What Are the Main Differences between the Ideas of the Early and the Later Wittgenstein - Assignment Example

Question 1: What are the main differences between the ideas of the early and the later Wittgenstein? Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein’s two major works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1922 and Philosophische Untersuchungen or Philosophical Investigations published posthumously in 1953, have inspired a vast secondary literature and helped to shape subsequent developments in analytical philosophy. His fame has spread far beyond the confines of academic life. The Austrian born philosopher spent much of his life researching on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Growing up in a cultural and religious environment since childhood deeply influenced his thoughts which were later refined by Russell as his mentor. His profound thoughts and personality took him beyond the boundaries of philosophy and established him as anti-systemic though conducive to genuine philosophical understanding (Grayling 2001). The work of Wittgenstein can be divided in two distinguished phases, the early work presented in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the later more matured work presented in Philosophical Investigations. His thoughts were found to be distinctly different in both the works. He seemed to reinvent philosophy in his later work of Philosophical Investigations. The early work of Wittgenstein published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was constructed around seven basic propositions to deal with the philosophical problem of world, thought and language. The propositions are: the world is all that is the case; what is the case - a fact - is the existence of states of affairs; a logical picture of facts is a thought; a thought is a proposition with sense; a proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions; the general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N (ξ)] and this is the general form of proposition and what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. According to him the thoughts and propositions can be pictures of the facts. He conceptualized world to be consisting of facts rather than the traditional atomistic conception of world made up of objects. His famous “picture theory of meaning” deals with language saying that language consists of propositions and propositions are the perceptible expression of thoughts. The thoughts are demonstrated to be the logical expression of facts. His expressions in Tractatus were guided by the thoughts of Frege and Russell. Wittgenstein asserted that all meaningful propositions are of equal value and propositions and thoughts are pictures in literal sense and not metaphorical. He tried to distinguish between sense and nonsense and saying and showing in his book. According to him philosophy can only be expressed in non-philosophical propositions and not in philosophical propositions. He attempted to define the limits of logic in understanding the world. Logical positivism also claimed his attention. According to him language is not necessarily a picture of facts and the task of philosophy is not to discover the correct logical form of language, but to construct the most convenient language, to provide a grammar of science (Hartnack 1985). The major problem with the Tractatus is its difficulty in interpretation. Wittgenstein's method in the book does not follow its own demands regarding the only strictly correct philosophical method. Wittgenstein himself grew dissatisfied with his dogmatic approach in Tractatus and completely transformed into anti-dogmatic approach in Philosophical Investigations. He shifted from the realm of logic and concentrated ordinary language as the center of the philosopher's attention and adopted aphoristic style of writing. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy abandons the rigidly structured world of the Tractatus in favor of a less pristine and more modest conception of a complex world that resists any simple articulation. Instead of strictly numbered sections which are organized hierarchically in programmatic order, the Philosophical Investigations fragmentarily voices aphorisms about language-games, family resemblance, forms of life, jumping from one topic to another. This variation in style is essentially connected with the very nature of the new book. The Philosophical Investigations used conversational tone in its narration and was diffuse and concrete with vivid illustration and metaphors as opposed to the Tractatus. In his new thoughts he realized the necessity to study intention, desire, expectation and understanding to understand the nature of language and symbolism and thereby philosophy itself. He wrote that philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment. Wittgenstein tried to show how philosophers are led away from the ordinary world of language in use by misleading aspects of language itself. He expressed his notion of rule and rule following in this regard which Kripke (1982) argued to be the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has ever seen. Kripke contended that the central argument of the Philosophical Investigations centers on a devastating rule-following paradox that undermines the possibility of following rules in the use of language. While Tractatus studied the comparison of proposition and picture the Philosophical Investigation concentrated on the language game to understand the meanings of words. He argued that all words are not names and naming is not at all easy. He attacked the concept of private language saying that there can not be a language whose words refere to what can only be known to the speaker of the language (Kenny 1984). He opposed his views in Tractatus in this regard where he stated a correlation between elements of thought and the atoms of the world. In the Philosophical Investigations he denied any such correlation. The central idea of Tractatus was the concept of atoms forming the substance of the world whereas the central idea of the Philosophical Investigations was the form of life in which the language games are embedded. The Philosophical Investigations also concentrated on the philosophy of mind. Unlike Tractatus which concentrated on single philosophical method the Philosophical Investigations dealt with various methods and therapies. It investigated different psychological concepts of sensation, thought, understanding, volition, etc. The two distinct works of Ludwig Wittgenstein made him the key figure in the development of the history of analytical philosophy though his anti-theoritical and anti-scientism stance combined with the difficulty of his work posed problem for later philosophers. He had been criticized for his position on the limits of language and his abandonment of empirical explanation for linguistic description in his later works. Despite all these facts Wittgenstein remained to be the proponent of the most revolutionary and contrasting thoughts of all time and the driving frce behind emreging post-analytical philosophy (Richter 2006). References 1) Grayling, A., 2001. Wittgenstein: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2) Hartnack, J., 1965. Wittgenstein and modern philosophy. London: Methuen. 