Wading into the Tractatus

The attached audio (or better: use this 16 kbps compressed version) is our beginning of a close reading of the early Wittgenstein.

I do not encourage very many people to listen. There are probably only two people in the world that wouldn’t be bored to tears by it. Listen to a little bit if you want to be encouraged that there are others in the world besides yourself for whom the highlight of a vacation would be a three hour discussion of philosophy.

Listen to more if you have the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in hand and want to join our struggle. Don’t listen for quick answers — listen only if you are interested in going slowly and carefully, discussing each word.

14 thoughts on “Wading into the Tractatus

  1. Nevermind, it worked. This is very enlightening and particularily useful as a Philosophy major. I’d love to see more and more of these recorded discussions turn up on the blog. Is there any hope of a podcast in the future?

  2. 129 MB is a big file to download. Audacity is free audio editor that allows for mp3 export to greatly reduce the size of the file.

  3. Joshua — it’s up. Even using the minimum bitrate, it still didn’t compress as much as I had hoped, but even a factor of 6x is worthwhile I suppose when dealing with such a monster. Thanks again for the tip.

    Josh — we do intend to do a weekly live broadcast/ podcast. It’s mainly technical savvy that we need to come up to speed on. Thanks for the word of encouragement.

    Any reader that can steer us toward tools and resources needed to move in that direction, please let us know.

  4. I certainly look forward to your pod cast! You might consider starting a youtube channel, it’s easy enough and there sure is a lot of traffic on youtube. A channel and a link to your site wouldn’t hurt.

  5. Mo — thanks. Aren’t youtube videos short, like 5 minutes-ish? Do they have them with people just blabbing randomly? What equipment is needed to produce one?

  6. There are entire full length documentaries on youtube. Concerning the equipment, from what I understand it’s basic and easy. I’ll look into it for you. Your provocative movie reviews, cultural analysis, some of the professor’s classroom lectures, live sermons, the occasional interview, opera clips and so on would make for a wonderful youtube broadcast! Most Christians will never hear a truly reformed perspective and thus taking advantage of a visual, easily accessible and popular media such as is youtube wouldn’t be a bad idea not to mention the fact that it is in need of an intellectual reformed presence. You could post responses to famous atheists and the like who readily utilize yutube and really generate an audience.

  7. There are more and more Bahnsen and Schaefer videos on youtube, interaction between individuals by way of their channels concerning TAG and other arguments for God’s existence. It would be priceless to have individuals such as yourselves making a presence there.

  8. Here is an article on starting a podcast:

    http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm

    Hopefully you guys could get both a youtube channel and a podcast going so we could send out links and hand out mp3s to spread the word.

    It would be especially useful to get such videos/mp3s considering you guys are the only prominent reformed folk that I know of with an accurate view of politics/history. Also, your philosophical abilities would make the programs that much more unique.

  9. Not sure if you got the my comments on podcast overview. It contained a few links and could have been detected as spam.

  10. Joshua — I fear it may have gotten whacked as spam, if it was posted as a comment. It shouldn’t have of course; at most it should have submitted it to our approval queue. But that queue is empty, and unfortunately, I can’t get in to the spam buffer because our version of WP is too old. If you still have a copy of your post… I have turned off the spam catcher; try it again. Tnx.

    (I’ll turn the spam-catching back on around midnight or so.)

  11. I tried again (twice) but I got an error message saying something like “it seems like you have submitted a duplicate comment.” So check your email for the comment under the subject line “Podcast Overview”. I hope it’s helpful.

  12. Joshua — tnx, got it.

    If any one else has has that problem when posting, let us know by email as Joshua has done. We too have been victims of the spam software.

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