A Holistic Approach To Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy
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A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHY BASED UPON HIS DISCUSSION ON RULE-FOLLOWING
Introduction: A Holistic Approach
Certain figures in the history of what is understood by the word philosophy today pose modern philosophers a great deal of difficulty in coping with the meaning of their philosophical projects. This is partly due to the heavy language those great men adopted in order to convey their ideas to the public. However, the most crucial and often overlooked reason for such difficulties is that we tend to focus only on individual ideas – or theories, if you will – proposed by them, usually not paying enough attention to their philosophy as a whole; or rather, not recognizing the place of that individual idea in the idea-space…show more content… One of the most important philosophers of our era, who is mostly misunderstood because of the reasons specified above, I think, is Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is exactly the reason why the strategy I have in mind in talking about his philosophy will be of a holistic character. Also, it should be noted that Wittgenstein was someone who mostly dealt with philosophy per se, instead of some particular pseudo-problems of modern day’s philosophy. This can be observed when we look at his remarks on these so-called problems of philosophy. He set up his project as a holistic approach to philosophy early on when he said in the preface of Tractatus that “The book [Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus] deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood.” Although he abandoned later some of his ideas he presented in the Tractatus, his aim in philosophy had never been to analyse particular problems that have been actually invented by professional philosophers. On the contrary, he tried to show that those problems were indeed invented, or somehow erroneously emerged, precisely from our misunderstanding of language. One can go even further and say that what Wittgenstein had done was a sort of meta-philosophy. However, in order to be able to carry out this task, one has also to recognize