Wittgenstein's Radical Alternative

How Wittgenstein completed the linguistic turn, replacing analysis with grammar as method, replacing knowledge with clarity as goal. 

Introduction:
In the first part of his career Wittgenstein was a logician of first rank, along with Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell.  His first book, the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, not only incorporated and deepened the new symbolic logic that was due primarily to Frege and Russell but also developed new tools for the clarification of thought by means of logical analysis.  Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, along with G. E. Moore, are the pillars of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy.  Wittgenstein, however, came to disagree with the other three in fundamental ways, and the divergence resulted in (or perhaps consisted in) pushing epistemology into the back seat.  In this paper I will largely ignore the first part of Wittgenstein’s career in order to concentrate on how his later work contrasts with both “Ordinary Language Philosophy” and mainline academic philosophy.

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Summary

Wittgenstein’s achievement in the history of philosophy consists in turning philosophy away from logical analysis toward contextual explication, and even more in undermining the dominance of epistemology that had characterized mainstream philosophy since Descartes.  Intellectually it is an achievement of monumental dimensions, but since a majority of academic philosophers continue to work in ways that Wittgenstein disdained, it remains unclear how decisive a mark he will have made in the history of the discipline.

Note: The full document is published in Philosophic Exchange (Brockport NY) 2008.