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Introduction First, let’s get the obligatory biographical parallels out of the way. Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both born in 1889 in adjacent German-speaking countries (Germany and Austria, respectively). After flirting with other occupations (priesthood and engineering), they both came to study under leading philosophers of the day (Edmund Husserl and Bertrand Russell), each of whom recognized in his pupil not only an heir apparent but the savior of philosophy as a whole.1 Both published a first book in the 1920s (Being and Time and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) which employs their mentors’ method (phenomenology and logical analysis) while criticizing their mentors’ conception of it. Full of enigmatic claims written in a cryptic style (hyphenated neologisms and diamond-dense numbered statements , respectively), each book established its author as preeminent within a branch of philosophy. While Heidegger and Wittgenstein came to be dissatisfied with these works, they continued to exert astonishing influence, giving birth to entire movements (existential phenomenology and logical positivism) that largely shaped the next several decades of their respective traditions. Few thinkers in the history of philosophy have been sufficiently forceful and original to give rise to an entire movement, but far fewer have spawned two. Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein grew dissatisfied with their early work and underwent what Heidegger calls a Kehre or “turning,” the exact nature and extent of which continues to be the subject of vast scholarly contention. Amazingly, abandoning their celebrated early work for even more mysterious writings only expanded their influence. Ordinary language philosophy and what has been called “post-analytic” philosophy are deeply indebted to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, while postmodernism and post-structuralism arose in the wake of Heidegger’s later thought. Their teaching styles were unorthodox and spellbinding,2 and inspired many of their students to fruitful careers themselves.3 They remain leading 2 Introduction contenders for the (dubious) title of “greatest philosopher of the twentieth century” and, on a personal note, both have fascinated me in a way that no other philosophers have.4 One reason for their importance is that they both developed powerful critiques of traditional philosophical theories. Heidegger and later Wittgenstein undermine the Cartesian conception of the self, reality, and the relationship between them. Now, this project is hardly remarkable; digging up Descartes in order to kill him off yet again has been a rather popular pastime among philosophers for some time now. He is, to change genres, the Margaret Dumont of modern philosophy. What is distinctive about Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s work is the way in which they construct thorough alternatives which do not so much refute Cartesian ideas as prevent them from arising in the first place. They both try to show that the underlying ideas, far from being self-evident and foundational, actually rest on and perpetuate a whole host of misguided presuppositions. And as we will see, Heidegger and Wittgenstein do not just share a common enemy: they employ startlingly similar ideas and methods to help us dispense with it and move on with our intellectual lives. This agreement is particularly important in light of their typical classification in different branches of contemporary philosophy—namely, continental and analytic—which diverge significantly on such basic matters as what it means to philosophize, which topics are philosophically important, and what counts as a legitimate reason or argument. By now, these branches have grown so far apart that many who are educated in one know little about the other (beyond the fact that it isn’t worth wasting time on) and yet, this book will argue, these two central thinkers make similar arguments for similar views on a wide range of fundamental issues. And where they disagree, we can bring them into dialogue and compare their reasons. If a load-bearing bridge can be built between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, perhaps this will facilitate dialogue between analytic and continental thinkers in general, making the traditions intelligible to each other, thus allowing a fruitful crosspollination.5 At times, I admit, I could almost imagine myself as Henry Drummond at the end of Inherit the Wind, clasping Being and Time and Philosophical Investigations together to my chest. In this sense, I am continuing the project begun in my first book, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (2007), albeit with a different strategy. That work devised a common vocabulary to show that continental and analytic philosophers have been working on the same topic. Here, I focus on two thinkers to...

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