Wittgenstein의 哲學에 關하여

TLDR: In this article, the authors examine the effect of the so-called "hinge propositions" on Wittgenstein's work and propose a way to put an end to it once and for all together with all it has brought about.

Abstract: My main goal in this paper is to examine critically, in order to put an end to it once and for all together with all it has brought about, what from my point of view is a very harmful myth, ascribed to Ludwig Wittgenstein by several distinguished scholars, viz., the myth of the so-called ‘hinge propositions’. From the point of view of the history of ideas, the effects of this myth just cannot be ignored. Indeed, based on this myth it now has become a sort of unavoidable fashion to speak of a “third Wittgenstein”, a thinker who apparently would have superseded or overcome his own magnum opus, i.e., the Philosophical Investigations. According to those who support this reading of Wittgenstein’s work, he would have left behind his own phase of grammatical analysis in order to enter a new field of philosophical speculation, a new kind of therapy (whose nature, by the way, has never been made quite clear), much more similar to the sort of rational adventure which is practiced in traditional metaphysics than to the kind of analysis which Wittgenstein painfully managed to developed and practice and which, last but not least, brought him so many good results. Now in order to count with more elements to carry out our examination it’ll be convenient to have at our disposal a simple but neat and well argued panorama, a global but a convincing one too, of the philosophical background in which Wittgenstein has recourse to the expression ‘hinge’, which so many headaches has already caused. We are thus forced to exercise ourselves in a task of reconstruction of ideas. Our starting point, therefore, can only be the following: if we contemplate his work in toto: how many Wittgensteins is it reasonable to think there are? To answering this question I’ll devote the first part of this essay.