scholarly journals Mysticism and Early Analytic Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Marek Dobrzeniecki
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis

Early analytic philosophy is known for its logical rigor that seems to leave no place for non-rational sources of knowledge such as mystical experiences. The following paper shows on the example of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein that despite of this early analytic philosophy was interested in mysticism and it also shows the roots of this interest. For Russell an application of logical methods to solving philosophical puzzled was an expression of a more fundamental striving – to know the world as it is, sub specie aeternitatis – which is mystical in nature. In turn early Wittgenstein’s philosophy sets the limits of meaningful propositions and provides the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown and what manifests itself in the world. The latter belongs to the realm of the mystical.

How Do We Recognize God

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
Stanisław Judycki
Keyword(s):  
Christian Theology ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
Significant Weakness

There are three main ways to acquire the knowledge of the existence of God and the knowledge of His nature. These are either the arguments taking into account the nature of the world and our thinking about the world, or it is the argumentation trying to prove the authenticity of certain historical events, or it is a reference to particular types of experiences, called mystical experiences. In the case of Christian philosophy we will have to consider, firstly, the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God, and, secondly,  the attempts to show the authenticity of reports of the events regarding Jesus of Nazareth and, thirdly, the arguments in favor of the objectivity of mystical experiences recorded in the history of Christian religion. In regard to all of the above-mentioned three sources of knowledge about God, I would like to ask the following questions. How do we know that all of them refer to the same object? On what basis can we say that even if these three 'ways to God' are correct, they refer us to the same being? Are they independent of each other, and if they depend on each other in some way, what are the relationships among them? If we were not able to demonstrate that the item referred to by the term 'God' in all of these three ways is the same object or being, it would represent a significant weakness in Christian theology and philosophy. I will try to outline what relationship may exist between these three sources of knowledge about God. Then I will attempt to describe the criteria connecting all these sources of knowledge.

scholarly journals Mistisisme dan Hal-hal Tak Tercakapkan : Menimbang Epistemologi Hudhūrī

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Muhammad Sabri
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Language Games ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mystic Experience ◽  
Philosophical Structure

<div><p><strong>Abstract :</strong> In general, this article intends to answer a fundamental question, whether a mystical experience  can  or  cannot  be  expressed  through language. If the answer is positive, what kind of language can ‘formulate’ an inner space of human experience to penetrate into the heart of the most real reality? What kind of consciousness can “bring” the light of God to the ‘empirical’ world? h en how to formulate a mystical consciousness in expressing spiritual experience that is “subjective” and therefore, has limitations? How, in  fact,  the  status  of  “non-subjective  phenomenal” consciousness in Islamic epistemology? h e above questions, of course, are just a small ripple for those who seek to dive into the depth of “Mystical Ocean without shore”. To  give an answer, this article then presents two contemporary philosophers from the genre of analytic philosophy, but from a diff erent background from that of tradition: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)  and  Mehdi Ha’iri  Yazdi  (1923  to  1999).  h is  article appears to be a “resistance” epistemic: to show the fragile philosophical structure of positivism to capture the invisible ‘realities’. h is last genre of philosophy, which is concerned mostly with the reliability of facts, the necessity correspondence between the facts and language, and glorifi es the verifi cation principles, has experienced “stutters” in every endeavor to reveal the world of meaning. h is article, also seeks reveal the way to the world of “experience” and does not stop at the world of knowledge. By adopting the approach of Analytic Philosophy, this article shows the folds of meaning and reality: empirical, meta-empirical, existential, and spiritual.  For  the  author,  the  all  layers  of  reality  can  only  be  revealed through a mystical experience, a presential knowledge (al-’ilm al-hudhūrī) in a perfect ontological state.</p><p><em>Keywords : Mystical experience, Logical-positivism, al-‘ilm al-hudhūrī, Language games, Logosentrism, Metalanguage, Perceptive</em></p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstrak :</strong> Secara umum artikel ini ingin menjawab sebuah pertanyaan fundamental apakah pengalaman mistik (mystic experience) dapat diekspresikan melalui bahasa. Jika jawabnya positif, bahasa jenis apakah yang bisa ‘merumuskan’ sebuah pengalaman inner space manusia hingga menembus ke jantung realitas yang paling sejati? Kesadaran jenis apakah yang mampu “menghadirkan” cahaya Tuhan ke dunia ‘empiris’? Lalu bagaimana merumuskan sebuah kesadaran mistik dalam ungkapan- ungkapan pengalaman keruhanian yang bersifat “subyektif ” dan karena itu memiliki keterbatasan-keterbatasan? Bagaimana sejatinya posisi kesadaran “subyektif-non fenomenal” dalam bangunan epistemologi Islam? Deretan pertanyaan di atas, tentu hanyalah riak kecil dari gelombang tanya yang ingin menyelami kedalaman “lautan mistik” yang tak bertepi. Untuk menjawab terhadap pertanyaan di atas, artikel ini lalu menghadirkan dua fi lsuf kontemporer yang berasal dari genre fi lsafat analitik (analytic philosophy) namun dari latar belakang tradisi yang berbeda: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) dan Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi (1923-1999). Artikel ini hadir untuk sebuah “perlawanan” epistemik: memperlihatkan betapa gawatnya bangunan filsafat Positivisme dalam memotret ‘realitas-realitas’ yang tak kasat mata. Genre fi lsafat terakhir ini, meski berhasil memesona tradisi  fi lsafat Barat yang memuja, keterandalan fakta, keharusan korespondensi antara fakta dan bahasa, dan mengagungkan verifi cation principles, tetapi ia mengalami “kegagapan” dalam setiap ikhtiar menyingkap dunia makna (meaning). artikel ini, sebaliknya, memperlihatkan pentingnya menempuh jalan ke dunia “pengalaman”(experience) dan tidak berhenti pada dunia pengetahuan (knowledge). Dengan menggunakan pendekatan Filsafat Analitik,  penulis memperlihatkan lipatan makna dan realitas yang berlapis: empirik, meta-empirik, eksistensial, dan spiritual. Dan seluruh lapisan  realitas tersebut hanya dapat disingkap melalui pengalaman mistik via al-‘ilm al-hudhūrī dalam sebuah ‘ketercelupan ontologis’ yang sempurna.</p><p><em>Kata kunci : Pengalaman mistik, Logika-positivistik, al-‘ilm al-hudhūrī, Permainan bahasa, Logosentrime, Metabahasa, Perseptif</em></p></div>

