Abstract

Wittgenstein's move is admirably motivated and directed, but it suffers from basic flaws which involve it in as many problems as it has warded off. This paper will attempt to trace out some of these flaws, and also to suggest how they might have been avoided. In the process, it will invoke the aid of the ancient aphorist who seems in some ways to have been a kindred spirit of Wittgenstein, and who shares with him a stress upon the public or the "common" as the key to overcoming philosophy's perplexities: Heraclitus of Ephesus. The sage who, wearied by the abstruseness of vain speculation and by the chatter of the marketplace, went off to play with the children in the temple of Artemis, may have some useful hints for the gardener in the Irish monastery, wearied by the hum of the idling engine forever "gunned" by the professional philosophers.