Charles Hoskinson, Favorite Philosophers
Philosophical content from the Cardano community
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Ekphrasis
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Summary and analysis by Stephen Whitenstall
“Wittgenstein makes no sense at all to me.” – Charles.
My commentary – Wittgenstein in effect founded logical atomism with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) – the intent of which is stated at the beginning as “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Which is referred to as the “Picture Theory of Language”. Later Wittgenstein revised his views (dubbing the Tractus “dogmatic”) and went on to write his Philosophical Investigations” (1951) which introduced the concepts “Meaning as use”, “Language-games”, “Family Resemblance”, “Rule-following”, “Private Language” and “Forms of Life” into analytic philosophy.
“Kripke has Kripkenstein” – Charles.
“At least there I have modal logic …the little boxes and I have the diamonds. I can do a computation … and I can reason about what people are saying. Really it was all about precision and the nature of truth, precision and the nature of possibility ...” – Charles
“How far a formal language can take you ...” – Charles
“David Hilbert also did the same thing …” – Charles
“Russell got his career started with working with Alfred North Whitehead, a logician. There was this whole desire in late 19th century mathematics."
An extensive interview with Charles Hoskinson by Lex Fridman aired last week. The podcast covers many subjects and lasts over 4 hours. Different topics of conversation are timestamped on Lex Fridman's YouTube channel and well worth a listen. In this forum post I would like to summarise the topic , provide some commentary and references for further reading.
Lex starts by quoting Charles as mentioning Betrand Russell (, ) and Saul Kripke (,) as "two of your favourite philosophers" and asks Charles to comment on what ideas of theirs he finds insightful.
Charles says that "you can't really talk about Russell and Saul without mentioning Wittgenstein" (, , ) “And Tarski” (, ). Together these philosophers increased the level of precision we have in formal languages and language in general.
My commentary – Charles is referring here to Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982). () which, at its core, concerns the “rule-following paradox”. This paradox is a sceptical proposition concerning the possibility of following rules in language: “.. no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” (Philosophical Investigations §201a).
My commentary – Charles refers here to two of the fundamental symbols of modal logic (), necessity “the little box” and possibility “the diamonds”.
My commentary – Charles refers here to “Hilbert’s Program” () that is, the formalization of all of mathematics in axiomatic form.