Philosophical Tribulations by Louis Witteringswine

Satire on Wittgenstein’s Investigations available here. Here is a delightful sample:

18. Imagine a tribe which could masturbate only in a group. And so it never occurred to them that anyone might do it alone and they had no word for this either. And now, imagine this tribe in the dark. If no one says anything or touches anyone, do they know they’re masturbating? Suddenly someone turns on the light. At what moment would it be correct to say, ‘Hey! We’re a bunch of wankers!’?

19. Imagine everything just as it is, only DIFFERENT, instead of the same. What would it mean to want to say that, at a quite particular point in a chess game–just before you lose your queen, let us say–, we came to recognize that we lacked a special facial gesture for expressing precisely THIS kind of difference?

20. I want to say: AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!

21. Philosophical puzzles take the form: a one-legged Indian in a butt-kicking contest on thin ice.

“A philosopher is a member of no community in particular” – Wittgenstein

The header above is taken from this image:

Little Known Facts About Wittgenstein

Brendan Mackie, over at Raise high the roofbeam, Carpenters! continues to delight and amuse with little known and, shall we say, provocative tales from the life of LW. Here is a snippit of one:

“No I won’t! No I won’t! I will never!” Wittgenstein screamed at a fashionable New Year’s Eve party in Berlin, ushering in 1921. The next day found him on a train to Sweden, where he got himself a small room in a boardinghouse. For the next six months, Wittgenstein refused to speak a single word. He communicated in a series of grunts and gestures, spending his days hunched over a desk, writing furiously, tearing out his hair, ripping up pages and pages of manuscripts. Often at dinners, Wittgenstein would frustrate his fellow boarders by trying to participate in their lively conversations about Swedish politics and art – but without words. The great philosopher would get angery that nobody could understand him, often throwing plates against the wall and shaking intractable interlocutors. When summer came, he built a large bonfire in the countryside and burnt all of his past six months’ of work. He wrote a postcard to his sister soon after that said, simply “Life is for reading great works. And writing them. There is nothing else.”

Go here for the rest.