Wittgenstein: A Critique (review)

614 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 198 7 J. N. Findlay. Wittgenstein: A Critique. International Library of Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Pp. 262. $30.00. The author purports to offer "a comprehensive critique of the thought of Wittgenstein from a standpoint which recognizes him to be, both in his earlier and his later thinking, a systematic philosophical thinker..." (1). This is not so easy since the later Wittgenstein professed to have no doctrines and theories, but rather only a method to lay to rest such doctrines and theories. Nevertheless our undaunted author is convinced that there are beasts hidden deep in the Wittgensteinian jungle of aphorisms and remarks which he "must pin down and shoot down." The record of this hunting expedition consists of seven chapters. In Chapter 1, the author laid out his strategic plan for the hunt. In Chapter a, he visits his masters, "the Intentionalists," (Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl) to sharpen his weapons for the hunt. In Chapter 3, he pays a courtesy call to Wittgenstein's friends (Russell, Frege, and Moore) to find short-cuts and pitfalls. He sets out for the Wittgenstein land by first entering the well-laid out Tractatus farm land where some easy prey exist (in Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, he reaches the transitional forest of the Blue and Brown Books. Finally, he enters the small jungle of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Chapter 6) and then the big jungle of the Philosophical Investigations (Chapter 7) where some serious pinning down and shooting down occurred. But this curious hunting expedition with convoluted arrows (many of them more than ten lines long) failed to come up with any real beast from the Wittgensteinian jungle but only succeeded in exhibiting some ghosts from the author's private garden. Chapters 2 and 4 are both entitled "The context of Wittgenstein's Thoughts" in which the author expounds four systematic standpoints contemporary with Wittgenstein , which the author regards as having some relevance, whether direct or indirect, to Wittgenstein's thinking. The direct relevance of Russell, Frege, and Moore to Wittgenstein is obvious but it is not easy to see the connection between Wittgenstein and the intentionalists. The relevance turned out to be very indirect since "There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein was either directly or deeply acquainted with the works of any of these thinkers..." (22). This strange way of searching for "the historical roots of [Wittgenstein's] thought" (12) exhibits itself in other places. For example, "There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein was acquainted with any of the works of Titchner, but the Wundtian character of the experimental psychology he met with in Cambridge must have driven him in the similar direction..." (11). The author spends a chapter on the intentionalists not because it has much to do with the "context of Wittgenstein's Thought" but because he wants us to understand the context of h/s thought. He really likes intricate systems. "What is important and great about Husserl is the intricately worked out details of his intentional descriptions ..." (34). He is especially fond of "the manful intricacies of Meinong's arguments ..." (32). No wonder the author "found the time he spent in studying them one of the most philosophically rewarding in his life" (33)- Compared to the intentionalists , Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind is an "elementaristic Wundtianism" (a 2) based on "mechanistic and other irrelevant models" (39)- With the sharp and intri- BOOK REVIEWS 615 cate intentionalist weapon in hand the author goes forth to shoot down as many sitting ducks as he could find in the Wittgensteinian jungle. Needless to say the author found plenty of sitting decoys to shoot at. A few examples will suffice to show that they are decoys set by the author himself. The author claims that throughout Wittgeinstein's writings, expecially in his later writings, he presupposed a common-sense view of the world and that this was inspired by Moore. He characterizes On Certainty as "thoroughly Moorean" (69) in spite of the fact that it is a thorough critique of Moore's defence of common sense. The later Wittgenstein did not have...