Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

Wittgenstein's philosophical production touched upon numerous critical points in contemporary philosophy. It is not incorrect to say that Wittgenstein's major concern throughout his life remained the investigation on language, but it would be reductive to limit his thought to the philosophy of language and logic. He was stimulated by Weininger, Frege, Russell, Spengler…, but also Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. One cannot either reduce his influences to the philosophical area: he was an attentive reader of Goethe and appreciator of German poetry. Music, moreover, and particularly the classical romantic music of the Liederists and Brahms, remained one of his primary sources of inspiration.

At the time of the ''Tractatus'', the influence of the prevailing logicism restricted his consideration of symbolism to a representational and “realist” perspective, although he brought brilliant innovations to coeval philosophy - from the theory of proposition and logical atomism to truth-functionality, from the foundations of ontology and epistemology to the conception of the normativity of natural laws, from reflection on solipsism to ethics, aesthetics and even theology. The logical Wittgenstein of the ''Tractatus'' particularly conditioned the emergence of the neo-positivist philosophy of the so-called Vienna Circle, which was formed in the Austrian capital during the first post-war period and brought together thinkers such as Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and Friedrich Waismann (1896-1959).

The period of the ''Philosophical Investigations'' coincides with an evolution in Wittgenstein’s consideration of language, traced back to linguistic practices – the well-known "language games" – that reveal specific configurations of the human being – "forms of life". These notions reveal an affinity with the "linguistic-pragmatic turn" in philosophy of language, and are applied variously by the author in the philosophy of psychology, in anthropological reflections (see, for example, his ''Notes on Frazer's Golden Bough'') and in his work on the foundations of mathematics.

It has often been emphasized – even by Wittgenstein himself, in some passages – the discontinuity between his youthful thought and his mature reflections, especially in relation to the connotation of the nature of language – formally structured in the “early” Wittgenstein, linked to the variable forms of culture in the "second" Wittgenstein. However, lines of continuity can be discerned, especially in the conception of philosophy as a "critique of language" and the "ethical point" of philosophical work, which is not intended to operate a foundation or give rise to a theory, but contains a transformative force of the human being.