Philosophical Dictionary

Let's discuss rage bait by way of ancient Greek philosophy. Join us as we discuss rhetoric and logic, and how they both play a part in taking apart your most annoying online content.

Most philosophical problems, Wittgenstein thought, are knots in our language, not puzzles about the world. We explain linguistic confusion, language games, meaning is use and the beetle in a box, from the Tractatus to the Investigations, and ask what his critics asked: is calling a problem confusion a clever dodge?

In the logic meme, an explorer finally finds the Scroll of Truth and throws it away, because it is a truth table. Aristotle founded formal logic without ever drawing one, the Stoics built the logic of “if”, Boole turned it into 0 and 1, and Frege’s system broke on a letter. So who drew the first truth table?

Wittgenstein’s line about the limits of language usually gets quoted as advice to learn more words. The original says something stranger: logic, the world and the self share one boundary, and the most important things lie beyond it. Where does the quote come from, and did Wittgenstein later take it back?