Moritz Schlick promoted the work of Wittgenstein even though he was the senior central member of the Vienna circle. But his ideas were in some sense more interesting in some ways because he was basically taking the ideas of Hilbert about axioms in geometry and using them to think about philosophy. He wanted to split concepts from percepts and have an axiomatic platform of concepts as the basis of reasoning, more or less like the axioms of set theory, but higher concepts. I talk about him in my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign.

Wittgenstein basically went off the deep end in Tractatus with a very reductionist approach of everything to facts stated in propositions and attempted to systematize those rather than concentrating on the conceptual level, but I guess when the Hilbert program fell apart that effected Schlick’s approach too. Wittgenstein eventually migrated from language facts to language games and other interesting ideas, to me the most interesting of which are his concentration on the schemas. I like his Philosophical Grammar better than Philosophical investigations.

But essentially we can see Wittgenstein taking a wrong turn into Language Philosophy which is the source of all Analytic Philosophy, that is basically an anti-philosophy. Schlick instead wanted to make philosophy precise like geometry and axiomize it, which if possible would give a stable basis for thought. But of course, this program was not followed up due to the impact of Godel’s undecidability proof. But I try to explain the generality of the axiomatic platform approach in my dissertation, and how that hooks into other aspects of the Western tradition. The closest thing I know to this approach is the ideas about conceptual lattices. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_lattice

This brings up a point which I make over and over, which is to say that “IS” is a parochial Indo-European concept not shared by other languages and worlds, many of which we have wiped out by colonialism, but sufficent other languages and worlds exist that we should not get the idea that Being is a universal as we have thought for centuries, but rather it is very specific to our worldview which has become dominant and foisted it on others over the last few centuries.

So when we say “What IS” about anything we are talking about the essence or the What of something that has Being projected on it over the existential core. Our idea of essence is caught up in our concept of Being, and we talk about the essential being of something, which normally indicates the kind or sort of thing that something is. However, in Husserl’s phenomenology he identifies ‘essence perception’ as different from abstractions. So the essence of something in this case is the limits and coherence of its attributes and thus about the multiple constraints on something that makes it what it is and not something else at some level of family resemblance between like things. So we talk about genera and species of things, like animals for instance. As Heidegger shows in Being and Time Pure Being (present-at-hand) is mostly ruled by abstraction, while Process Being (ready-to-hand) is mostly ruled by essence perception which he calls circumspective concern and relates to the totality of the things that support existence, and many of those things are part of the technological infrastructure that supports actions toward goals which are seen in terms of static abstractions.

What IS is usually revealed by the processes that operate on something, so for instance evolution operates on species, and defines their what in relation to their niche in an ecosystem that is itself evolving over time which pushes the organisms of a given kind to evolve as well with a dollop of randomness just to add a bit of interest to the proceedings. So essences tend to be seen functionally in terms of the dynamics of the thing in relation to other things, and the things with their essence keeps much of its content which might otherwise be washed away by abstractions that are static illusory continuities concerning the thing, for instance when we represent something by a name. The name may capture the abstraction but has nothing to do with capturing the essence of something which needs more detail in terms of the characteristics and the coherence and limits of those characteristics and many times also including the lifecycle of the thing. So for instance we go into a Forest and look around at the trees and realize that we are seeing trees at all points in their lifecycle and so we see playing itself out around us in the various examples we see around us the various stages of growth of a given kind of tree. The constraints on the essence of the tree thus are a dynamic envelope of possible changes over time as well which we now normally relate to the genetic structure within the DNA of the cells of the organism which then we relate to the Epigenetic landscape that is produced when the cell develops in a given environment. So the term essence not only relates to constraints in terms of whether something stays the same if the limits or arrangement or presence of characteristics change, but also it relates to the constraints on the development of the thing in line with the norms of that species given its genetic makeup and the interaction with the ecosystem.

But there is another level of Essence that I talk about in my dissertation on Emergent Design [http://about.me/emergentdesign] which is at the Hyper Being level and which is related to Derrida’s ideas of Differance (differing and deferring). At a certain point we must consider the discontinuities between kinds of things, and the discontinuities in development, and how distinctions are made in the first place between things in space and time and how fragile that process is. I will leave it to the reader to explore this level by themselves but it has to do with how the discontinuities come to be in space and time given representations and repetitions within things and the interplay between these distinctions and what that says about the relation between the species and the individual, in other words the individual differences can matter, and the essence at the level of species is not everything, but there is a peculiar essence to individual things that is unique and singular and goes beyond what is just at the level of kind or sort. And many times when we look at all the individual differences say in trees of the same species there is a wide variety of differences and there is a spectrum or field of possibilities that are actualized many times with striking anomalies that are instructive.

