Abstract

This article offers a novel interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Martin Heidegger’s deep yet elusive philosophical affinity. Moving beyond commonplaces—such as claims that both thinkers are pragmatists, solve skepticism in parallel, or reject representationalism in similar ways—it argues that each espouses minimal externalism and a quietist stance toward traditional metaphysical inquiry. For Wittgenstein, language is inseparably embedded in forms-of-life and does not require theoretical “grounding.” For Heidegger, Dasein is constitutively Being-in-the-world, and any attempt to explain the subject–object relation through representational frameworks is misguided. In both cases, attention to everyday contexts shows that our practices are “the ground already before us,” an insight that dissolves rather than solves the problem of grounding. By clarifying how minimal externalism and quietism develop in each thinker’s work, the paper defends the view that Wittgenstein and Heidegger converge upon a systematic reorientation of philosophical method itself.