Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- I RELIGION AND MORALITY FROM A PRAGMATIST POINT OF VIEW
- II PHILOSOPHY'S PLACE IN CULTURE
- III CURRENT ISSUS WITHIN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
- 9 A pragmatist view of contemporary analytic philosophy
- 10 Naturalism and quietism
- 11 Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn
- 12 Holism and historicism
- 13 Kant vs. Dewey: the current situation of moral philosophy
- Index of names
11 - Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- I RELIGION AND MORALITY FROM A PRAGMATIST POINT OF VIEW
- II PHILOSOPHY'S PLACE IN CULTURE
- III CURRENT ISSUS WITHIN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
- 9 A pragmatist view of contemporary analytic philosophy
- 10 Naturalism and quietism
- 11 Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn
- 12 Holism and historicism
- 13 Kant vs. Dewey: the current situation of moral philosophy
- Index of names
Summary
There are profound differences of opinion among contemporary philosophers both about whether Wittgenstein is worth reading and about what one can learn from him. They parallel disagreements about whether, and in what sense, philosophical problems are problems of language. In this chapter, I shall describe three views of Wittgenstein, corresponding to three ways of thinking about the so-called “linguistic turn in philosophy.” Doing so will help me defend two claims for which I have argued in the past. First: there is no interesting sense in which philosophical problems are problems of language. Second: the linguistic turn was useful nevertheless, for it turned philosophers' attention from the topic of experience toward that of linguistic behavior. That shift helped break the hold of empiricism – and, more broadly, of representationalism.
Contemporary philosophers who call themselves “naturalists” typically see little value in Wittgenstein's work. For them, the central topic of philosophy is what Philip Pettit calls, in Sellarsian language, the clash between “the manifest image” and “the scientific image.” The manifest image incorporates what Pettit calls “the ideas that come with our spontaneous, everyday practices, such as the ideas we naturally have about freedom and consciousness, causation and law, value and duty.” The scientific image, he says, “challenges us to look for where in that world there can be room for phenomena that remain as vivid as ever in the manifest image: consciousness, freedom, responsibility, goodness, virtue and the like.”
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- Information
- Philosophy as Cultural PoliticsPhilosophical Papers, pp. 160 - 175Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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