Imagine a philosopher who lived and worked in Oxford or Cambridge at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s, and suppose she has been hibernating for about sixty years. After a tense stand-off, she wakes up in present-day Britain with all her memories intact. In a sense, of course, to her eyes almost everything has changed since then. But even focusing only on her professional field, namely philosophy, she feels deeply disoriented, for in the meantime many radical transformations have occurred. One of the novelties concerns the place of the later Wittgensteinâor, more generally, the weight and influence of what in this book is labelled the later Wittgensteinian traditionâin analytic philosophy.1 The imaginary philosopher remembers that in the 1950s Oxford and to a lesser extent Cambridge were the âmeccaâ of analytic philosophy, and Wittgensteinâthe later Wittgensteinâwas the champion of that philosophical tendency: a great majority of scholars in the Oxbridge analytic community shared a body of methodological and theoretical points and attitudes stemming from Wittgensteinâs teaching; in those years, the later Wittgensteinian paradigm in philosophy was so dominant in Britain that to many it seemed not unreasonable to presume that it was about to have a similar impact on the philosophical landscape of all English-speaking countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (Forguson 2001: 325). But when, after sixty years or so, the imaginary philosopher wakes up, her first impression is that during the hibernation period things must have gone on differently and unexpectedly. She ascertains that the later Wittgensteinian traditionâits assumptions, purposes, methods and philosophical styleâhas been largely forgotten or rejected by present-day analytic philosophers. Looking closer at the present philosophical scene, however, she also notices that, after all, there are still many Anglo-American philosophers who develop Wittgenstein-inspired views in their articles and books: but this happens in a context in which the overall number of professional philosophers has increased amazingly, and where it is not uncontroversial how to define what counts as mainstream and what counts as peripheral philosophy (Weatherson 2014; Bonino and Tripodi 2018b). âHow did we get here from there?â is the question recently posed by Tim Williamson (2014). The same question is at stake in the present book.
The basis of the present work is the conviction that the imaginary hibernating philosopherâs disoriented responses are by and large correct, and point in the right direction. Such responses can be roughly spelt out in the following terms: in the history of analytical philosophy from the 1950s to the present day, the later Wittgensteinian tradition gradually lost its centrality in Britain, and never reached a comparable consideration in the United States of America. The main purpose of this book is to outline an explanation of this historical-philosophical fact: the decline of the later Wittgensteinian tradition throughout the historical development of analytic philosophy, from the 1950s to the present day. This chapter sketches out the bookâs main explanandum. Chapters 2â7 attempt to explain it. An entirely different book would be required to account for a second fact: that on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean the Wittgensteinian tradition never ceased to exist or do a great deal of interesting philosophy; it is beyond the purposes of the present book to provide a picture of the various recent philosophical uses or rediscoveries of Wittgensteinâs later philosophy. Chapter 7, however, takes a small step in that direction: it doesnât really outline the Wittgensteinian fieldâto borrow Pierre Bourdieuâs terminologyâin the recent history of analytic philosophy, but it provides some preliminary data for accomplishing the task in future work.
This is through and through a history of philosophy book. However, the historical-philosophical phenomena discussed and, hopefully, in part explained in the book are complex and multifaceted, so as to require the support of different perspectives borrowed from the history of ideas, intellectual history, and the sociology of knowledge, broadly conceived. The point is not to deny that philosophical arguments, as well as their conclusions, do matter. However, neither the arguments nor their conclusions are enough to explain philosophical success or failure, since the ââintrinsic force of true ideasâ perpetually meets resistance from all quarters, in the shape of interests, prejudices and passionsâ (Bourdieu 1999: 220). Social mechanisms and broadly cultural conditions play a role which is difficult to overestimate, though sometimes it is not easy to understand the details. Therefore this book is very inclusive methodologically, occasionally combining the traditional methods of the history of philosophy (such as conceptual analysis, rational reconstruction and the examination of the historical context) with a variety of sociological tools and concepts (both qualitative and quantitative), with categories borrowed from economic history (belonging especially to the Annales school), and with so-called distant reading methods, introduced into literary history some decades ago by Franco Moretti (Bloor 1976; Braudel 1980/1997; Bourdieu 1984a; Kusch 1995, 2000; Wallerstein 2000; Moretti 2005, 2013).
