Take a look at the later Wittgenstein—he’s basically the Plato (Socrates) killer, as well as the Descartes killer.
This whole way of doing philosophy is misconceived. Meaning is not about what goes on in our brains, language is a precipitate of human social action, but not the result of human design, much like economic value (and also, I think moral value).
IOW, there is no “the” concept of justice, there are various things (in the real world) called “justice”, in the context of various “games” (ways of using words combined with ways of acting), and they are inter-related, but not in an essentialist way (one thing in common), rather in the way a rope is made out of skeins and threads that overlap some of the way, but with no thread or skein going all the way the length of the rope. Or again, cf. his concept of “family resemblance”—there’s a family nose, but not everyone in the family has it, while some members of the family have the family cheekbones, but not all have them, etc.
With this understanding, philosophy is free to go back to being pre-Socratic and Bayesian (with some element of Aristotle’s systematization). In the long view (which is but the blink of an AI) it was an interesting 2,000-odd year detour, but it was ultimately a dead end (as was the “modern” philosophical turn of Cartesian methodological solipsism).
Yeah post-Tractatus—Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein’s Lectures by Alice Ambrose (very useful to get an inroad into the later W.), On Certainty and a book on phil of maths the title of which I can’t remember.
None of these were published, they’re all notes or lectures notes or nearly-finished books. The only book post-Tractatus that Wittgenstein seems to have been ready to publish was the first part (as currently published) of Philosophical Investigations (the second part isn’t connected really, it’s someone else’s idea of something that they thought fit with it).
His later philosopy was WIP at the time of his death, but with the first part of PI, we’re seeing something that’s really new and revolutionary in philosophy. Some of it was taken up and became “ordinary language philosophy” in Oxford (esp JL Austin), but that was really only part of the story. Dan Dennett is, I think, a true heir of the later Wittgenstein (perhaps W. wouldn’t have thought so, because his conception of philosophy excluded it from the empirical domain altogether, and restricted it to purely being about language and concepts—but he wasn’t right about everything, and I hold to the older definition of philosophy :) ).
The Tractatus isn’t actually totally repudiated by the PI either, but it’s seen as a kind of special case of his later philosophy, as having a more limited scope and usefulness than W. thought when he wrote it.
I’m saying all this as someone who, when I first encountered W.’s later philosophy, agreed with Russell’s estimate of it as trivial—I thought W. was just a fey poseur. But over the course of the past few decades of my life, having re-read PI maybe 4 or 5 times with concentration, and returned to pondering it again and again, I’ve come to gradually realize that he really was the philosophical schizz :)
It’s not systematic though—as W. says in the intro to PI, it’s something you’ve got to go over several times, like becoming familiar with a landscape by journeying through it, criss-crossing it several times.
Take a look at the later Wittgenstein—he’s basically the Plato (Socrates) killer, as well as the Descartes killer.
This whole way of doing philosophy is misconceived. Meaning is not about what goes on in our brains, language is a precipitate of human social action, but not the result of human design, much like economic value (and also, I think moral value).
IOW, there is no “the” concept of justice, there are various things (in the real world) called “justice”, in the context of various “games” (ways of using words combined with ways of acting), and they are inter-related, but not in an essentialist way (one thing in common), rather in the way a rope is made out of skeins and threads that overlap some of the way, but with no thread or skein going all the way the length of the rope. Or again, cf. his concept of “family resemblance”—there’s a family nose, but not everyone in the family has it, while some members of the family have the family cheekbones, but not all have them, etc.
With this understanding, philosophy is free to go back to being pre-Socratic and Bayesian (with some element of Aristotle’s systematization). In the long view (which is but the blink of an AI) it was an interesting 2,000-odd year detour, but it was ultimately a dead end (as was the “modern” philosophical turn of Cartesian methodological solipsism).
After the Tractatus?
Yeah post-Tractatus—Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein’s Lectures by Alice Ambrose (very useful to get an inroad into the later W.), On Certainty and a book on phil of maths the title of which I can’t remember.
None of these were published, they’re all notes or lectures notes or nearly-finished books. The only book post-Tractatus that Wittgenstein seems to have been ready to publish was the first part (as currently published) of Philosophical Investigations (the second part isn’t connected really, it’s someone else’s idea of something that they thought fit with it).
His later philosopy was WIP at the time of his death, but with the first part of PI, we’re seeing something that’s really new and revolutionary in philosophy. Some of it was taken up and became “ordinary language philosophy” in Oxford (esp JL Austin), but that was really only part of the story. Dan Dennett is, I think, a true heir of the later Wittgenstein (perhaps W. wouldn’t have thought so, because his conception of philosophy excluded it from the empirical domain altogether, and restricted it to purely being about language and concepts—but he wasn’t right about everything, and I hold to the older definition of philosophy :) ).
The Tractatus isn’t actually totally repudiated by the PI either, but it’s seen as a kind of special case of his later philosophy, as having a more limited scope and usefulness than W. thought when he wrote it.
I’m saying all this as someone who, when I first encountered W.’s later philosophy, agreed with Russell’s estimate of it as trivial—I thought W. was just a fey poseur. But over the course of the past few decades of my life, having re-read PI maybe 4 or 5 times with concentration, and returned to pondering it again and again, I’ve come to gradually realize that he really was the philosophical schizz :)
It’s not systematic though—as W. says in the intro to PI, it’s something you’ve got to go over several times, like becoming familiar with a landscape by journeying through it, criss-crossing it several times.