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The limits of our world

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And now, for something completely different... an alternate philosophical scenario.

The POD here is that Ludwig Wittgenstein died of an infectious disease while staying prisoner in WWI, right after he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The text was only discovered decades later, and would have a great impact in his native Austria in the inmediate postwar, but it would have a rather different, esoteric interpretation. The main academic effects:

Popper would have a much greater impact. "Logical Positivism" here means "Analytical philosophy", a much more restrictive, rejected and controversial label from which the British Academia has been expurged.

Philosophy of language and cognitive sciences are a bit behind OTL, but eventually a group of American philosophers came up with something relatively close to what the late Wittgenstein researched (that's what the "Holistic Program" means)

The Continental schools were object of different kinds of debate, and their mutual differences were sharpened. Eventually there was not a single "Continental school" to speak of, as there is not a monolithic "Analytical school" to antagonize. Heidegger, in spite of influencing Sartre as IOTL, has eventually become a minor, more obscure philosopher: his pupil Gadamer has eclipsed him. In the Spanish-speaking world, the late works of Ortega y Gasset (and the more poetic, Intuitionist approach of María Zambrano) became more renowned and divulged, enough to become a philiosophical school in its own right.

Vitalism in this world must be understood in its least restricted sense, as the schools that put the vital process at the forefront of philosophical inquiry. Existential Vitalism treats the vital process as the basis of an existential struggle against an uncertain world and of an unavoidable process of self-construction. Phenomenic Vitalism regards the vital process as the starting point of the consciousness phenomena, which is its true object of analysis. Historicist Vitalism regards the vital processes as producers of a collective history with its own rationality, which brings particular meanings to the communities and the individuals living in them.

There's not a Postmodernism to speak of, but some schools resemble it a lot, especially what emerged from Post-Soviet Russia... except that it would be more precisely called a form of nihilistic Materialism that prescinds of the notion of truth against the notion of will.

Finally, the American Pragmatic schools suffered a schism around a strong vs weak notion of truth. That's what allows Putnam to be classified as "Paleopragmatist", rather than Neopragmatist as IOTL.

Wittgenstein's Fideist approach to the mystique through the logical structure of the world is taught by a closed elite that is the target of many conspiracy theorists. They have chapter houses all over the world, but the most prominent ones are located in Anchorage, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, Omaha, Raleigh, New York City, Boston, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Reykjavik, Santiago de Compostela, Bilbao, Geneva, Paris, London, Edimburgh, Copenhagen, Hanover, Vienna, Cracow, Stockholm, Rome, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Cape Town, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Melbourne and Wellington.
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elusivexeno's avatar
Also what is "weak-truth" pragmatism?