I don’t really mention it in my dissertation but we can also see essence at the level of Wild Being as well. But here we are talking about the field of propensities by which probabilities are transformed into actualities. In other words even beyond individual differences there is the realm of possibility and the adjacent possible that renders potentials that may or may not be actualized into specific viable individuals. And this is the level where the Chinese talk about Chi and Li. Essentially their culture is the reverse of ours because they posit that Chi, Li and Shu are the fundamentals and the other levels are degeneration from the rich reality that is seen for instance in Jade Carvings. Jade is more priceless than gold in China because the individual piece of Jade has subtle coloring and texture, and pattern laid down in time as the crystals formed which can be brought out in carving to sublime aesthetic effect. Chi is the subtle energy flows that form the crystals, what Adrian Bijan calls flow architecture within a stream of flow like that which builds up Jade cystals. Li is the precise patterning laid down in that process that shows subtle natural ordering of the crystalline content along with the impurities that we see as a pattern. But when we see that pattern we are witnessing the propensities that the individual particles had which were realized in the fractal patterning of the Jade material. A good book about this is http://www.amazon.com/The-Propen…. Shu is the numerically distinct object which exhibits the Li based on the flow of the Chi. But Li also means principle in as much as there are different sorts of propensities that things might have at this greatest possible level of granularity where the content and its specific givenness matters. Knowing the Li of things allows one to recognize the patterns that are forming when they have not yet become set in stone, and then we can recognize what we see set in stone (i.e. the actual Jade patterning) as just one possible realized potential from a host of possible ones that could have occurred but didn’t. But the one that did form the pattern we see expresses the propensities, dispositions, tendencies at play in the moment when the crystal was actually forming that gave rise to its suchness and thatness which is beyond words but seen immediately in the thing itself before our eyes. We can think of Li as viablity developmental channels which are direcelty expressed in the specifics of the patterning we see in something.

Essence can function at all the meta-levels of Being (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, Ultra) and takes on a different emergent meaning at each level. What something IS is always just about as deep a question you can ask about something. The only thing deeper is Why.

Shiva / Dionysus are personifications of time.

Nietzsche had a lot to say about this. But it would be difficult to summarize his normally caustic analysis of the motivations for various philosophies, but let us just hint that it has something to do with affirming death rather than life in too many cases (Schopenhauer for instance).

But in general ones view of the cosmos is a reflection of one’s self and that does not just go for philosophers. And the reason this has to be so is that what we see as our world is conditioned by our internalization of that world and so there has to be a reflective as well as a reflexive quality to between self and world of philosophers, not to mention poets, artists and everyone else.

But what do you mean by personal life? Many times it is not the actual events of daily life that have an effect, but more ones spiritual life in the sense of the inner drive to know in relation to what is known during ones time, and how one reacts to that and takes a course toward the cutting edge of the tradition in which one finds oneself. More interesting still are the unconscious motives that come out in ones philosophy of which the philosopher themselves are unaware, and paying attention to that started with Nietzsche.

I think the key point is this. Philosophers who reach any depth in their thought find themselves completely out of kilter with their time and those around them within their society and culture, and are lucky if they have a few close friends which Nietzsche did have, in spite of making enemies of almost everyone, so that he ended up being fairly lonely in the end. But he celebrates that solitude and distinguishes solitude from loneliness. Like as not philosophers find themselves in solitude if they think deeply about the nature of existence because most people just never make it to a place where they can see the world in any deeper way.

Basically philosophers like Nietzsche who reach some depth in their thought that goes beyond the cutting edge of the tradition live in a different world than everyone else, they see things that others do not see, and the world has meaning in ways that others just do not understand. How this comes about is that what they have done is to have learned the tradition and then in the context of a problematic asked questions the pursuit of the answers to which takes them beyond that tradition. So the ability to see what others do not see comes from the unique synthesis of the tradition as a whole which others do not know well enough to synthesize consciously. We all synthesize the tradition unconsciously and that is what allows us to negotiate the world around us in our daily life. But the way things are in our world are conditioned by how people saw things throughout the development of the tradition the societies and cultures from which we drew our own society and culture. Philosophers are the ones who synthesize their world in a cognitive way in a discursive manner, unlike the synthesis of artists and poets. We really need all these different syntheses, and philosophers often take as their subject matter the arts and poetry as well and more and more the science of their day attempting to get a comprehensive integrative and synergistic view of the entire world and its inner potentials and outward possibilities that are hidden to most who live in those worlds.

The world really is a wondrous place in which everything is exemplified down to the finest detail which Hegel calls Absolute Reason. In other words there is actual structure to the world that is hidden from view, which determines how things work within the world and set the limits of the possibilities within the world which few realize, and this hidden or invisible structure of transcendentals is exemplified in almost everything within the world so once you have reached a synthesis of the world, then it starts making sense in a new way and allows you to see new possibilities that hitherto were impossible to perceive. We are now used to this occurring in the narrow realm of technology. But it can also occur in a wider realm that encompasses the entire world and that is what the deepest philosophers pursue with ardor because they find the mutual mirroring of everything in the world fascinating.

