Philosophical Questions in Lewis Carroll’s Works
Abstract
The article tries to answer the following questions: Why did Lewis Carroll’s ideas, expressed in the form of fairy tales, fascinate numerous analytical philosophers? What does Carroll’s contribution to the contemporary logic and philosophy consist in?
The basic thesis of the article is that Lewis Carroll – remaining in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of David Hume’s and George Berkeley’s philosophy – supplied material illustrating the problems connected with the use of language. He showed how improper use of language leads to formation of philosophical problems.
The article presents Carroll’s output. He was one of the pioneers of symbolic logic that he developed in Boole’s and De Morgan’s tradition – in the field of the so-called recreation mathematics that he popularized in the form of riddles, puzzles, doublets and puns, compared by some logicians to a formal system.
The article presents the essence of the theory of language developed by Carroll, in which language may be something hermetic with only one person having access to it (the case of Humpty Dumpty), but also something common, something social (Alice’s conversation with the White King). Attention is paid to the fact that Carroll differentiated between what is nonsensical and what is absurd (the criterion being its relation to logic). It is pointed that Carroll’s aim was first of all discovering the nonsense that is hidden behind the formulation of a metaphysical problem.
In the article also the connections are studied between Carroll and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the relation between them being seen in the view that absurd introduced by means of humor is a kind of vaccine that is supposed to protect us from forming absurdity in philosophy.
In conclusion it is stated that Carroll’s ideas that are the most significant for analytic philosophers are concerned with the nature of language that is not a transparent medium for him, but something that offers resistance when we communicate with others, as well as something that may be flexible and adjusted to our will. By manipulating language Carroll shows in what way philosophy balances between sense and nonsense and how often philosophical questions arise from erroneous use of language and erroneous posing of problems.
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