Quote of the Day
Jan. 26th, 2017 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
47. But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed? What are the simple constituent parts of a chair? The pieces of wood from which it is assembled? Or the molecules, or the atoms? “Simple” means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense ‘composite’? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the ‘simple parts of a chair’.
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Asking “Is this object composite?” outside a particular game is like what a boy once did when he had to say whether the verbs in certain sentences were in the active or passive voice, and who racked his brains over the question whether the verb “to sleep”, for example, meant something active or passive.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. 4ed. p 26
no subject
Date: 2017-01-27 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-27 07:24 pm (UTC)