Research Information System
100 Years of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — 70 Years after Wittgenstein’s Death. A Critical Assessment, Vienna, Austria, 7 - 12 August 2023, pp.491-501
In his logical-philosophical treatise published in 1922, Ludwig Wittgenstein defined “all philosophy” as Sprachkritik, “but not in the sense of Mauthner” (TLP 4.0031). This strange tribute to Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923) undoubtedly contributed to marginalise him as an illustrious and unknown outsider, even if Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, interpreted as a turn from logical language to ordinary language analysis, has been considered to be much in line with Mauthner’s semantic and pragmatic reflections on language as a human activity. This interpretation of a turn in Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the related presentation of Mauthner as a “precursor” of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy should be questioned. I suggest that the seemingly negative reference to Mauthner’s Sprachkritik in Wittgenstein’s definition of philosophy as language critique in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is more complicated than it seems and that it represents a key to understanding the continuities in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy as critical activity and language analysis. Rather than merely identifying common motives of Mauthner and Wittgenstein, which are particularly significant in the latter’s posthumous Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953), the aim of this paper is to question, from the very text of the and its subtext, what it means to define philosophy as critique of language, and what such a conception implies concerning the nature, method and purpose of philosophy as a unique kind of theoretical activity.