Apr 1, 2011

What's the point?, asked the philosopher

Mark Kingwell in Catch and Release:

When it comes to wondering why, philosophy is obviously a high-risk activity. Consider the possibilities. In many cases, philosophical subjects sail close to the limits of the sayable, attempting to articulate, for instance, the conditions of possibility of any form of knowledge or the final dynamic nature of reality. Philosophy is thus a form of activity on the verge of asking why any activity has a point! Even to accept the confines of propositions is, at this point, the act of someone gripped by either arrogance or folly. It was no joke when Wittgenstein, attempting to join logic and language, concluded his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the claim (warning? injunction?) that what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.