Abstract

 

Sense and nonsense

Wittgenstein, Idealism and the Limits of Language

 

Matthew John Densley

 

It has become fashionable to describe Wittgenstein as some kind of idealist.  Encouraged by the Kantian influence evident in his early Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, commentators have speculated about an implicit commitment to idealism in his mature thought.  Unfortunately, the debate has been marred by (a) a lack of an agreed understanding of what it means for a philosophy to be ‘idealist’, and (b) a lack of supporting evidence at the level of detailed exegesis of Wittgenstein’s texts.  This thesis endeavours to address these problems and resolve the debate.  In part one, I set out to clarify the notion of an idealist doctrine in general, and to define a form of idealism that is most suitable for comparison with Wittgenstein’s work.  This involves a brief investigation of the historical significance of idealism, a description of the influence of Transcendental Idealism on the early Wittgenstein, and a discussion of the kind of idealism that is still prevalent today as an approach to metaphysics.  Part two provides a fairly detailed exposition of certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought.  This exposition is used in the first place to motivate the claim that Wittgenstein was an idealist, but finally to argue that he did not, in fact, hold any such metaphysical doctrine.  Rather, I defend an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought that maintains that he consistently held to his anti-theoretical principles, and thus avoided any of the positive metaphysical commitments that would be entailed by an idealist doctrine.  The later Wittgenstein is described as a ‘quietist’ with respect to metaphysical discourse.  In part three I illustrate a quietist methodology by arguing that it is the only approach that can settle our intuitions about certain problems in the philosophy of subjectivity.