The nature of philosophy in 'orthodox' Wittgensteinianism

Abstract

This paper aims to present an overview of the 'orthodox' Wittgensteinian tradition. The term 'orthodox' is here understood as denoting the variety of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy made either by his pupils or by the pupils of his pupils. The author singles out the most notable proponents of this tradition and proceeds to discuss their main ideas in relation to the problem of the nature of philosophy, assuming that such context will help reveal the fundamental characteristics of the entire tradition most clearly. He also traces down the evolution toward a radical scepticism which occurred in orthodox Wittgensteinianism from mid-70s and has come to dominate its teaching even to this day, the resulting idea being that philosophy has no genuine object or problems of its own and could be reduced to the role of a method of conceptual analysis or that of linguistic therapy. Such reduction rests on Wittgenstein’s analogy between language and a family of games, where language is no longer a unified whole, but rather an aggregate of fragments of linguistic activity, the meaning of each fragment being determined by its proper grammar rules. Philosophical theories which offer universalist explanations do not fall under specialized grammars, are not governed by rule-sets and represent an outcome of the confusion of grammars. Philosophy, therefore, can have no meaningful goals and is only a method of language analysis. Even though this view is supported by plausible arguments, it was notably rejected by the first generation of Wittgensteinians.