Fate, Time, and Language Quotes

“How did Wittgenstein get to this point? The Tractatus is concerned with a disarmingly basic question: How is language possible? When we consider the world around us, everything seems to interact with everything else causally, in accordance with the laws of nature. The exception is a certain strange thing we call language, which somehow manages to interact with other things in the world in an entirely different way: it represents them meaningfully. The ability to represent things allow us to communicate, enables us to deal with things that are not actually present to us, and provides the fabric of our mental life, our daily thoughts. But how is it, exactly, that language produces meaning?”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“Investigations “eliminated solipsism but not the horror.” The only difference between this new predicament and that of the Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped together, with other people, in the institution of language.”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.”
― David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“He was perpetually on guard against the ways that abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real.”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“One of the few giveaways in their exchange that Wallace is also a goofy college kid is that he alludes to Descartes as ‘Monsieur D’ and Kant as ‘the Big K.”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“Wallace had read the Tractatus, of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was "the most beautiful opening line in western lit"). He knew that Wittgenstein's book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus, its cold, formal, logical picture of the world cold make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened-a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson's novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, "What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?" Pronouncing the novel "a kind of philosophical sci-fi," Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had "fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein's doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness.”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“Unlike determinism, fatalism does not proceed by contemplating the causal mechanics of the universe-the implications for human freedom of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. Instead, the fatalist argues that his doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the logic of propositions about the future. In simplified form, a version of the argument might run as follows: If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it's false, then it is the case that I won't. Either way, it's the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won't do now.”
― David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“a “game” that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.”
― David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“In the terrorist case, the inequivalence can be shown by proving the compatibility within the system of the following two propositions: (a) Yesterday it was possible for there to be an explosion. (b) It is not possible today that there was an explosion yesterday,”
― David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“The story ‘Good Old Neon’ invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the ‘fraudulence paradox.”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

“Unlike logical modality and plain-old physical modality, situational physical modality, he observed, is not eternal and unchanging but rather highly sensitive to details of time and place (as the Eiffel Tower example illustrates).”
― James Ryerson, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will