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Some(non)thing To Say • Fooling Yourself Rationally • Better Consequences • Attack & Defence • Do Not Pass Go • Vegetable Matters • Thinking Mathematically • Scientific Separations • Marxist Critiques

Some(non)thing To Say

Dear Editor: Thank you for the excellent stuff on Wittgenstein in Issue 103. I would like to suggest that the question ‘Thing or non-thing?’ might help us to understand Wittgenstein. A non-thing is anything that vanishes when the human intellect is absent. Thus Michelangelo’s David is a non-thing, but the stone it consists of is a thing. It seems that what Wittgenstein was getting at is that when philosophy tries to pin down the eternal truth about a non-thing; morality, infinity, God, numbers, words and so on, it is doomed to failure; because non-things depend for their quasi-existence on the interpreting intellect.

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