scholarly journals Person of the Issue: William James (1842-1910)

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Patel
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
School Of Medicine ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Thinker

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.

The Ship of Logic on the High Seas of Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-104
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy ◽  
High Seas

Chapter 3 looks at the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy as it emerges from Gottlob Frege, gains momentum in Bertrand Russell, and finds elaboration in the early and middle work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The characteristic move of linguistic philosophy will be the clarification of presumably ‘muddled’ ordinary statements: the bringing to the surface a lucidity that is lurking within language, needing only to be coaxed out. The author shows how in the works of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein, the drive to clarity entails a stripping away of every intersubjective, rhetorical element in discourse. He then argues that a language clarified by professional philosophers is a substitute for the objectivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by showing how intersubjectivity returns first as irony in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and then as the belief that language always ‘works’: that it fails only when external circumstances disturb its inner workings.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Sanford Shieh
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Philosophy Of Logic ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Issue

This chapter presents the principal philosophical issue of the book: is the nature of logic specified by the concepts of necessity and possibility? According to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the answer is no, because these concepts of modality are empty: there are no genuine distinctions among the necessary, the possible and the actual. The upshot for Frege and Russell is that logic is fundamental, and modality is to be reconstructed from logical notions. This chapter continues with a brief outline of Volume II of this work: how C. I. Lewis and Ludwig Wittgenstein argued against the anti-modal stance of Frege and Russell. I conclude with a note on the significance of this aspect of early analytic philosophy for contemporary philosophy of logic and modality.

scholarly journals Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Beaney
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Philosophical Questions

Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction introduces some of the key ideas of the founders of analytic philosophy—Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Susan Stebbing around the turn of the 20th century—by exploring certain fundamental philosophical questions and showing how those ideas can be used in offering answers. Considering the work of Susan Stebbing, it also explores the application of analytic philosophy to critical thinking, and emphasizes the conceptual creativity that lies at the heart of fruitful analysis. Throughout, this VSI illustrates why clarity of thinking, precision of expression, and rigour of argumentation are rightly seen as virtues of analytic philosophy.

The Event Universe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leemon B. McHenry
Keyword(s):  
Electromagnetic Field ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Linguistic Methods

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Beyond Perennialism and Constructivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayon Maharaj
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Common Core ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Conditioning ◽  
Mystical Experiences

This chapter draws upon Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and mystical testimony in order to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the nature of mystical experience. In recent analytic philosophy of religion, two approaches to mystical experience have been especially influential: perennialism and constructivism. While perennialists maintain that there is a common core of all mystical experiences across various cultures, constructivists claim that a mystic’s cultural conditioning plays a major role in shaping his or her mystical experiences. After identifying the strengths and limitations of these two positions, Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna champions a “manifestationist” approach to mystical experience that provides a powerful dialectical alternative to both perennialism and constructivism. According to Sri Ramakrishna, mystics in various traditions experience different real manifestations of one and the same impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. Sri Ramakrishna’s manifestationist paradigm shares the advantages of both perennialism and constructivism but avoids their respective weaknesses and limitations.

scholarly journals On Russell’s 1927 Book The Analysis of Matter

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Said Mikki
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Foundations Of Physics ◽  
The World ◽  
Ordinal Space ◽  
Historical Fact

The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be named Russell space, introduced in Part III of that book, may be viewed as more fundamental than many other types of spaces since the highly abstract nature of the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell there would incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, but not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. We also point out the curious historical fact that the book The Analysis of Matter can be chronologically considered the earliest book-length generic attempt to reflect on the relation between quantum mechanics, just emerging by that time, and general relativity.

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