"Heidegger and Wittgenstein: Worldliness and Surveyable Representation in the Architecture of the Ordinary" (original) (raw)
Related papers
The World as Limited Whole: The Later Wittgenstein and Later Heidegger on a Critique of Concepts
The purpose of my presentation is to bring together various remarks made by Wittgenstein and Heidegger in their respective later works regarding the critique of concepts. Throughout both the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty Wittgenstein presents a critique of concepts which share striking similarities to the thought of Martin Heidegger in his “What is Called Thinking?” and “What is a Thing?”, as well as much of the later period of Heidegger’s thought. My aim is to examine various comments by Wittgenstein, in particular those comments within the Philosophical Investigations which can be read as offering a specific critique of conceptual thinking (I have in mind here particularly remarks §65, §66, §81, & §89, as well as others). In this, it is my hope to demonstrate that both the later Wittgenstein’s and the later Heidegger’s remarks not only orient us toward a praxis-oriented dimension of meaning and understanding, but that further, both philosophers can offer a perspectives to further contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. More specifically, my aim is to examine broadly how Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblances sits comfortably alongside Heidegger’s critiques of metaphysics starting in the mid-1930’s. My intent is to first show the ways each philosopher frames their respective critiques of representation and concept formation and to then show in what important ways their respective critiques overlap. Finally, and most importantly, I will show that such an analysis of Wittgenstein and Heidegger can shed interesting insights on their respective “philosophies of mind”. In this I am influenced by both Cavell’s and Cora Diamond’s reading of the later Wittgenstein and from contemporary commentaries on Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and representational thinking. My aim is to show that when brought together, Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s critiques of concepts and conceptual thinking can help us to further elucidate questions of realism and anti-realism in contemporary debates.
Wittgenstein_reads_Heidegger_Heidegger_r.pdf
Wittgenstein reads Heidegger, Heidegger reads Wittgenstein: Thinking Language Bounding World This is a tale of two readings, and of a non-encounter: the missed encounter between two philosophers whose legacy, as has been noted, might jointly define the scope of problems and questions left open for philosophy today. In particular, I will discuss today two remarks, one by Wittgenstein on Heidegger, and the other by Heidegger on Wittgenstein; as far as I know, the first is the only recorded remark by Wittgenstein about Heidegger, and the second is one of only two by Heidegger about Wittgenstein. 1 As readings, both remarks that I shall discuss are, at best, partial, elliptical, and glancing. Interestingly, as I shall argue, each is actually a suggestive misreading of the one philosopher by the other. By considering the two misreadings, I shall argue, we can understand better the relationship between the two great twentieth century investigators of the still obscure linkages among being, language and truth. And we can gain some insight into some of the many questions still left open by the many failed encounters of twentieth century philosophy, including what might be considered the most definitive encounter that is still routinely missed, miscarried, or misunderstood, the encounter between the " traditions " of " analytic " and " continental " philosophy, which are still widely supposed to be disjoint.
Did Wittgenstein Disagree with Heidegger?
If Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most influential analytic philosopher of the last century, and Martin Heidegger the most influential continental philosopher of the last century, then one would think there would be a lot of interest in the relation between the two.
European Journal of Philosophy, 2020
David Egan's book is not the first work to bring together the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. Many philosophers, most notably Hubert Dreyfus and Stanley Cavell, have long felt there to be an affinity between the two philosophers, despite the many differences in tone, style, and tradition. Such a sensed affinity tends to focus on two central strands of their work: a deep dissatisfaction with philosophy as traditionally conceived and practiced, and an appeal to the everyday or the ordinary as crucial to articulating that dissatisfaction and providing for an alternative way of doing philosophy (what Heidegger refers to as ontology, whose method is phenomenology, and what Wittgenstein refers to as, if anything, simply grammatical investigations). There has in recent years been a spate of work that endeavors to tease out these affinities in detail, including book-length studies and collections of papers. Egan himself is one of a triumvirate who edited such a collection a few years back (in the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to that volume), so he is hardly a newcomer to the Heidegger-and-Wittgenstein corner of philosophy. Despite this being something of a crowded field, Egan's book stands out as a sensitive, lucid, and nuanced treatment of the interplay between the two philosophers. Because I am so sympathetic to so much of what Egan has to say (again, in the spirit of full disclosure, some of my own work is cited here and there, mostly approvingly), mustering a more critical perspective has been quite a challenge. Nonetheless, after sketching out Egan's project, I will try to bring out some worries that arose in working through his book. Rather than cite minor quibbles and squabblessuch as Egan's treatment of Heidegger's notion of distantiality at the end of third chapter or (far worse) his overlooking a paper of mine in note 9 on page 45-I will concentrate on more central issues. The book is divided into three parts. Parts One and Two concern the notion of everydayness, viewed first from the perspective of averageness and then from the perspective of authenticity. The third part steps back to reflect on the way both philosophers' transformed conceptions of the everydayyoked as they are to criticism of philosophy as traditionally conceiveddemand a transformed conception of philosophical practice. Although Egan shuttles between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, he does so within chapters so that both philosophers remain present in the discussion, with key ideas from each deftly woven together without being crudely assimilated or identified (there is even at one point the introduction of a Kripkendegger figure to parallel the Kripkenstein that haunts a swath of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein). While Egan throughout the book emphasizes the affinities between the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, the part of the book devoted to method calls greater attention to their differences. Egan carefully documents how both philosophers are sensitive to the ways in which their rejection of traditional philosophy demands a reconception of philosophical method: Heidegger, for example, notes early on in Being and Time that the shift from entities to being (from the ontical to the ontological) initiates a project where "we lack not only most of the words but above all the 'grammar'." (BT 63/39); and Wittgenstein struggled throughout the later decades of his life to find a suitable way to arrange and present his thoughts (after all, Philosophical Investigations was only published posthumously). Despite the self-consciousness Heidegger displays about the demands his project places on language, Egan finds his departures from traditional philosophical methods, at least at the time of Being
An analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
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