Abstract
Although, as indicated in the preface, our interest is in the ‘later’ rather than the ‘early’ Wittgenstein, it is important to consider briefly the ideas advanced in the Tractatus before going on to examine, in greater depth, his subsequent views. Despite the enormous differences in his standpoints during the two phases of his work, his principal aim remained the achievement of clear understanding. And he always emphasised that philosophy was not a science, but rather an activity of elucidation and clarification. His concern in both phases was with the same topic: the relation of language to the world.
Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form: it is not one of its properties that it possesses. It is typical of it that it is building, construction. Its activity is one of constructing more and more complex structures. And even clarity serves this end, and is not sought on its own account. For me on the other hand clarity, lucidity, is the goal sought. Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Notes
Quoted in M. O’C. Drury, The Danger of Words (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. ix-x.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) p. 62. Throughout this volume I will refer to Wittgenstein’s works in the following manner: Notebooks 1914–1916 as NB, followed by page number; The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1958), BB, followed by page number; Lectures and Conversations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), LC, followed by page number; On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), OC, followed by paragraph number; Philosophical Grammar (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), PG, followed by page number; Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), PI, Part I, followed by paragraph number; Part II, followed by page number; Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), RFM, followed by section and paragraph numbers; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Humanities Press, 1961), TLP, followed by sentence number; Zettel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) Z, followed by paragraph number.
Georg Henrik von Wright, ‘A Biographical Sketch’, in Norman Malcom, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 7–8.
Quoted in G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1959) p. 161.
Quoted in Harold Morick (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) p. 177.
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) p. 228.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) p. 52.
Stanley Cavell, ‘Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy’, Daedalus, 93 (1964) p. 964.
Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972) p. 120.
Eugene A. Nida, ‘Principles of Translation as Exemplified by Bible Translations’, in Reuben A. Brower (ed.), On Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959) p. 13.
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (New York: Collier Books, 1970) p. 60.
An especially useful discussion of the private language problem can be found in Esa Itkonen, Linguistics and Metascience (Kokemäki, Finland: Societas Philosophica et Phaenomenologica, 1974).
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© 1977 Derek L. Phillips
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Phillips, D.L. (1977). The ‘Early’ and ‘Later’ Wittgenstein. In: Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03160-3_2
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