purpose of philosophy to clarify language wittgenstein

Purpose of philosophy to clarify language wittgenstein how to#

That is, it's his views about how to do philosophy and what you can and cannot achieve by doing philosophy that I most firmly reject. It's really his 'metaphilosophical' outlook that I find myself constantly recoiling from. And though I probably ultimately reject a lot of it, it isn't these things that I find so hard to swallow from Wittgenstein. I presume we'll talk about some of his more intriquing philosophical claims today - his picture theory of meaning, his claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, his later (and highly influential) view that meaning is use, his argument against the very possibility of a private language. There's lots of things that Wittgenstein says in his great work the Philosophical Investigations, for example, that I find intriguing, deep, challenging, and well worth thinking about even today. When I say that I find myself resistant to much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, it's not so much this or that particular claim of his that I resist. In the rest of this post, I'll try to say a bit about why. Nonetheless, I find myself resistant to much of his philosophy - especially his later philosophy. I don't doubt that Wittgenstein was a deep, ingenious, and highly impactful philosophy. I did read a fair amount of Wittgenstein as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where a number of my teachers had an enduring fascination with his work. Now I don't profess at all to be an expert on Wittgenstein. Indeed, Wittgenstein has to be regarded as one of the great founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, especially of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy. But there's no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime - a book that he later basically repudiated - he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Purpose of philosophy to clarify language wittgenstein