Thursday, March 15, 2007

Thoughts of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tonight, for lack of anything better to do, I read another installment of the seemingly endless debate on religious belief between atheist Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. It made me think of something Ludwig Wittgenstein said. From Wikipedia:

[In Propositions [sic] 6 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein] begins talking of the will, life after death, and God. In his examination of these issues he argues that all discussion of them is a misuse of logic. Specifically, since logical language can only reflect the world, any discussion of the mystical, that which lies outside of the metaphysical subject's world, is meaningless.

And for the last Proposition, No. 7, Wittgenstein writes: "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence." * Amen.

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*(In German: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.")

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