Regarding Witt's comments on the metaphysical self in section 5.6
(excerpts copied below), I take it that his comment "what the
solipsist _means_ is quite correct; only it cannot be _said_" (5.62)
follows from the fact that language pertains to what is _in_ my world,
and so language cannot legitimately address "my world" as though it
were an object _in_ my world (2.174, 5.61). (And I take Witt to be
speaking of epistemological solipsism, not metaphysical solipsism.)

But surely, given that "what the solipsist _means_ is quite correct",
the puzzle implicit in the solipsism vs. realism issue remains,
even if that puzzle can't legitimately be put into language.
Does anybody really feel that the problem of epistemological
solipsism has "vanished" (6.521), even if it can't legitimately be
phrased as a problem?

===============================

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Pears and McGuinness translation).
5.6:
"_The limits of my language_ mean the limits of my world"

On Aug 23, 3:32 pm, "andy-k" wrote:

Ed wrote:

I think that Witt present just such an argument when he says that
"I am my world. (The microcosm.)" (5.63), "There is no such
thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas" (5.631), and
"The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the
world" (5.632). So the answer to his rhetorical question "Where
_in_ the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?" (5.633) is
"nowhere" -- "The philosophical self is [...] the metaphysical subject,
the limit of the world -- not a part of it" (5.641). The philosophical
self, the metaphysical subject "shrinks to a point without extension,
and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it" (5.64).

On Aug 23, 10:24 pm, "andy-k" wrote:

On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:32:54 +0100, andy-k wrote:

In the process of subject.

On Aug 24, 1:24 am, "andy-k" wrote:

andy-k wrote:

Yes, a limit, a boundary. You can stand in the middle of a city and ask:
"Where's the city? All I see are buildings, cars, streets, people, etc."
This is similar to what Hume did when he engaged in the self-nihilism
that philosophers have been fawning over ever since. But it's trivial
because we can do the same thing with most other items.

If I could somehow fit and exist inside a golf ball, I'd be asking:
"Where's the golf ball? All I see are these various materials
surrounding me. There's nothing I can point to that's a golf ball." It's
the can't see the forest for the trees scenario; if you want to define
the forest you have to find its edge and follow it all the way around to
grasp how it does have a limit and thus would appear or could be
conceived to be a thing or entity from outside itself (overhead from a
distance).

posted by Ecce

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Recipients: Ignore all below.

andy-k wrote:

No --at least ulitimately, but we can say that the innate templates we
function under don't allow us to have a choice. Wittgenstein seems to
have demonstrated that in later years with the Public Language argument.
That is, we shouldn't waste our time with solipsism because it is
prevented being viable in an priori sense or by language being public by
its very nature.

posted by Ecce

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Recipients: Ignore all below.

On Aug 23, 9:51 pm, Ed earthlink.net> wrote:

andy-k schreef:

I think Emmanuel Kant was the first to show that we're dependant on
ourselves for knowledge. Anything that is known comes from a translation
in ourselves.

I think solipsism is one of three ways of looking at things. Only the
three ways of looking at things combined descibes our living.

1) you compare any event relative to yourself, that means when you move
an object that moves with you does not move for you. From this idea
comes the idea as yourself as a source for the world.

2) you compare any event relative to another, that means you try to have
an understanding of the situation, the truth, for another. You see
people in a bus moving, and then you know that for them the others in
the bus don't move.