So let me give you an example taken from Nietzsche and Heidegger which is Nihilism. Stanley wrote a book called Nihilism which is the best definition of the phenomena I have found. Bascially nihilism is when you think there are two things that are different that are in conflict and one is good and the other evil from a limited perspective, but then you find that they are really exactly the same thing. This is what Achilles discovered about the Acheans and Trojans in the Iliad, they both take women. And his response was nihilistic in that he withdrew too much and then when Petrocles was killed he went into bezerker mode and then was too active becoming inhuman in the process. So it has been known since antiquity that our world produces nihilism at its core and this is the main thing characteristic of the worldview that it generates nihilism. Nietzsche’s final book that was never finished called Will to Power was all about this nihilistic core to the worldview, and Heidegger took it up attributing it to technology. But this is a general thing about the worldview, it generates nihilism where ever you look, and you can find it everywhere in your own life and in the lives of those around you and throughout the culture and our society. Everything is driven by the production of nihilism by the worldview. And if you know that, which is something that most people do not know, then you will see it everywhere. And that changes how you see things like the relations between democrats and republicans for instance. It is really incumbents that rule. Party is even in these times of lack of compromise really an irrelevant detail, and those caught up in the us vs them of the political system are living in an illusion, not recognizing where the sovereign power resides that drives actual decisions. Sovereign power now resides with the corporations who control the senators via lobbyists and their contributions to the extent that the people do not wrest that power back to themselves by voting against corporate interests whether championed by democrats or republicans. Corporations are the seats of sovereignty within our society. They extend their influence on us through the manipulation of congress. Our attention is drawn away from this by the apparent conflict between the dying Republican Party and the resurgent Democratic Party, but the corporations will work with and contribute to who ever is in power, and their lobbyists will craft legislation for the Congressmen for them to pass into law to specifically help them continue to exploit the public in any way that they can. But we do not have to talk about politics. Look at any level of society and what ever scale or phenomena you choose to look at the marks of nihilism will be there operating in some way that is unique to the phenomena that you have chosen to regard.

Once you see that nihilism is everywhere and organizing everything within our worldview, then you realize that the whole question becomes how do you make a non-nihilistic distinction. how do you make a distinction that does not generate more nihilism. And you see that this is almost impossible. What ever decision you make is probably going exacerbate nihilism in the situation, and not doing so is nearly impossible. It is only when you start to understand nonduality that there seems to be an answer to this most pressing of problems that no one knows even exists. Focusing in on Nihilism as an essential feature of the worldview did not happen over night, but it has been refined by many philosophers over time, in different ways. For instance Kant’s Critique of Pure reason is precisely addressed to exactly this problem of the Antinomies of Reason. Hegel addressed it with his idea of Spirit and Absolute Reason. But Nietzsche saw it a much more concrete and pervasive problem and really the key problem to be dealt with within our tradition.

One way to characterize this problem is the way that we see in Achilles. He realizes that the conflicting opposites in the war in which he is engaged are really the same. This takes meaning out of his world, but his reaction is also nihilistic which was to withdraw completely and then to go berzerk once his friend died, who actually he killed by allowing him to wear his own armor making himself the target of the enemy when he did not have the strength of Achilles to defend himself. Achilles actually was responsible for his Friend’s death by his inaction, but that caused him to go berserk and become inhuman in his killing rage until Paris asking for Hectors body brought him back to himself and rehumanized him because he knew he would never see his own Father again, and that Hector and he were alike in that, one living and the other dead. The Iliad is like a manual on how to live in a nihilistic society and how the illusory artificial extreme opposites that govern our society tear us up between them as we overreact in one direction and then the other through our hubris. The whole question then becomes how can is see through the nihilistic extreme artificial opposites given to us by society, and thread the needle by finding a golden thread which is non-nihilistic so as not to fall into any of the traps that society offers us on every side to entice us to become caught up and completely overwhelmed by the nihilism.

