Philosophy by the Way

Random quote Killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man. Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563)

In my blog last week, I wrote about J.L. Austin’s language theory. John Searle became that much inspired by Austin’s work, and also by the w...

Random quote We should not take the absence of the word to be equivalent to the absence of thought. Martha C. Nussbaum (1947-)

You don’t need to write thick books and many articles to have a big impact on philosophy. Wittgenstein, for instance, published only one art...

Random quote The relative independence of the motorway in the landscape demonstrates the independence that travelling has gained in our soci...

Philosophers write about all kinds of ingenious and difficult themes that are often remote from day life. They (and I must say that I am oft...

Random quote In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its ...

Aristotle, the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy In the abstract of his article “ Are moral philosoph...

Random quote The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)

To my mind, one of the most intriguing issues in social philosophy is that groups as such can have different opinions than its individual me...

Random quote One of the reasons that we find so few persons rational and agreeable in conversation is there is hardly a person who d...

Mass at Fatima, Portuga l One of the strangest, if not weirdest, words that you can find in many English dictionaries is “mumpsimus”. It loo...

Random quote The criterion for philosophy of primitivism lies not in the conceptual form to which one feels absolutely allied, but in the pu...

Yes, I know that you are eagerly waiting for a new blog. However, this time you’ll see only mental fog. Sometimes I must working on my physi...

Random quote One does not need to hope in order to undertake something, nor to succeed in order to persevere. William I of Orange (the Silen...

Traces of a roe (little deer) in the concrete of a cycle track Philosophers often come with new theories which then are refuted by other phi...

Random quote As is well known, everyone sees the world differently, but he usually does not notice anything of it. Gerhard Roth (1942-)

The photo at the top of this blog shows a boundary stone somewhere east of the Dutch town of Nijmegen. The stone marks there the border betw...

Random quote No man shall be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one is to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleases....

Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations , § 443: “ ‘The red which you imagine is surely not the same (not the same thing) as...

Random quote The history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. … This history is thought in s...

  Last week I was on holiday and so I couldn’t write a blog. Instead, I have uploaded this photo. It’s a photo that I like a lot. I have tak...

Random quote That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise. Ludwig Wittgenstei...

I find fallacies intriguing. That’s why I have treated them already several times in these blogs. Fallacies are incorrect reasonings and soo...

Random quote Fighting for prestige, for honour, is litteraly fighting for nothing, René Girard (1923-2015)

OLympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece In the days of Montaigne there were no Olympic Games. The original Olympic Games of Antiquity had ended a...

Random quote All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell (1903-1950)

For Wittgenstein, a picture represents what it depicts. Often it also expresses what we cannot say in words. If we can, maybe we need a long...

Random quote The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its ...

In my last blog we have seen that photography was important for Wittgenstein, not only because he himself was an enthusiast photographer, bu...

Random quote Every people must face the truth that in the space it calls its property and to which it is attached, it is a relatively recent...

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have ...