Prolegomenon

‘I destroy! I destroy! I destroy!’, Wittgenstein wrote in one of his pocket notebooks in the early 1930s.

His destructive side is manifest in his criticisms of a wide range of philo-sophical conceptions of language and linguistic meaning. It is seen in his critique of metaphysics, and it is evident in his demolition of dualism, behaviourism and mentalism in the philosophy of mind. The upshot of these critical investigations is the destruction of what he called ‘houses of cards’. His aim was to expose philosophical illusions, to undermine grand theories modelled on theories in the natural sciences and to reveal the chimerical character of metaphysical systems. He did not show these theories and systems to be false but to be nonsense. By ‘nonsense’ I don't mean stupid rubbish. It is very important to be clear about this. I mean that such philosophical theories and systems subtly transgress the limits of language and bounds of sense. The task of philosophy, Wittgenstein held, is to transform latent nonsense into patent nonsense – to make it clear exactly where and why the bounds of sense are transgressed.

Nevertheless, there is also a constructive side to Wittgenstein's later phi-losophy. Side by side with the exposure of nonsense, Wittgenstein gives us, from one domain to another, an overview of the network of concepts that make up the ways in which we think. We have seen this first, in the domain of language, meaning and linguistic understanding. There he displayed for us the warp and the weft of the concepts of word and name, sentence and description, the meaning of words and the meaning of sentences, use and practice, explanation of meaning and definition, meaning of something by words and understanding the meanings of words and so on and so forth. We have also examined aspects of his philosophy of psychology in which he gives us an overview of psychological concepts, their first-person present-tense use and their third-person ascription, their asymmetries regarding knowledge, doubt and belief, their link with behavioural criteria, the concepts of mind and of body, the misleading pictures of outer and inner and so on through a broad and ramifying weave of interlocking concepts.