So this is just one example based on Nietzsche and Heidegger of how philosophers see the world differently. So for instance Heidegger never admitted that his Nazism was a mistake. And that is because in his time the nihilistic opposites for him was capitalism and communism, and fascism was suppose to be an alternative to these two ideologies. His fascism was brown shirt fascism which was purged by Hitler because they believed in continuous National Socialist revolution. Heidegger distanced himself from the Nazi movement after the pusche in which the Brownshirts were massacred and he lost power. So when we say he was a NAZI what we do not realize that there was two kinds of NAZI and he was the kind that lost out in the power struggle that established Hitler as a dictator bent on world domination. But the reason that Heidegger never admitted his fault was deeper than that even. The central concept of the Nazi ideology was the concept of the “folk”. For Heidegger Nazism was a romantic return to the German origins, and this concept was key in Nietzsche as well. That is one of the aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that was misused by the Nazis, basically through the work of his sister in reediting his work to make it appealing to the Nazi establishment. Heidegger worked throughout the pre-war years to prove that his philosophy was a better basis for Nazism than Nietzsches. But by that he meant Brown shirt continuous revolution returning to the folk basis of german nationalism. To admit that his involvement with Nazism was wrong was tantamount for Heidegger to separation from his own roots in his own country which he valued more than anything else, it would mean Sparation from his folk roots on which his whole philosophy was based as a kind of Romanticism. From his point of view Brown Shirt Nazism never lost its force to give his life meaning, and Black Shirt Nazism was an aberration which did not put the folk first but in fact ended up destroying the folk basis of german society. But beyond that Heidegger came to see that there was no difference between Black Shirt Nazism, Capitalism, and Communism. And I think this has actually become true. By their fighting with each other over a century they absorbed the characteristics of the other into themselves. So now we have something called global corporatism which has aspects that are like each of the proceeding ideologies that warred with each other in the last century. So for Heidegger all the ideologies were totalitarian and nihilistic and to admit he was wrong would be to accept the unholy union between corporatism and technological imperialism which was destroying the earth. For Heidegger the romantic concept of folk origins identification is the only real alternative to the technological and corporate domination and transformation of the world into an ever smaller and more alienated place. Folk is just the larges of the series that encompasses faimily, neighborhood, community, village, cultured society, folk (Volk). In other words it is precisely what is being threatened and stamped out by developers, and corporations, and franchies, and Walmart, and the finance industry gone out of control. It is the natural thresholds of human organization in which we are fated to be together that Heidegger believes is one of the few things that can save us from the pervasive nihilism of our modern culture and society. Thus he would council us to cultivate our extended families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our villages, our cultural heritage and healthy traditional social norms as well as our origins in a certain ethnic group with a specific genealogy and that is what we must protect at all costs from the global corporatism that threatens to engulf us in a world that is all the same, where there are no independently owned shops but only Walmart, where there are no bookstores any longer, because books are the essential lifeblood of human freedom, where there are no independently owned restraints because there are only chains left with sanatized corporate environments. There is something deep in Heideggers refusal to distance himself from Nazism, because to him what was good in Nazism which was its roots in the german folk origins is still pertinent to us today in a time where we lost the battle with the nihilistic effects of corporate technologization of society and culture. To him we would have lost that battle no matter who had won the ideological wars of the twentieth century. But of course we disagree with him in as much as the fact that since our society is not yet totalitarian that the outcome was much better, even though the danger of corporatism is still very much alive and the possibility of falling into totalitarianism is ever with us as we oscillate between ideological extremes. Basically the only thing that saves us is the constitution which we still revere because it gave us our freedom from state sovereignty. But what it did not contemplate was the rise of corporate sovereignty where corporations (imaginary people)  are given the rights of citizens. We have returned to polytheism only our gods (invisible people) are embodied on sheets of paper with signatures that were based on laws created to give run away slaves their rights that created imaginary people who did not die, and who could hold property. No one could have imagined that the worship of the gods could be called work, and the adherents would be called employees, shareholders and customers. Now we live in cities that all look the same. Where ever you go there are the same stories, and where ever you are it is now basically the same place, and this is how mening gets sucked out of the world through the homogenization of experience in a world ruled by corporations. We thought it was governments that would do that, but it turne out that governments have merely become servats of corporate interests. And as we become corporate people we loose some of our humanity.

Philosophers are the ones who say what is obvious but is not said because it is taboo and search for a way out of the conundrum that we placed ourselves in which made humans second class citizens after corporations within our society. For instance we do not put corporations in prison but we put citizens in prison. Corporate crime goes unpunished, while trivial human crimes are punished severely. Corporations have the money by accumulation of resources to bend the legal system to their will and they can destroy others just because they can afford to litigate indefinitely. Corporations control the congress via their lobbyists and their campaign contributions. And it is basically Corporations that are actively destroying the planet as we speak. There is no one in corporations to take responsibility for the evil they do. Their CEO, CFO, CTO, CxOs are the 1% who own most of the wealth and for whom the tax code is tipped in their favor only partially redressed by the recent fiscal cliff deal.

Corporatism is merely an example of how the nihilistic nature of the worldview has transformed in our time, but the nihilism is the same, it is merely manifesting in a new form. But it is pervasive effecting all aspects of our life. Zizek is a good critic of the seemingly benign aspects of corporations and how they trick us into thinking we are doing something for the planet when we buy their products giving something back to assuage our guilt. Zizek is the philosopher who is calling us today to reexamine how the corporations have taken away all the commons and are engulfing us with a new kind of economic totalitarianism, and how we play into their hands. Corporations are transcendentals because they are immortal. And the call of Nietzsche to abandon all transcendentals and instead affirm life and the earth would lead to the abandoning of the imaginary transcendentals that allow Corporatism to flourish. Nietzsche is still radical in our time. And that is the mark of greatness of a philosopher, they become more and more relevant as time passes because they saw far ahead by thinking deeply about the world they were embedded in and like us overwhelmed by. They made sense of it for us, and now we have to make sense of it ourselves in even deeper ways. And this becomes for the philosopher a personal challenge and taking up this personal challenge determines the nature of the philosophical response to the world as it appears to us. And it is in this way that the personal life of the philosopher informs their thought and abiding ways.

What determines the boundaries of physical objects?

Why do we perceive only some combinations of atoms as objects?

I call the answer to this question General Schemas Theory.

