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Theme 1, Reader 1: The Philosophy book. pg 82 - pg.95 (Frases that…

- - - - What we perceive are ideas, not things in themselves.
        
        A thing in itself must lie outside experience
        
        So the world consists only of ideas...
        
        ... and minds that perceive those ideas.
        
        A thing only exists in so far as it perceives or is perceived.
    - - Berkeley has two main objections to this view. First he argues that our understanding of causality (the fact that certain events cause other events) is based entirely on our experience of our own volitions (the way we cause events to happen through the action of our wills).
        
        His point is that there is in fact no such things as a "physical cause" because there is no such thing as a physical world beyond the world of ideas that could possibly be the cause of our ideas.
      - His second objection is that because ideas are mental entities, they cannot resemble physical entities, because the two types of thing have completely different properties.
      - The world is constructed purely of thought and whatever is not itself perceiving, exists only as one of our perceptions.
    - - For Berkeley, God not only creates us as perceivers, he is the cause and constant generator of all our perceptions. This raises a number of questions, the most urgent being: how is it that we sometimes perceive things incorrectly? Why would God want to deceive us?
        
        Berkely tries to answer this question by claiming that our perceptions are never, in fact, in error, and that where we go wrong is in the judgments we make about what we perceive.
    - - We never perceive the same thing.
      - God caused my ideas and your idea, but unless we share a single mind with each other and with God, there are still 3 different ideas, so there are 3 different oars.
        
        Berkeley leaves us depending for our knowledge of the world, and of the existence of other minds, upon our faith in a God that would never deceive us.
- - - - The new possibilities collide with our current circumstances
        
        Life is a series of collisions with the future.
- - - - Wittgenstein states that he is setting out to make clear what can be meaningfully said. Wittgenstein wants to set the limits of language and, buy implication, of all thought. He does this because he suspects that a great deal of philosophical discussion and disagreement is based on some fundamental errors in how we go about thinking and talking about the world.
    - - Propositions are 'pictures' or facts in the same way that maps are pictures of the world
        
        Any propositions that does not picture facts is meaningless - for example 'killing is bad'
        
        My language is therefore limited to statements of facts about the world
        
        The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
    - - Tractatus is based on a fairly simple principle, that both language and the world are formally structured, and that these structures can be broken down into their component parts.
        
        Tractatus begins with the claim that ''the world is all that is the case.'' ''The world is the totality of facts, not of things.''
        
        Tractatus meaningful language must consist solely of propositions. ''The totality of propositions.'' he writes ''is language''.
        
        Language ''pictures'' the world
        
        Example: The sound waves generated by a performance of a symphony, the score of that symphony and the pattern formed b the grooves on a gramophone recording of the symphony all share between them the same logic form. Wittgenstein states ''A picture is laid against reality like a measure.'' In this way it can depict te world.
        
        Wittgenstein's propositions that are, bu their very nature, true or false, pictures also are either true or false.
      - Discussion about religious and ethical values is for Wittgenstein strictly meaningless. because the things that we are attempting to talk about when we discuss such topics are beyond the limits of th world, they also lie beyond the limits of our language. Wittgenstein writes: ''It is clear that ethics cannot be put into language.''
      - All of this, however has serious repercussions for the propositions that lie pithing the Tractatus itself. After all, these are not propositions that picture the world. Even logic, one of Wittgenstein's major tools, does not say anything about the world. Is the Tractatus , therefore, nonsense?
        
        Anybody who understand the Tractatus properly, he claims, will eventually see that the propositions used in it aren nonsense, too. They are like the steps of a philosophical ladder that helps us to climb altogether beyond the problems of philosophy, but which we can kick away once we have ascended.
        
        After completing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein concluded there were no more philosophical problems left to resolve, and so abandoned the discipline.
        
        However voer the course of 1920s and 1930s, he began to question his earlier thinking. In particular, he questioned his once firmly held belief that language consists solely of propositions, a view that ignores much of what we do in our everyday speech (from telling jokes, to cajoling, to scolding).
        
        Nevertheless, despite all of its problems, the Tractatus remains one of the most challenging and compelling works of Western philosophy.