Augustine’s Own (Anti-)Private Language Argument

An Origin of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument? I stumbled upon this proto-Private Language argument, even shorter than Wittgenstein’s. The more that I read Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, the more I get the feeling that Wittgenstein indeed had read this text fairly closely (I see many parallels in thought, including the tantamount notion that words are things defined [...]

Heidegger: He Who Doesn’t Enjoy God

Not a Tool I’ve run into a wonderful article which elucidates Augustine’s and Davidson’s theories of discourse in terms of each other,  Stephen R. Yarbrough’s “The Love of Invention: Augustine, Davidson, and the Discourse of Unifying Belief,” one which I want post something of substance soon. But today it comes to me, through Yarbrough’s explication [...]

Wittgenstein’s Abuse of Augustine’s “making/doing the truth”

Wittgenstein famously begins his Philosophical Investigations  with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions, in Latin no less, which is supposed to reveal a hidden “picture” of language that was damagingly influential across the centuries of Western philosophy, an influence that goes unabated until Wittgenstein theraputically provides us with a new picture, more than 1,500 years later. A [...]

Slightly, Re-evaluating Descartes

The Flexed Lens of Hyperbolic Doubt, as it Imaginatively Focuses the MInd   Instead of seeing Descartes as the harbinger of the tremendous severing of the Body and the Mind, as philosophy can be thought to have suffered over the centuries that followed, there are more subtle readings that grasp the cohesive project that Descartes [...]