It is not the case, they argued, that philosophy asks questions that, unfortunately, are just too difficult for us to answer—philosophy’s questions themselves are not even intelligible; they are pseudo-formulations. Foreshadowing postmodernism’s anti-realism, for example, Moritz Schlick wrote of the meaninglessness of propositions about an external world: “Does the external world exist?” is an unintelligible question, for “both its denial and affirmation are meaningless.”[95] And if we cannot speak meaningfully of an external world, then ascribing cause and effect to the world is also
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