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1 What Is Philosophy? Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer connexion when a philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word “this” innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §38 When we merely stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more. This grasping which is free of the “as,” is a privation of the kind of seeing in which one merely understands. It is not more primordial than that kind of seeing, but is derived from it. —Heidegger, Being and Time, 190/149 The topics philosophers discuss are as diverse as the types of things there are in the universe, and plenty of them ignore even that restriction. But there is one topic that all great philosophers address, and that is philosophy itself. This issue carries personal significance for Wittgenstein and Heidegger since their methodological innovations were partially undertaken in rebellion against their mentors. Being and Time struck Husserl as a personal betrayal, especially since Heidegger had concealed the extent of his apostasy while Husserl was furthering his career.1 Russell was, for a time, broken by Wittgenstein’s criticisms, abandoning the book he had been writing to leave the future of philosophy to his young pupil.2 It is here, with their understanding of philosophy, that I will begin examining Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s thought, starting with their suspicion of the way it has traditionally been practiced. While demands to change the course of philosophy are a relatively constant feature of this course, Wittgenstein and Heidegger are unusually severe in their critiques. It is not a matter of individual mistaken claims or flawed methods in need 14 Chapter 1 of repair; the entire project has been misconstrued from the ground up, building certain errors and distortions into the structure of the discipline itself. Heidegger comes to call his later work “thinking” to emphasize its distance from traditional philosophy. Both consider the negative step of disassembling received views to be a necessary preparation if their positive work is to avoid perpetuating these perennial problems. For later Wittgenstein, this means disenchanting various “pictures” that have taken over one’s thinking about a subject, while early Heidegger proposes the Destruktion or “dismantling” of traditional theories, a process that would have formed the second half of Being and Time had he completed that work. The Right Signs Wittgenstein’s work needs to be read as a whole.3 The later works, largely written in reaction to his early views, often illuminate his highly compressed early writings. While he comes to attack a number of “grave mistakes ”4 in the Tractatus, that book serves more as an example of the type of philosophy he later takes aim at, rather than his specific target. In Schlick’s copy of the book, Wittgenstein described it as “the symptom of a disease,”5 a disease he sets out to eradicate by finding what gives rise to the philosophical impulse in general. The Tractatus thus represents a paradigmatic example of a phenomenon that is pervasive,6 which means that studying the former will help us grasp the latter, as Wittgenstein advises: “I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking” (PI x). While Russell’s introduction depicts the Tractatus as seeking “the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language,”7 Wittgenstein—who disliked Russell’s contribution (NB 131)—is actually after the conditions of any successful description of reality. Any language that can represent reality by forming propositions which assert the existence or non-existence of states-of-affairs is perfectly legitimate and needs no support from an ideal system of communication fashioned to more rigorous standards, the way Russell and Whitehead constructed a logical basis for mathematics. In other words, “all the propositions of our everyday language , just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.”8 To say that everyday language is in perfect logical order, however, is not quite the same as saying that it is in perfect order simpliciter, and on that slender difference hangs the entire endeavor. Everyday language...

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