Description and transcendence [draft]

Note: This was the start of two other (much longer) posts, Philosophy as such and The entertainment value of metaphysics. I was browsing through some old drafts, and thought this one was interesting enough in its own right to deserve being posted.

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Last week I was browsing the Oxford University Press website to see if Jesse Prinz's The Emotional Construction of Morals was out yet in the U.S. (it isn't/wasn't) when I stumbled across a book with a most peculiar title: The Riddles of Existence by Earl Conee and Theodore Sider.
1. Oxford University Press: The Riddles of Existence

This really says it all (click for a larger view):



One thing that seemed particularly odd about this is that metaphysics is described as one of the deepest sorts of intellectual thought, yet "nothing is resolved." In lieu of any progress or conclusions from metaphysics, entertainment value is provided. There is supposedly "fun" in trying to indefinitively tackle the biggest of life's questions, these riddles of existence.

...

Again, I emphasize:

"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us." —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Or more bluntly:

"PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." —Ambrose Bierce

I'll carry this a few steps further:

1. Experience contains no paradoxes and no contradictions. These can only occur between statements and propositions—that is, in words. (The word 'contradiction' does well to emphasize my point: contra dicere would roughly translate to "to say against".)


2. There's no such thing as a philosophical problem outside of the bounds of artificial and non-representational constructions of language, nor does a "philosophical problem" or "riddle of existence" have any practical implications. [seducing]