Of course such a notion is subjective, but whenever the question is asked.."Who was the greatest...or who was the most impactful/influential philosopher of the 20th century"
the general consensus tends to be This guy or Heidegger...
why is this? what did he do?
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Did you read tractacus?
lol Wittgenstein is no where near the same level as Heidegger
I'll put him at 2nd greatest of the 20th century
but just read Being and Time....just the sheer complexity is something that Wittgenstein could never reach with his simplistic philosophy
why is complexity good? In the sciences, one strives for the most elegant theory, and that includes looking for the simplest possible answer. Why not the same in philosophy?
Complexity doesn't necessarily mean better.
Because he chewed up and spat out logical positivism.
>why is this? what did he do?
If you didn't know, you didn't read. If you didn't read, you shouldn't be posting about him or the subject in such a light. If you didn't read, you shouldn't be posting on the board dedicated to reading the subject first. You and many others need to leave this board.
they both 'ended metaphysics'
ANSWER THE QUETION
The Linguistic Turn.
That is, instead of presuppose Reason like so many did after the Epistemological Turn, deduce that many errors in communication of philosophy are due to inherent linguistic errors. Logic as a formal system also came in the 20th century, with a focus on creating systems of logic that would also aid in proper communication.
Both of these were responses to Epistemology of course, which made evident the limits of perception and knowledge.
Sometimes we believe that asking certain question is part of the philosophical progress, we are "moving on". A resonable case can be made to argue that Wittgenstein was not only the greatest philosopher in the 20th century, but as some people argue, the greatest philosopher since Kant. Sometimes it's believed that the questions asked by Wittgenstein would never have been asked if there were no Wittgenstein, this is, the philosophical turn on philosophy and the work of contemporary philosophy would have never happened without him.
This is what often make philosophers not just good, but great. Their work is expansive, and it extends to many fields in which one would think the work would never have any influence (to the point some mathematicians say the philosophical investigations was a very influential book in their work); it is a "system" which has not only philosophical arguments but a way of doing philosophy (Wittgenstein considered this new way of doing philosophy, the 'disolution' of philosophical problems working through a process of unraveling the 'mist' in philosophical question revealing the over-stretched analogies through language games, his greatest contribution to philosophy); puts a philosophical "end" to some problems working with their new method,
Closing remarks:
(1) It is relatively easy to come up with a "method" and claim that it solves philosophical problems. Develop a new way of doing philosophy that doesn't fall into any philosophical trap of the past, is almost impossible.
Kant did it with his development of trascendental arguments. A detailed explanation would take more time than I am willing to spend here, but it should be noted that the "principles" of a good argument were already given by Neo-humeans at the time, and Kant's trascendental deduction is a way of writing a philosophical argument that follows each argumentative condition and yet is completely novel. Wittgenstein's case rest on Frege and Russell, and in the same way Kant did it, Wittgenstein manages to follow the "basic" rules while producing something novel at the same time. Heidegger method follows Husserl, and while the results are innovative, his did not create a new way of carrying philosophical investigations.
(2) Great philosophers, often find a way to justify and explain their own practice. A metaphilosophical paradigm is given. This does NOT happen with Heidegger.
(3) Answers to this type of questions are biased. This needs to be understood in this way: we have only seen their immediate influence, but we don't know if their philosophy will have any influence in the future (I would say yes, but we don't know). There has been many many treatises considered masterpieces, and eventually forgotten. Nobody can doubt that Kant was a brilliant philosopher, but the best proof of that 200+ years after Kant we still read him, there are plenty of Kantians around, and some consequences of his work are inescapable.
Do you think the ideas would of developed without Wittgenstein...or did it take his genius to do it
many argue that Newton's ideas would of came eventually without him or Einstein's relativity would of been solved by someone else
of course science is completely different enterprise than philosophy
I think this take us to the old problem of continuity. Does science develop bit by bit, of scientific development occur in jumps? The most known example of the latter is Kuhn's notion of paradigm, or in a general scope, Foucault's episteme.
I think that if a person holds the idea of continuous development, the idea of irreplaceable genius is hard to take true. A genius of this kind, if possible, is the cause of a 'jump' in the way the discipline works.
There is some reason in the cases you quote regarding Newton and Einstein, and this is given because they were the major exponents in a series of thoughts that were in everyone's mind, this is, the problems were already there, and they were the ones capable of solve them, but there was plenty of people working on the same problems (and if I recall correctly, Poincare was very close to formulate relativist physics, see en.wikipedia.org
In the case of Wittgenstein, he not only gave solution but asked many questions that I, personally, find them too unique to think that someone else could have asked them and create so much philosophical work upon them (If you are whistling a tune and you are interrupted, how do you know how to go on?, Why is the alphabet like a string of pearls in a box?, Does my telephone call to New York strengthen my conviction that the earth exists?, Why would it be unthinkable that I should stay in the saddle however much the facts bucked?, Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?).