If you take a Kantian perspective then space and time are projected and then the categories of objects are projected within the singular of spacetime. Schemas are the different templates of understanding of objects of different scopes within that projection. So what you are calling the dots (monads) and the objects (forms) are two of the different schemas that exist within the set of possible schemas. The set of possible schemas according to S’ theory is:

Pluriverse
Kosmos
World
Domain
Meta-system
System
Form
Pattern
Monad
Facet

And these are related to dimensions such that there are two dimensions per schema and two schemas per dimension and thus these schemas stretch from -1 to the 9th dimensions. Projection means basically that you are producing those objects out of sensory data unconsciously within the brain, and we don’t really understand how that occurs yet, but what we do know is that unitary phenomena we see are distributed into different processing areas in the brain so that different parts of the brain are processing different aspects fo the objects we see. There is a very complex functioning algoritm in our brains that produce the illusion of integrated unified objects that we see in our perception within consciousness and that illusion is the schemas. We are presented in consciousness with objects already schematized by the schema recognition apparatus that we are born with and that develops as we develop in our interaction with the world. Hopefully we will eventually understand how this actually works. But the key is that we can see by studying the models of things in science that there is a finite set like the one identified in S’ which has various scopes which are seamlessly nested to give us a continuous experience of the world without unschematized gaps. For more about the history of schemas theory see Umberto Eco Kant and the Platypus. The type of schema I am talking about he calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas which are the most basic kind of schema.

I would argue for the incommensurability of the situation would be such that the Buddha could not appear in the place of Krishna to give advice.

Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu. The whole of the epic is built around Krishna being available to give advice to the Pandavas. And in general the advice is to break at crucial points the Dharma that they are sworn to uphold. So there is a kind of paradox in the actions of Krishna toward the Pandavas in as much as he councils each of the Pandavas to break the dharma rules of war in order to win and that is what sends them initially to hell while those who are evil that they fight against are seen in Heaven before Heaven and Hell are realized to be illusions.

Vishnu is to some extent a nondual between Brhama and Shiva but accepting Being (Sat). The Bhagavad Gita advocates both a way of piety and a way of intellectual approach to god.

Buddha on the other hand is a Heresy in the Hindu tradition, which rejects Sat and teaches that Existence is Empty. The basic teaching is that life is Dukkha and that means something like ultimately unsatisfactory. And this is a reason for withdraw from the world to seek enlightenment. The Buddha would not be found on the battle field. But the Pandavas could have bumped into one of the past Buddhas in the Forest. If they had he would have told them that Dharma means something completely different than they imagined. In Buddhism Dharmas are like Tattvas they are basic mechanisms of consciousness and life. Dharmas are transformed out of caste roles into aspects of reality within consciousness. In early Buddhism Dharmas are real but the Self is illusory. So if they had bumped into a proto-Buddha in the forest he would have told them that their lives as kings and warriors were illusory. And the implication would have been that the Battle was illusory, and the results of the battle for the winner would also be illusory. In Hinduism there is the idea of Maya or illusion being like magic. But for Buddhism even the reality is illusory. For Buddhism neither aspect nor anti-aspect is Empty Existence. The aspects are truth, reality, identity and presence. The Buddha does not believe that either the Pandavas nor the Kauravas have any self-identity through time yet all their actions are driven by karma and result in more karma. To the Buddha there is no difference between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. They have not arisen nor will they perish. For the Buddha the whole story of the Mahabharata is merely an illusion. So from the point of view of the Buddha the story is never told, yet it also never ceases being told. The whole story is about vesting value in certain characters (Pandavas) and negative value in other characters (Kauravas). But these distinctions are never actually made and they never actually vanish. In this sense the Buddha places himself prior to the arising of the tale and after the unceasing illusion of the tale plays itself out. There was the rock on the side of the road before the tale came along and valued some things and devalued others, but the rock at the side of the road was still there unvalued nor devalued when the tale was finished and the rock was undisturbed. No one happened to give advice to, the war did not occur, no one was killed, the disaster of the war had no effect. And the same is true from a Buddhist point of view with respect to real wars that kill real people. At the end of the real war the same rocks at the side of the road are setting there as existed untouched from the beginning of the conflict. Emptiness is an extremely nihilistic doctrine that reveals the limits of nihilism itself. Emptiness in effect uses nihilism against nihilism to refute nihilism. The advice of Krishna to the Pandavas is nihilistic. It makes it such that in fact there is no difference between the Pandavas and the Kauravas in the end — they both violate the dharma, but the Pandavas’ violation seems worse because they are sworn to uphold the dharma and they forsake it specifically under the direction of Krishna the avatar of Vishnu. So they think they have been given leave to break the dharma, but they have not and they go to Hell because of it. But ultimately Heaven and Hell are illusions, but what it does not say is that ultimately the characters are illusions as well. That is where emptiness comes in, where one would deny continuous identity to the characters. If we did that, denied the characters their Being then suddenly the whole story falls apart, as do the motivations of the characters, and the consequences, yet still we could see that there was karma circulating as a kind of quasi-causality, and empty pantomime continues with mere existence stripped of is invested meanings

People say that because the other truly great philosophers in the French school are all dead now. So he is the last one standing who appears on more talk shows. In comparison with Christopher Hitchens at least he is a real philosopher, unlike Hitchens who is also no longer standing.

As for Zizek’s contribution. Well he made Lacan make sense to me, that is something  but it does not qualify for greatness. To my mind he is not a truly great philosopher. Great Philosophers are people like Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger. They are people whose thought changed how we conceive of our world. It does not happen often.

Next rank down are philosophers such as Epidocles, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Peirce, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze and others who present penetrating analyses of the world that cannot be ignored by others.

