Philosophical Investigations 1-50

Copied from my lj account and written a while back, so I might have changed my mind about some stuff:

Well, I worked my first day in Park City today. The drive was heftier than I had anticipated, but that's another story for a different blog. Anyway, during work, I read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It reads a bit like Spinoza, but much better. He often references "imaginary languages" and uses these for basis of how to understand working languages. This, quite obviously for me, has ties with pataphysics: imaginary science. One part that I found quite interesting was when he discussed the name-bearer-meaning relationship. Obviously when he started to recount what "naming a thing" meant for him, I was interested because of Hegel's ideas on the same subject. For Wittgenstein, he believes naming is akin to 'attaching a label,' and he goes to say, in essence, that only simples can really be named. But back to name-bearer-meaning: He talked about how when a person (Chad, for example) dies, the bearer of the meaning dies, but not the meaning. This is what enables the sentece: Chad is dead, to make sense at all. The meaning is not gone, only the bearer. These were interesting terms for me, and his example just made it pop. Another thing I can remember (not having my $50 book right by me) is that he equates defining with describing, and that to solve language is to solve philosophy. Obviously the book is much more complex than what I have outlined here, but I believe this is the gist, or at least the most striking things I have learned from reading it so far. Good times, great oldies.