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A Farewell to Forms of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

E. F. Thompkins
E. F. Thompkins
Affiliation:
Grange, South Australia
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Extract

The little boy who announced to a shocked court that the emperor was dressed in nothing but his birthday suit was no mean philosopher in the Wittgensteinian mode. Immune from bewitchment by language he followed blindly, figuratively speaking, the rule of ‘look and see’; any explanation being superfluous since everything lay exposed to view, he described what he saw in everyday words stripped of metaphysical gloss and used in a language-game they could happily call home. Such impeccable philosophical credentials and his fearless pursuit of the truth encourage me to follow his example, though I feel a certain trepidation at the enormity of what I am about to suggest: To my ingenuous gaze the body corporate of Wittgensteinian scholarship displays some startlingly naughty bits that really ought to be decently covered.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 252 , April 1990 , pp. 181 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

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2 This article is based on my reading of the German texts of Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen and Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung and not on Anscombe, G. E. M.'s Philosophical InvestigationsGoogle Scholar and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of either C. K. Ogden or D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. I identify references by means of Wittgenstein's section number preceded by PU for Philosophische Untersuchungen, PI for Philosophical Investigations, and T (for Tractatus) for Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung which is generally known as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Tractatus for short) even in German.

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