The Rise
Since perhaps not everybody is going to agree with this bookâs main assumptionsâespecially with the reality or factuality of the bookâs main historical-philosophical explanandumâin what follows a few preliminary words will be added concerning the rise and the fall of the later Wittgensteinian tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy. The background of the story is well known, so the details will be omitted. After returning to Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein was welcomed by the intellectual Ă©lite as the legendary author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. As John Maynard Keynes once famously wrote in a letter to Lydia Lopokova: âWell, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 trainâ (Monk 1990: 255). In Cambridge, Wittgenstein started to give lectures and at-homes, which would in the following two decades deeply change the entire philosophical climate in Britain. From 1930 to 1941, and then from 1945 to 1947, many people attended his lectures and were influenced by him in various ways. Some of them were, or were going to become, professors of philosophy or other disciplines such as mathematics in British, Scandinavian, Australasian and American universities, among them George Edward Moore, Alice Ambrose, Max Black, Richard Braithwaite, Margaret Masterman, Karl Britton, Maurice Cornforth, Reuben Louis Goodstein, Austin Duncan-Jones, Margaret Macdonald, John Wisdom, John Findlay, Douglas Gasking, Casimir Lewy, Norman Malcolm, George A. Paul, Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, Alan Turing, Georg Henrik von Wright, Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Allan Cameron Jackson, Georg Kreisel, Cecil Alec Mace, and Stephen Toulmin (Hacker 1996: 77, 138).
In most cases, his pupils venerated Wittgenstein: Geach once compared Wittgensteinâs classes to Quaker prayer meetings (Malcolm 1958/2001: 45), and von Wright observed that âto learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catchwords and even to imitate his tone of voice, his mien and gestures was almost impossibleâ (von Wright 1955: 242). Wittgenstein was aware of such shortcomings of his teaching. He felt he was a failure as a teacher: as he once said, âThe only seed that I am likely to sow is a certain jargonâ (Malcolm 1958/2001: 53); he also believed that âhis ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciplesâ (von Wright 1955: 527). In fact, he even doubted that âhe would be better understood in the future,â for âhe felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day menâ (von Wright 1955: 527). Accordingly, he shunned the idea of funding a school and, more generally, of being imitated, ânot at any rate by those who publish articles in philosophical journalsâ (Wittgenstein 1980a: 61e). According to von Wright, âthat was one reason why he did not himself publish his later worksâ (von Wright 1955: 527). As a matter of fact, however, his lectures and personal conversations, the circulation of the Blue and Brown Books and, above all, the posthumous publication, in 1953, of the Philosophical Investigations (later followed by the publication of several other parts of his Nachlass) made Wittgensteinâs later philosophy the dominant way of thinking in Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s (Hacker 1996: Chapter 6).
This is not to say that everybody in Cambridge followed or at least admired the Wittgensteinian revolution in philosophy. This is rather to suggest something less general and more precise, which can be summarised in the following three points. First, almost everybody in the new generation of Cambridge philosophers was deeply impressed by Wittgensteinâs later way of philosophising, and set up their own work based on that model. Secondly, even those who, like C.D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, were more critical towards it, did not deny its importance and centrality. Broad watched âwith a fatherly eye the philosophic gambols of ⊠[his] younger friends as they dance[d] to the highly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgensteinâs fluteâ (Broad 1925: 7). Nonetheless, Broad felt compelled to say that âto refuse the chair to Wittgenstein would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physicsâ (Drury 1984: 141). Something similar is true of Russell, a philosopher Wittgenstein used to admire greatly, even though he later came to regard him as one who was not âgoing to kill himself doing philosophyâ any more (Malcolm 1958/2001: 57): Russell wondered âwhy a whole school finds important wisdomâ in Wittgensteinâs later philosophy, which he regarded, on the contrary, âto have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary,â so as to have become âat best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusementâ (Russell 1959a: 216â217); at the same time, however, Russell could not help acknowledging that Wittgensteinâs later philosophy was the leading philosophical tendency in Britain during that period, overtaking both Tractatus-inspired analysis and logical positivism.
Thirdly, and perhaps most import...