Next rank down are people like Hobbs, Hume, Locke, Levinas, Schopenhauer, Badiou, Zizek, Sartre, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Bataille, Baudrillard, who are “interesting” as Zizek defies the term, which means that you can live without them and you wont be completely lost but it is better to know what they have to say if you can manage to work them into your study program.

Then there are those that are easy to ignore like Lyotard, Buber, Wm. James, Bergson, and othes of the lesser lights of philosophy.

However, that said I do find Zizek exciting, especially where he interprets Lacan as really being Hegel, because that is the reduction of the inexplicable to the impossible and there is something daring in that.

To me the most interesting of Wittgenstein’s books is Philosophical Grammar which is the proto-Philosophical Investigations. This is because I worked to create something called General Schemas Theory which is the next higher discipline beyond Systems Theory. For some reason this as not been created before in our tradition, not sure why. But it turns out that Wittgenstein in Philosophical Grammar he includes ruminations about a lot of different schemas which is very useful.

See From General Systems Theory to General Schemas Theory

See also General Schemas Theory Research

Being a philosopher of the Continental persuasion I have a lot of mixed feelings about Wittgenstein. My first introduction to him was when I was at LSE there was a class I took from Gellner where he spent the whole time making fun of Wittgenstein, so this did not bode well for my relation to the philosopher. First book I read was Tractatus which I felt was manifestly absurd, but now occasionally find useful, and then I read Zetel which is a book of sentences cut out of discarded manuscripts of his own and kept in a box that he liked. When I read Zetel I decided that Wittgenstein was definitely crazy. Later I read Philosophical Investigations and realized that many of the points he was making were the same as Heidegger and so that became useful because one could appeal to Philosophical investigations and those who did not like Continental Philosophy would then agree with you just because Wittgenstein had said it too. It was not until I read the precursor of Philosophical Investigations which was Philosophical Grammar that I found his work genuinely useful because basically what that book can be seen as is an exploration of the use of different schemas in our thinking. I don’t know of any other philosopher who has explored the schemas in this way. For more information about Schemas see Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

With respect to Language Philosophy I like Schlick much better. Schlick was the older center of the Vienna Circle who promoted the work of the younger Wittgenstein. But Schlick in his work was attempting to bring the ideas of Hilbert about axioms into Philosophy. I have found his work useful for defining what I call the Axiomatic Platform in my recent dissertation. Seehttp://about.me/emergentdesign. The idea of Schlick is that we need to distinguish percept and concept and relate concepts to each other without the mixture of percepts to create an axiomatic platform for thinking. This is not really a reductionism because what it does is seek a stable basis for thinking. Wittgenstein and the other Language Philosophers following him on the other hand think that all philosophy is just a confusion of language. And if we look carefully at the way we use English language we can purge these confusions from our speech and thus from our thoughts. Thus actually it is an anti-philosophy which attempts to reduce all philosophical questions to gibberish. Of course, you can take anything to be non-sensical if you like. Wittgenstein followed on Moore who tried to make philosophy accessible to everyone by stating it in common vernacular without technical vocabulary and thus simplify it for the understanding of the common man. Basically these various strands of what became Analytical Philosophy was a retrenchment after the age of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and Godel’s Proof which dashed the hopes of Hilbert’s programme, which was to axiomize everything in a final conclusive form. Godel showed that this was not possible. So Russell and Whitehead’s attempt of reducing mathematics to set theory and logic was also seen as ultimately futile. So for instance Higher Logical Type theory developed by Russell and productively applied to many topics by Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind was abandoned. Quine and Putnam went off in a different direction which shaped the course of Analytical Philosophy as a substream of philosophy that became dominant in America and the UK mainly because it was safe during the cold war (You wouldn’t want to refer to Hegel. for instance, because Marxists did that).

This is extremely unfortunate that the course set out by Russell using Higher Logical Type theory to solve paradoxes were not pursued, because what I saw and developed in my first dissertation was the application of Higher Logical Type Theory (cf Copi) to the kinds of Being discovered by the Continentals. Basically the reason that that the idea of there being various kinds of modalities of Being made no sense to the Analytical Philosophers was because they did not have Higher Logical Type Theory to use to understand the nature of Being as Paradox or Absurdity. If you abandon the linguistic ethnocentrism of European Philosophy and realize that only Indo-European languages have Being, and then you realize that Being itself is fundamentally fragmented in its roots in the Indo-European languages and that in point of fact it represents an impossibility or absurdity and therefore an illusion, then suddenly we can apply Higher Logical Type theory to realize the meaning of the different levels of Being discovered by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Delueze, etc. Basically there are different kinds of being at different meta-levels of the representation of the repetition of Being and at each level there are the same four types (aspects) of Being (identity, presence, reality, truth) that emergently change their meaning at each meta-level of Being. These meta-levels are called Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra. Many of the quandaries explored by the later Wittgenstein can be explained by this phenomena, because basically he is realizing the truth of Heidegger’s statement that Language is the House of Being. However, we see Wittgenstein toying with the depths of language rather than coming to grips with the phenomena as a whole as the Continental Philosophers tried to do.

