THE PROBLEM ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

It is one of the wonderful paradoxes of our time that the greatest and most stimulating philosopher of the century should identify his work with the stodgiest and dullest of school subjects. It is nonetheless the case that for the last twenty years of his life, the years of his greatest productivity and his profoundest work, Wittgenstein identified what he was doing, and what other philosophers really have been doing and should be doing, with grammar. This perspective is as carefully considered as it is puzzling. It emerged out of earnest and ongoing work, and its implications are felt throughout his later philosophical investigations. Although he settled into this general conception of philosophy soon after his return to Cambridge, probably in 1930, he never gave a clear and orderly account of what he meant. Nor did he succeed, in spite of the centrality of this idea from 1930 right through his last writings, in convincing all those who read his work sympathetically that he meant what he seemed to be saying; both Moore (PO, pp. 46-114) and Feyerabend, for example, expressed profound skepticism about it shortly after his death.