Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to compare the method used by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein in their respective criticisms of three philosophical concepts that they considered to be traditional. The three concepts chosen for comparison are world, language and truth. Our method will consist of showing some crucial developments of their treatment of these concepts in Heidegger's Being and Time and Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. It can be found that there is is a similarity in the manner in which these philosophers attempted to reformulate these concepts. It involves their efforts to inspect ordinary behavior very closely prior to their philosophical conclusions. In doing this analysis of everyday life they both contended that much of preceding philosophy is inadequate to account for what really goes on during these experiences. Heidegger treated Descartes' notion of extended substances, the role of intuition in Husserl's work and a view of Aristotle's conception of truth as correspondence. He looked at the use of tools, for example, to stress the importance of a certain 'possibility' character of the being of man when in an everyday mode. He then asserted that those who held the traditional concepts have a presupposition that presence and representation are the keys to understanding these behaviors and taked them to task for it. The later Wittgenstein criticized no other than himself as the writer of the Tractatus by showing that the views that the world is fundamentally combinations of objects, that language's essence is in picturing facts and that truth is agreement cannot explain such everyday experiences as reading, thinking and speaking. Our essay concludes with a commentary suggesting ways to evaluate whether their work was indeed radical