What Wittgenstein discovered is that even after you reduce all philosophical problems to language you then still have language and it  has its own depths when you consider how it is used to connect us to the world in which we live. Wittgenstein’s ultimate idea is that Meaning is Use. But this is merely a reformulation of the idea of Heidegger that there is a ready to hand mode of Being of Language behind the Present at hand mode of Being of Language if we consider Language as a tool. But of course Heidegger thinks that language cannot be considered as a tool and so something much deeper is going on in language that goes beyond our relation to tools. To have a utilitarian view of language and to say that is where meaning comes from is again a reduction. Heidegger’s view is that Language is itself something that uses us to produce the meaning of Being in the world, not the other way around. Heidegger has a non-representable and non-utilitarian view which is the opposite of that of Wittgenstein. Yet they are both coming to very similar conclusions. Stanley Rosen book Nihilism is an excellent study of Heidegger and Wittgenstein as nihilistic opposites.

What is interesting is that later Wittgenstein was considered mystical by even Analytical Philosophers who are the equivalent of Plato’s “men of earth” in Philosophy.  Basically the men of earth are those who only believe in what they can hold in their hands, and thus do not believe in anything invisible. These are distinguished from those initiated into the lesser (those that understand Process Being, i.e. Heraclitus) and the greater (those that understand Pure Being, i.e. Parmenides) Mysteries. And then beyond that there are those who want Change and Changelessness at the same time, i.e. those who want to understand the WorldSoul who are the Heirophant, those who conduct the mysteries and understand what Plato in the Timaeus calls the Third Kind of Being (i.e. Hyper Being or what Derrida calls DifferAnce, and what Heidegger calls -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out). Wittgenstein to his credit began to explore the invisibles in relation to Language beyond the language games and nihilistic arguments of his followers to such an extent that he lost his family resemblance to them and went beyond them so that they could no longer understand him. Basically Wittgenstein with his doctrine of Meaning is Use is his initiation into the lesser mysteries. But also in his exploration of the use of Schemas in Philosophical Grammar and to some extent in Philosophical Investigations he is beginning to explore some of the greater mysteries that Plato alludes to.

Fundamentally, I think Wittgenstein can be blamed for the degeneration of philosophy into the handmaiden of science and the production of an anti-philosophy that was taken for actual philosophy. In this backwater only Kant and Frege were given any status as real philosophers, and the works of Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the French Continental Philosophers such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and others carrying on the European Philosphical tradition were eschewed as incomprehensible, but of course they pursued triviality and arguments over differences between their language games that seemed to lead no where instead. A grand specialty of philosophy that does not talk about the essential conundrums of life but only the basis for science which reduces all other problems to distortions in our language sprang up which became a trivializing monster whose nihilism is apparent to anyone who has been bored by endless pointless arguments about how many unnecessary distinctions there are on the head of a pin. These arguments have nothing to do with the questions that haunt us about our existence in this postmodern era. They are quintessentially modern, and rooted in Pure Being, and ignorant of any kind of Being beyond that thus missing many of the important dimensions of the actual world in which we find ourselves that Continental Philosophy explores wantonly (eg. Zizek).

There is four states according to Kant:

Synthetic A priori
Analytic A priori
Synthetic A posteriori
Analytic A posteriori

Both Space and Time are Synthetic A priori notions

And also the Categories in Space and the Schema in Time are Synthetic A priori notions

Synthetic A priori is something we project prior to experience that is necessary to make experience possible.

Analytic A priori is any sub-notions that can be deduced from the categories or space and time. So for instance for Kant geometry is deduced from space and arithmetic deduced from time.

The thing-in-itself is beyond these projections. We really don’t know it or how it interacts with the projections to fill the world with sensations that become perceptions. But what we do is intuit things based on the presented manifolds of the A priori syntheses we perceive (with our senses) and apperceive (with cognition). The combination of the two are experience. The thing-in-itself is genuinely transcendent in the sense of not being available in any way and not being known in any way. But because of that it is really just a phantom of our imagination anyway, in fact it does not exist, and is only there as a part of the philosophical architecture to make sure that we know that everything we experience is phenomenological. The thing-in-itself is what Husserl would call a bracket, it is there so we know that what ever we posit beyond experience is out of bounds for metaphysical speculation. Prior metaphysics to Kant had all kinds of theories about the thing-in-itself, but for Kant this kind of dogmatic speculation is out of bounds and a bad use of reason.

That means that “objective” space and time beyond experience are themselves noumena. But experienced space and time as phenomena are synthetic a priori projections only. But they are different from other projections in as much as they are singular, in other words there is only one space and only one time that is projected everywhere by everybody. And in fact for Kant that is the truly “objective” space and time. Today we would say spacetime, but that they were both the same singular was unknown to Kant.

There is a direct line from Kant to Husserl. Husserl in his phenomenology attempts to get at what is happening in consciousness within the Kantian Transcendental Framework. Transcendental means necessary for the possibility of experience like Space, Time and the Categories. Transcendent means beyond experience like the noumena. Kant is a Transcendental Idealist and believes that is the only route to Transcendental Realism. Because the transcendent noumena is never known, and can never be known, our only access to reality is via idealism. Idealism for Kant is the only possible realism. When you bracket the thing-in-it-self, or noumena, completely then there is nothing else but what appears in experience, and that is real. Thus what ever is real is exactly what appears in experience. Abstractly this appears quizzical because we can continue to talk about noumena, and when we do we are really just making out of bound metaphysical claims which is a sickness of reason for Kant.

