What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ PI I, 116.6 While teaching at Cambridge between the wars, Wittgenstein published nothing.. When Austria b
Trang 1systems ‘When philosophers use a word—‘‘knowledge’’, ‘‘being’’, ‘‘object’’,
‘‘I’’, ‘‘proposition’’, ‘‘name’’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI I, 116).6
While teaching at Cambridge between the wars, Wittgenstein published nothing He wrote copiously, filling notebooks, drafting and redrafting manuscripts, and circulating substantial handouts among his pupils, who also took and preserved detailed notes of his lectures But none of this material was published until after his death His ideas circulated, often in garbled form, largely by word of mouth
When Austria became part of Nazi Germany by the Anschluss of 1938, Wittgenstein became a British citizen During the war he worked as a paramedic, and in 1947 he resigned his Cambridge chair, being succeeded
by his Finnish pupil Georg Henrik von Wright He continued to write philosophy and to communicate philosophical thoughts to close friends and disciples After a period of solitary life in Ireland, he stayed in the houses of various friends in Oxford and Cambridge until his death in 1951
at the age of sixty-two
Analytic Philosophy after Wittgenstein
In 1949 Gilbert Ryle, Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford, published a book called The Concept of Mind The ideas presented in that book bore a strong resemblance to Wittgenstein’s Ryle was strongly anti-Cartesian, and indeed the first chapter of the book was entitled ‘Descartes’ Myth’ Ryle emphasized a distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, which may have owed something to Heidegger His discussion of the will and the emotions annihilated the notion of internal impressions which many philosophers had inherited from the British empiricists In a chapter on ‘Dispositions and Occurrences’ he brought to the attention of modern philosophers the importance of the Aristotelian distinctions be-tween different forms of actuality and potentiality His discussion of sensation, imagination, and intellect leaned too heavily in the direction
6 Wittgenstein’s attitude to metaphysics is treated at length in Ch 7.
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