3) Kenny, A., 1984. The legacy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell. 4) Kripke, S., 1982. Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Oxford: Blackwell. 5) Richter, D.J., 2006. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951). The Internet Encyclopedia on Philosophy [online]. Available at: http://www.iep.utm.edu/w/wittgens.htm [accessed on 17 August 2008]. Question 2: What are the main differences between the ideas of the early and the later Heidegger? Martin Heidegger was one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century contributing hugely in the fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, political theory, psychology, theology and postmodernism. He was basically concerned with ontology or the study of being. His famous unfinished work, “Being and Time”, attempted to access being (Sein) by means of phenomenological analysis of human existence (Dasein) in respect to its temporal and historical character. Heidegger in his work profoundly touched all the deepest and significantly unconsidered portions of thoughts and had considerably shaken the basis of all the existing thoughts of twentieth century. “Being and Time” remained his most influential work till date though he showed distinctive shift from his primary focus in his later works. He stressed the nihilism of modern technological society, and attempted to win Western philosophical tradition back to the question of being in his later works by placing an emphasis on language as the vehicle through which the question of being could be unfolded, and also on the special role of poetry (Clark 2002). His life was also marred in controversy due to his fascination towards Nazism and scientists argue about the influence of his political thought on his philosophy, though there are views that Heidegger as a philosopher was a completely different person and his political inclination had nothing to do with philosophy. In his earlier work of “Being and Time”, Heidegger posed the question of being which was primarily neglected for the past 2500 years. His thoughts about the concept of ‘being’ showed the potential to challenge the traditional concepts, methods and assumptions of philosophy completely (Appignanesi 1999). Heidegger’s earlier work tried to explore the meaning of ‘being’ taking the sense of ‘meaning’ to be something from which a thing can be understood as it is (King 2001). He attempted to conjoin two insights in his work: the first being the attention of philosophy to all the beings in the world including the world itself while neglecting the question of ‘being’ itself and the second being his understanding of historical experience to be present always in the form of being. This became his ground for existential analytic arguing that to be able to describe experience properly means finding the being for which such a description might matter. Thus he described the concept of ‘dasein’ in terms of the condition of possibility for anything like a “philosophical anthropology”. The basis of Heidegger’s notion of autheticity and resolutenes is the need to be responsible for one’s own existence. Heidegger in his work criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. The combination of these two insights in Heidegger’s thought depended on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. His notion of ‘dasein’ thrown into an already existing world with mortal possibilities means that ‘dasein’ is an essentially temporal being. It also implies that the description of ‘dasein’can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. Heidegger could not separate philosophical terminology from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of “Being and Time” was thus only the beginning in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the transformation of its language and meaning making the existential analytic to be only a limited thought (Mulhall 1996). In his later works Heidegger showed significant shift of focus from his earlier thoughts. Though he himself argued that the turn in his views was only the result of deeper analysis, still the major changes could not be denied. In his later work, Heidegger largely abandoned the account of ‘dasein’ as a pragmatic, engaged, worldly agent, and instead discussed other elements necessary to an understanding of being, notably language, the earth as the almost ineffable foundation of world and the presence of the gods. Nevertheless, ‘dasein’ or ‘mortals’ as he termed it later remained a crucial part of the coming-about or event of being in his later works also. In the later thoughts Heidegger focused on “dwelling” rather than “doing” which was his focus earlier. Heidegger focused less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior “openness to being”. According to him the essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. Heidegger contrasted this openness to the “will to power” of the modern human subject, which is one way of forgetting this originary openness. Heidegger’s later writings concentrated on two major themes of poetry and technology. Heidegger saw poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of “revealing”. According to him poetry reveals being in the way in which, if it is genuine poetry, it commences something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals. In his discussion on modern technology he found a new stage of revealing which overcame the distinction between subject and object even in the material world. He described the essence of modern technology to be an attempt to the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated “standing reserve” of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. Heidegger described “enframing” in modern technological concept. Heidegger acknowledged the great dangers posed by modern technology but did not condemn it as he hoped it to constitute a chance for human beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being (Pattison 2000). Some researchers have concluded that an agrarian nostalgia permeates his later work He was also criticized for his supposed ignorance of the role of the other human being and for his relation to politics but his rethinking of his own earlier works and his changing vision are able to establish the ethics of Heidegger at a stronger position (Lewis 2005). References 1) Appignanesi, R., 1999. Introducing Heidegger. Cambridge: Icon. 2) Clark, T., 2002. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge. 3) King, M., 2001. A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. John Llewelyn, Albany: SUNY Press. 4) Lewis, M., 2005. Heidegger and the place of ethics. London: Continuum. 5) Mulhall, S., 1996. Routledge philosophy guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. London: Routledge. 6) Pattison, G., 2000. Routledge philosophy guidebook to the later Heidegger. London: Routledge. Read More