Abstract

The paper is a reply in Process Studies to a paper of mine that had earlier appeared in Process Studies on Wittgenstein and Whitehead. The paper considers both the “earlier” Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the “later” Wittgenstein beginning with the Philosophical Investigations. The paper discusses Wittgenstein’s idea that the philosophical truth is “open to view”, the centrality of the picture theory in the Tractatus, the Tractatus-dichotomy between “saying” and “showing”, the Tractatus-view that “one must be silent” about that which can only be “shown”, the role of “logical atomism” in the Tractatus, the kind of “clarity” Wittgenstein sought in his ethical and his philosophical investigations, the Tractatus-notion of “logical space” and Ramal’s claim that the Tractatus posits a “transcendental space” for the mystical, the question whether Wittgenstein embraced the idea of ineliminable paradox in human life, the Tractatus-idea that logic is the basis of metaphysics, Wittgenstein’s “organicism” in both his “earlier” and “later” philosophies, Wittgenstein’s notion of essences in both his “earlier” and “later” philosophies, the “later” Wittgenstein’s and Whitehead’s respective views of the relation of philosophy and ordinary language, the question whether the “later” Wittgenstein and/or Whitehead uses words in a metaphorical sense in their philosophical works, the “later” Wittgenstein’s notion of “grammatical” propositions, the significance of cosmological language in both Wittgenstein and Whitehead. The paper is published at Academia [dot] edu