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Comment by lisper

Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously.

The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.

[1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

parent lisper 2 years ago

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