17 - Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy - III

Summary

The Goals of Philosophy: Conceptual Geography and Intellectual Therapy

In the last two lectures, we saw that according to Wittgenstein, philosophy has both positive and negative aims.

• ● Positively, philosophy aims to give an overview – a surveyable representation of a conceptual field. Wittgenstein compares this task of philosophy to conceptual cartography.

• ● Negatively, philosophy aims to disentangle conceptual confusions, to destroy metaphysical illusions, to undermine mythologies of symbolism and of psychology (both within philosophy and within the sciences).

So, let's start with the positive objective. To give a synopsis of the use of an expression, describing its salient logico-grammatical features and rendering a surveyable account of its conceptual affinities and disaffinities, is a positive achievement. One who has an overview knows his way around in the grammar of the problematic expression and is in a position to clear up associated philosophical confusions. The point of striving for an overview is to clear up philosophical difficulties – to make the troubles disappear. Where there are no conceptual difficulties, as in, say, culinary discourse, there is no point in striving for an overview of concepts. For where there are no such troubles, there is nothing to make disappear. The field of philosophy is limited by the range of our philosophical troubles.

Int. Yes, I think I understood that in our last meeting. But now I am a bit confused. I thought that it was Gilbert Ryle who talked about logical geography in his famous book The Concept of Mind.

PMSH. You’re quite right. Ryle did use this phrase in Concept of Mind. That book was published in 1949. But Wittgenstein invoked the metaphor of logical, or conceptual, geography much earlier. The philosopher, he wrote, wanted to master the geography of concepts: to see every locality in its proximate and its distant surroundings. In the early 1930s, he said to his pupils

One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language and the geography its grammar.