Muddles

The authors in an ironic twist name the chapter where this report on the aftermath of the sole encounter between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein "Clearing Up the Muddle", ironic because they strategically position the occupation of identifying muddles by quoting from the minutes of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club (MSC).

Rubbish or not, Wittgenstein apparently felt the need to reply to Popper's arguments at the meeting of the MSC three weeks later. "Prof. Wittgenstein's main aim", say the minutes, "was to correct some misunderstandings about philosophy as practised by the Cambridge school (i.e. by Wittgenstein himself)." And the minutes also record Wittgenstein's assertion that "the general form of a philosophical question is 'I am in a muddle; I don't know my way.'"

A point truly not lost on the reader of Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.

And so for day 744
26.12.2008