Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
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Kevin Cahill
Abstract
I take it to be a central task of Wittgenstein's philosophy to undermine certain mythological conceptions of language that tend to hold us captive in philosophy. I believe too that one of his primary motivations for attempting this task is his sense of the corrosive effect such conceptions have on a society uncritically beholden to them. This paper explores a related question: How did Wittgenstein understand our relation to the philosophical problems that arise from these mythological conceptions once we have a clearer picture of the connections between the mythology and the problems? More specifically, I discuss the suggestion, made independently by Stanley Cavell and John McDowell, that Wittgenstein believed the problems of philosophy to be so fundamentally rooted in us, that any freedom from metaphysical quandaries one may enjoy can at best be temporary. Quite apart from the overall validity this view may have as an interpretation of the relation between human beings and metaphysics, there is the question of whether it is what Wittgenstein actually held. My aim here is not to engage in a debate about whether or not the “will to philosophy” is part of the human condition. Rather, I wish simply to argue that there are good reasons for believing that Wittgenstein believed it possible to abandon metaphysics.
© Philosophia Press 2008
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- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