This may be a combination of the right genius at the right time. If Wittgenstein hadn't live a peculiar early life, maybe he wouldn't be the wittgenstein.
so to conclude what you said
Witty was simply a more groundbreaking philosopher than Heidegger?
yes
Tbqh, I think Quine is better than Wittgenstein, simply because he BTFO'd all the logical positivists.
Yeah i agree that Quine was the greatest of the 20th century...not Wittgenstein, Heidegger or anyone else
What did Quine do?
Yeah, I've been thinking of trying Quine out, what's cool about him?
My money is on Popper.
He was one of the few analytic philosophers who wrote penetratingly about societal affairs with The Open Society and it's Enemies.
His work on philosophy of science has been so influential that it has actually influenced scientist's thinking and scientific practice, which is hugely rare. The idea of conjecture and refutation, of his support for the hypothetical-deductive over the inductive method and his argument for falsifiability as the criterion for valid science are now accepted as norms.
Wittgenstein had too much of a rarified view of what philosophy should do, and so sometimes you are left wondering what his pragmatic contribution to knowlege is. It's all process, no content. More about how to think rather than actual products of thought.
>More about how to think rather than actual products of thought.
The first sounds immeasurably more important...
quine
Was he a marxist by the way? wittgenstein?
His paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" undermined the analytic/synthetic distinction used by positivists to justify verificationism and opened the door to analytic metaphysics. Also wrote a lot of interesting stuff in the philosophy of math, science, and language
>muh language games
Literally the death of philosophy
QUINEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Q
U INE
people become obsessed with W because they can't tell if he's the most autistic of mystics or the most mystical of autists.
would read the Tractatus again, a thousand times before the gay shit of his contemporaries (e.g. Russell and Whitehead)
Because biographies written about him later on made him out to be a God or an unnatural man and hyped up his interesting life of having been born into a wealthy family and turned to christianity and was into architecture and aviation etc.
In reality, he was a man like yourself and I and incredibly flawed, there are secret diaries belonging to Wittgenstein published in slovenian and italian that show during his war years he often masturbated and thought of his gay lover Pinsent.
Wittgenstein was undoubtedly a genius but there's nothing more embarrassing and annoying than people who later on have come to view themselves as his disciples, he hated them himself.
Instead of building upon what he wrote, many have taken it as doctrine, this with the fact there are few pictures of him and his wealthy background have create an allure or mysteriousness, if you read the accounts of his pupils at the schools he taught in europe, you'll learn he was like any other man, anxious and conflicted.
This. There's a cult of personality surrounding W. I have to admit when I was a dumb college twink I fell for it, but after a while, he starts to ring hollow. His linguistic reductionism has bubbled over into all kinds of insipid pedantics. His eliminationist platform that discards most subject matter as philosophically uninteresting or simply a language puzzle has trivialized the field.
Also, his manner of writing, while occasionally capturing glimpses of brilliance, is also frequently disorganized and rambling. He liked to write in numbered aphorisms and will abandon a thought before it was even completed, trying to pass off lazy half-backed analysis and suggested for oracular wisdom.
>In reality, he was a man like yourself and I and incredibly flawed, there are secret diaries belonging to Wittgenstein published in slovenian and italian that show during his war years he often masturbated and thought of his gay lover Pinsent.
These are not secret. He recorded all the masturbations during the war too.
He still is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, but people with little to no knowledge of him overrate him immensely.
because he's CUTE
We live in a generational era characterized by scientific realism, logical positivism, and atheistic, direction-less skepticism. So, why is it a surprise to you that there are some people who consider this charlatan the greatest philosopher of the 20th century?
Wittgenstein ultimately says nothing throughout the entirety of his work.
>charlatan
you are
>many argue that Newton's ideas would of came eventually without him
Most of his great ideas were made without him tho. Like Liebniz simultaneously developed biscuits (choco Liebniz is also clearly superior to fig Newtons).
>There's a cult of personality surrounding W. I have to admit when I was a dumb college twink I fell for it, but after a while, he starts to ring hollow. His linguistic reductionism has bubbled over into all kinds of insipid pedantics.
I don't think he can be read like this consistently. It's a perversion of his work thay serves Russel especially.
>Does science develop bit by bit, of scientific development occur in jumps? The most known example of the latter is Kuhn's notion of paradigm, or in a general scope, Foucault's episteme.
It isn't a question of "does it", of course it does both. Wtf brah?
Tell me one thing the Tractatus expressed that wasn't expressed before and wasn't half-assed.
The Greeks, the Christian mystics, and 19th century German philosophers were already chest-high in the waters of sign-value (language) analysis. The entire concept of perspectivism also seemed to go right over Wittgenstein's head with that book. His rudimentary outlining of what the philosophical tradition was already addressing indicates he didn't read very much of it, or poorly understood it.
>Using pragmatism as a standard in philosophy
This is not a field of thought for you.