Abstract

This dissertation tries to bring to light a radical reading of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and to constitute as a school the scholars who have given it. Those scholars have generally been seen as idiosyncratic, and have not been recognized as sharing a common reading of Wittgenstein. Their work has rarely been accepted or emulated or elaborated, so the reading has remained largely tacit and unexplored in the literature. The seemingly diverse works of Stanley Cavell, Saul Kripke, David Bloor, and some of the students of John Wisdom, especially Ilham Dilman and Renford Bambrough, belong to this school. ;I discover and articulate a number of theses that link these scholars to one another and distinguish them from other schools of interpretation. Most notably, radical readers take Wittgenstein to accept the apparently paradoxical or skeptical idea that meaning remains perpetually unsettled, or that we ourselves continually settle it by each act of language use. Wittgenstein said , "The application of every word is arbitrary," and radical readers characteristically summarize the heart of his work with some similarly extreme and challenging thesis. ;Radical readers take Wittgenstein's turn to social practice to be a corollary to this unsettled state of meaning. That is, it is because meaning is never settled that normativity must be located in human interaction. This places the radical reading within the wider field of social or community readings of Wittgenstein. To clarify the radical reading, I compare it with various other readings, primarily by examining various critiques of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I compare the radical reading first with the community reading to which it is closest , than with other community readings , and then with a representative individualist reading . I also examine one "intra-radical" critique , and end with a general defense of Kripke's book