Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Attempt at a Critical Rationalist Appraisal

Cham: Springer Verlag (2018)
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Abstract

This book collects 13 papers that explore Wittgenstein's philosophy throughout the different stages of his career. The author writes from the viewpoint of critical rationalism. The tone of his analysis is friendly and appreciative yet critical. Of these papers, seven are on the background to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Five papers examine different aspects of it: one on the philosophy of young Wittgenstein, one on his transitional period, and the final three on the philosophy of mature Wittgenstein, chiefly his Philosophical Investigations. The last of these papers, which serves as the concluding chapter, concerns the analytical school of philosophy that grew chiefly under its influence. Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations ignores formal languages while retaining the view of metaphysics as meaningless -- declaring that all languages are metaphysics-free. It was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Now it is passé. Wittgenstein had hoped to dissolve all philosophical disputes, yet he generated a new kind of dispute. His claim to have improved the philosophy of life is awkward just because he prevented philosophical discussion from the ability to achieve that: he cut the branch on which he was sitting. This, according to the author, is the most serious critique of Wittgenstein.

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9783030001162   3030001164   9783030001179   3030001180

DOI

10.1007/978-3-030-00117-9
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Chapters

Background

Regrettably, Wittgenstein did not consider the possibility that his early effort was both significant and a failure. So he replaced its content with its approach: the concern of philosophy is with language, questioning whether a sentence has truth-value before questioning whether it is true. To view... see more

Young Wittgenstein

To what extent did mature Wittgenstein disagree with young Wittgenstein? Some of the continuity between them was unavoidable. They shared the therapy that anti-philosophy is supposed to provide. Young Wittgenstein criticized Russell to the point of making him abandon his major research project that ... see more

Russell

Russell inaugurated analytic philosophy new-style. His initial concern was with rationality. He took its display in science to be best and the clearest. He therefore had two initial aims: to render philosophy scientific and to prove that science is certain . This led him to efforts to improve logic.... see more

The Message of Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein’s discussions of language games and of forms of life are parts of his theory of meaning. They led him to a fragmented view of language and so he proposed a search for the rules that each of the different fragments follows. The mention of forms of life was only a hint in that direction, ... see more

A History of Anti-metaphysics

The hostility to metaphysics began as the hostility to scholastic metaphysics and to that of Aristotle. It rested on Bacon’s doctrine of prejudice that led to the recommendation never to advocate an unproven theory: make no hypothesis. The hostility was thus to the speculative method of metaphysics.... see more

Logic and Language

The great change at the turn of the twentieth century, in philosophy in general and in logic in particular, was the transition from the view of logic as the logic of science – of proven informative truths – to the view of logic as the logic of formal languages – of correct speech, of following gramm... see more

Conclusion: The Place of Wittgenstein

The hermeneutic literature in Wittgenstein will benefit from following the rules of hermeneutics more closely. This will suit the view of him as a moralist. And then, although he thought he was great and would have been disappointed to learn that he was not, if this option is to be overruled, this s... see more

Interim Period: Carnap Versus Popper

The “Vienna Circle” worded young Wittgenstein’s philosophy as the identification of language with the language of science. He had claimed to have solved the problem of induction. They had to respond to Popper’s new solution to it. They took his solution to be in the framework of Wittgenstein’s ident... see more

The Waning of Essentialism

John O. Wisdom says, [new-style] analytic philosophy has resulted from a radical change in our theory of definition, and the resulting devaluation of the place of essential definitions in science and philosophy. Most traditional and most current metaphysics are deeply involved with essential definit... see more

Ordinary Language Analysis

Comments on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations should be respectful and not defensive: they should follow his own guidelines whenever possible, but critically, not in blind admiration. And they should include explicitly discussions of critics of his philosophy and their impact. Their natura... see more

Logic and Mathematics

It is Frege, not Boole, who is the father of modern logic. What exactly is modern about modern logic? Why did Frege develop it? The answers given here are these. Modern logic is both comprehensive and fully formal. The comprehensiveness in question is the sufficiency for the purposes of mathematics.... see more

Analysis of Analysis

Kinds of analysis proliferate. The paradigm of analysis is mathematics; Newton spoke of scientific analysis; chemical analysis is a paradigm for that; psychologists speak of analyses; social scientists follow suit; linguists offer discourse analyses; critical analyses of Shakespeare’s sonnets are al... see more

Frege

Extensionalism makes it possible to study logic independently of any theory of meaning. Frege’s logic was not fully extensional, however: he developed a theory of meaning in order to have classes uniquely determined. That theory is also flexible enough to allow statements of identity to be at times ... see more

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Joseph Agassi
York University

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The Problem of Analytic Philosophy.Joseph Agassi & Ian C. Jarvie - 2019 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 49 (5):413-433.

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