection between Russell's philosophical commitments and Russell's way of life, he never directly confronted Russell with the question. Russell was, after all, his benefactor, his mentor, and the source for his initial interest in philosophical problems. 2 Nevertheless, I maintain, Wittgenstein did confront Russell indirectly: he confronted the part of himself that was like Russell and, by attempting [End Page 345] to describe it in writing—the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—he discovered its barrenness. Insofar as such an act of writing is elucidatory of a person's soul in what and in how it pictures, it can legitimately be called a kind of poetry, for it bears the essential feature of all poetics: it serves to shape, through catharsis, the passions.Thus, though Wittgenstein neither considered the Tractatus to be a poem nor intentionally wrote it as a poem, it turned out to be a kind of poem in the sense that its form fits its content, both of which, in turn, accurately picture a specific form of life, and the passional result of this poetic construction is (and was, for Wittgenstein) a certain appropriate disdain for the form of life it pictures. This is what I suggest with regard to the Tractatus: it is most helpful and is best read as a poem. I will also try to show that this is how Wittgenstein himself came to think it should be read, which in turn helps to explain why he initially allowed and later continued to allow its publication.What does it mean to read the Tractatus as a poem picturing the form of life implicated by a philosophy like that of Russell's? In this poem Wittgenstein takes the fundamental principles of Russell's philosophy—that all words are signs that stand for objects or kinds of objects and that all meaningful propositions represent a possible arrangement of these objects—and draws out the full-blown implications of these principles. In the last section of the poem Wittgenstein shows the practical consequences of a life lived on these principles, concluding: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 3 The two-edged nature of this remark carries the force appropriate to the last line of a poem, for it is both descriptive and imagistic. It describes Wittgenstein's own thought when he realizes that, because of his Russellian philosophical commitments, he has nothing to say with regard to the good, the truth, and the beauty of life; and it is an image of the necessity that a...

Socrate's dialogue with the young student, Theaetetus, is a case of the highest form of education: a ‘divine service’ to the state of Athens, to Theaetetus' family and friends, and to Theaetetus himself. It is less a means for Socrates (or Plato) to present his theory of knowledge than a sort of ‘noble lie’ designed and intended by Socrates to keep Theaetetus both appropriately humble and hungry for wisdom. The progress of the dialogue is an allegory of moral education, a picturing of what Aristotle later laid out more pedantically in the Nicomachean Ethics.

In his book, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, Wendell Berry describes two poles of how one understands ‘economy’: (a) ‘the kind of economy that exists to protect the “right” of profit’ and (b) ‘the kind of economy [that] exists for the protection of gifts’. In this paper I describe a similar polemic in how one understands ‘education’. I suggest that, correspondingly, there are two kinds of education. There is (a) the education of commodity—the kind of education that seeks to produce persons who will maintain and increase the economy of profit. And there is (b) the education of community—the kind that seeks to foster persons who will maintain and preserve the essential characteristics of community. From the description of these two polemical views of education, it is clear which of them is the more favourable and sensible.

In modern times a gap has appeared between the arts of history and literature, and the sciences of historicism and criticism. Many modern critics, historians, and teachers of literature and history (and even many so‐called authors of literature) have welcomed, or at least complied with, the “scientification” of their arts, resulting in widespread illiteracy with regard to literature and history. The solution to this problem lies in a (re‐)investigation of how the art of literature teaches us the truth. I maintain that the lifeblood of literature is the set of common joys and griefs, the common blessings and sufferings, of mankind. Without a communication of these passions as passions with the result of a transformation or shaping of the soul – without a mimesis, as the Greeks would say –across the boundaries of tribe, race, gender and era, there is no literature; and no literacy. Using a scene from Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, I argue that these passions are part of the truth (or falsity) of any story involving human beings. So literature and history would both be restored if the writers, readers, and teachers of each developed a deeper concern for the whole truth.