Unanswerable Questions?

Speranza

There seems to be something repetitive in the TITLE to my post, "Unanaswerable questions? Carnap and Grice on metaphysics -- and falsifiability of internal metaphysical claims in the vernacular -- or other!" -- THIS CLUB.

Yet, R. B. Jones politely comments.

Here my commentary on his commentary.

Jones writes:


"Thank you also Speranza for your commentary, as always interesting and entertaining (I feel as if I must have written that many times)."

Thanks.

He adds:

"Of course I cannot follow up on much of it for fear of becoming completely distracted, but I am interested in this question of who we should consider the principal targets of Carnap's metaphysical zeal, Aristotle or Heidegger."

Good.

I would think Carnap HEIDEGGER naturally, even if he never understood him. Carnap's contact with Aristotle seems more indirect.

A GRICE note: Grice's contact with Aristotle was directly from the Greek, when a student at Corpus Christi, under Hardie, at Oxford. Only later, when Grice moved to the United States of America, would he complain that students (his students) were unable to read Aristotle in GREEK!

---- I don't think Grice ever read Heidegger in German or English. YET: it is a fashionable gesture of his to write (or say) in "Prolegomena" to "Logic and conversation" -- who knows, in an attempt to provoke or amuse the Carnapians in the audience -- "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher". (Heidegger was indeed a living philosopher then).

---

Jones goes on:

"In fact I didn't offer Aristotle as being one of Carnap's targets, so much as the source of the kind of philosophising which Carnap abjured, since his "Metaphysics" is the first volume in which (or rather, of which) that term is used."

But _does_ Aristotle *use* "metaphysical" in the object-language. It seems to me it's like a meta-linguistic description for him. He would prefer to refer to this or that alleged discipline as "first philosophy" rather. In which case, Carnap's attack would be against philosophy (first and foremost) rather than the special branch of metaphysics. I should recheck Wikipedia about this!

Jones goes on:

"Undoubtedly Heidegger was a better loved (hated?) target, but it was an extreme, and we might get a better sense of Carnap's opposition by considering Carnap's less exotic examples, one source of which is his recollections of student life."

Alright. I should re-check that, too. Grice went from a very classics-oriented college (as Corpus Christi was, based on the close study of Aristotle's work in Greek) to become a more 'general' philosopher at St. John's (also Oxford) where classics wasn't so strong.

Note too that Grice would associate Aristotle WITH Kant, and speak of "Kantotle". In doing so we are witnessing a more mature Grice that is expanding the scope of philosophy (as understood within the curriculum of "Literae Humaniores" that Grice followed) to include not just the classics like Aristotle, but the 'mods', like Kant.

--- never mind the contemporaries like Heidegger.

"I don't think it makes sense to go into more detail here, but I think this will come up again, in connection with Grice of course."

I'll recheck then:

-- Aristotle's use of 'metaphysical' qua adjective and his names for the field that metaphysics now comprises: first philosophy, and ontology?

-- Carnap's student days and his grasp of Aristotle as source of metaphysical external unanswerable questions.

Or not?

Cheers!