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Contextual metaphilosophy: the case of Wittgenstein
Gakis, D.
Publication date
2012
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Gakis, D. (2012). Contextual metaphilosophy: the case of Wittgenstein. Institute for Logic,
Language and Computation.
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Abstract
The aim of this dissertation is two-fold. First, we wish to present an alternative to the dominant metaphilosophical approaches that try to answer the question of what philosophy is by providing a normative answer, i.e. an answer based on each philosopher’s views on what philosophy (proper) should be. That kind of answer may take many forms: conceptual analysis, science, way of life, critique, the discovery of truth, and others. In opposition to such normative answers, we try to provide a descriptive answer to metaphilosophical questions by treating philosophy as an activity or praxis, as something that is actually done by human beings. Thus we approach philosophy as what philosophers do, as the product of the activity of humans who are situated in concrete historical, social, and cultural settings. From such a perspective, we come to see philosophy, not as a homogenous domain based on some kind of a philosophical essence, but as a multifarious and complex network composed of different paradigms which are related, not through a single characteristic that they all share, but through various kinds of resemblances (and differences of course). For such an enterprise, the relation of philosophy to its context, i.e. to the rest of the nexus of human activity and life, becomes crucial.
The second and principal aim of this study is to make such a contextual metaphilosophical perspective more concrete by means of a detailed investigation of the broader context of the life, thought, and work of a particular philosopher: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Thus we investigate many facets of the context of Wittgenstein’s life and thought, both in his early and his later phase. With regard to the early phase, we focus on the relation of his personal and (meta)philosophical stance to certain characteristics of modernity and of various strands of modernism. With regard to the later phase, we pay attention in particular to the social and anthropological shift of his perspective and to the largely Marxist context of his later life and thought. In this way, we come to see Wittgenstein not just as a philosopher occupied mainly with logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, but also as a philosopher who through his life and his work (and the interaction of the two) puts forward a certain ethical, social, and political stance as well, one that calls for a change in our form(s) of life.
Abstract
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What links the two aspects of the dissertation’s general goal is not only the contextual character of our approach, but also the emphasis on the idea that humans are a self-institutional species. This, we argue, is a major feature of Wittgenstein’s later (meta)philosophical perspective and shapes our contextual metaphilosophical approach as described above. It is the idea that human doings, beliefs, and sayings are not founded on any kind of metaphysical entities or extra-human essences like ‘God’, ‘Nature’, ‘Reality’, ‘Truth’, ‘Reason’, ‘History’, ‘Spirit/Mind’, ‘Subject’, or ‘Man’. The only thing we can rely on, (epistemo)logically, ethically, aesthetically, or psychologically, is ourselves and our fellow human beings, the communities that are constituted by and are constitutive of us and that we form, belong to, and interact with.
