From Analysis to Therapy: Notes on the “Philosophy” of Wittgenstein

Abstract

Wittgenstein is a dissident philosopher with its accounts of philosophy as his unordinary personality. Challenging the traditional philosophy he has forever been a critical philosopher and criticized even his own previous accounts when he found in them mistakes. His philosophy is approached generally in two or three periods, but sometimes more than three. Criticizing traditional philosophy as a logical positivist in Tractatus, he claims that propositions of philosophy are not true or false, but nonsense. World consists of facts not things. The pictures of facts are sentences. And all sentences belong to natural sciences. Philosophy does not have any sentences. What we expect from philosophy is to analyse the langue only and to say nothing on the world. After noticing his mistakes in his theory of langue, Wittgenstein comes to a new concept of langue that we use langue for different aims and always in a form of life. He introduces this new theory of langue with the conceptions of langue games and forms of life. What we expect from philosophy is to put forth that different langue games are played with different aims in various forms of life. Philosophy should not interfere these different uses of langue and let them be how they are. Therefore Wittgenstein invokes philosophers to test their philosophical terms with ordinary langue. Displaying how the uses of philosophical terms cripple our thinking he indicates the way of cure. On his philosophical journey from the analyses of langue to langue games and to therapy he remains forever a langue philosopher, an anti-philosopher. But philosophy in the 21st Century follows his paths.