But Husserl in his thought makes a fundamental contribution when he gives up bracketing, that has all kinds of problems like the problem of intersubjectivity, and instead talks about things as appearing on the horizon of the world. This solves all the problems of the noumena, and all the problems of bracketing because it says that every thing in experience is on the greatest possible horizon the horizon of everything in the world. And things have reality to the extent that they can be explored. Real things can be explored almost infinitely and that is what makes  them real. Imaginary things have some limit to their exploitability on the horzon and that is what makes them less than real. The horizon of the world is intersubjectively constituted and not rooted in the individual alone and thus the problems of intersubjectivity as in Cartesian Meditations vanish. So if we update Kant with the insights of the later Husserl then we see that what seem to be problems of Realism that linger in Transcendental Idealism are artifacts of the way Kant talked about the noumena as a kind of bracketing mechanism in his overall philosophical system which is basically phenomenological but Kant had not discovered phenomenology as a perspective yet. We had to wait for Hegel and also Pierce for that. Husserl refined Phenomenology and got rid of the excesses of Hegel as Peirce was also trying to do. That is to say Husserl and Peirce were trying to create a Kantian Phenomenology. But Husserl is the one who had the real insight as to how to get rid of this problem that lingered of realism verses idealism, by realizing that if there is a horizon of the world in which everything appears then it is the almost infinite exploitability of some phenomena that makes it seem real, and we can gauge all other experiences of phenomena against that infinite exploitability to judge their reality. And because it is an intersubjectively projected horizon we can do science on those objects we deem real. It took a long time to refine the Kantian Idealism in order to solve the problems of understanding transcendental realism and how Idealism is our only access to what is real without positing the brackets of the noumena.

Heidegger, of course, is assuming all this. His Dasein as being-in-the-world is merely that part of us that does the projection. What Heidegger is trying to do with Dasein is get beyond the Subject/Object dichotomy that still plagues Husserlian Phenomenology. And in Heidegger’s dasein we see the basic and underlying paradox of the whole Kantian and Husserlian Idealism which is that Dasein projects the world and then is an entity within the world it projects. But it is not yet a subject nor an object, that is a Present-at-hand reification that happens later. Rather Dasein exists in a mode of the Ready-to-hand where it exercises circumspective concern in a Process Being mode over the technological infrastructure that underlies all experience that is presented as present-at-hand, i.e. in a Pure Being mode. These two modalities of Being (present-at-hand and ready-to-hand) are equi-primordial and in fact always present in each moment together, whether we emphasize one or the other. But they are ways of pointing at things and grasping things that appear on the World Horizon of our being-in-the-world as explained by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception.

Really it is necessary to have the perspective of the history of Philosophy in order to understand any one particular contribution. For instance we really need to understand Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke and Hume in order to situate the contribution of Kant in his attempt to ground the physical science of Newton. That grounding still stands, no one has gotten beyond the transcendental framework set up by Kant. He posited fundamental limits to what reason can know beyond experience, basically positing that we cannot know anything beyond experience, but we can see in experience certain necessary elements that make experience possible and for us those are transcendental, but what is actually beyond experience, i.e. the bracket of the noumena, we cannot know.

Schopenhauer gives an interesting twist to this, by saying that we as entities must ourselves have a noumena within us, and he identifies that with Will and he says that we have special access to that Wille via music. This is a very interesting case which Nietzsche takes up and connects to evolution via his idea of the Will to Power. Schopenhauer gave a basis for romantic reactions against Kant with his concept of Will being the thing-in-itself within us. His term Wille is wider in meaning than our term Will. This basically gives rise to the concept of the Unconscious via Nietzsche. And as we know via Freud and Jung who explored the territory that Nietzsche opened up (but denied or repressed Nietzsche in the process) the unconscious has become one of the greatest modern concepts to be reckoned with. And if we were to say that there is any road to partial intimations of glimmers of the noumena it would be through the unconscious in ourselves, our noumena may not be as closed off from our experience as the noumena of other things like objective scientific objects. Thus the story does not yet have an end. Continental Philosophy has been exploring via Lacan and those that take him seriously like Deleuze the implications of the idea that the unconscious is in fact a noumena whose effects we see directly in its warpages of consciousness even though we have no direct access to it. And of course this brings up the question of access to other noumena of other things than ourselves. Jung develops the idea of the Psychoid as a way of thinking about this in psychological terms. So although the question seemed to be closed with regard to the reality beyond experience of objective things it is not completely closed with regard to the reality of what underlies subjective things

I think you would do well to read Meister Eckhart, who was a great German mystic within the Catholic tradition who will give an antidote for the answers you might find here. Basically he says that if it “feels” like something then it is not God. If it is a vision of a concrete thing, then it is not God. I will leave it to Meister Eckhart to explain this to you if you are interested. But do not believe everything that people will tell you about things like “what it feels like to be with God.” Those how know do not say, and those who say probably do know know.