Prof. Daniele Moyal-Sharrock has published an article in the current issue (24,70,2025) of the journal Think in which she turns back to revisit Ludwig Wittgenstein’s historic contribution to philosophy. This is to be praised, but her pessimistic take on Wittgenstein’s philosophy  —which she tries to defend— can also be construed as precisely the reason why he is now largely being discounted.

In my opinion Wittgenstein was the most perceptive philosopher of the 20^th century, but this judgment is based on a string of contributions which are opposite to the insights attributed to him by Prof. Moyal-Sharrock —and others who favour his pessimistic vision.

There are quotations which appear in Wittgenstein’s published oeuvre which seem to suggest that the main task of modern philosophy is to “cure” us from acquiring mazy verbal misunderstandings, e.g. the Red Queen’s comment that Alice “must have very sharp eyesight because she could see “nobody” coming down the road!” This is essentially a therapeutic interpretation of the subject, one which pitches it as a curative exercise in linguistic analysis. It goes under the heading   “showing the fly the way out of the flybottle”, an activity he seemed to think was quite similar to psycho-analysis.

Yes, but explaining merely ordinary language oddities is hardly the central, most difficult part of philosophy. To imply that this is central, diminishes the stature of philosophy.  The so-called “philosophic problems” it researches are of the easiest kind. Trying to present them as the main aim of philosophy is, however, obviously overblown. It is also probably the main reason why so many scholars “went off” linguistic philosophy after Stoppard’s play Jumpers was staged in the 1970s. This kind of “analysis” was widely dismissed as “just otiose talk”, and anyway it left everything “as it was” —as Wittgenstein himself often said. It has to be said, I’m afraid, that the exponents of linguistic philosophy seemed to be satisfied with practising an easy in-house dialogue verging on triviality.

Wittgenstein was correct in his historic assessment that the main problems of philosophy pivot on misunderstandings of language. But it was extraordinary language (religious condolencies, scientific explanations and questionable mathematical theorems) which presented the major challenge —after he had successfully solved the historic problem of meaning in ordinary language.   In my opinion all the classic dilemmas of philosophy are defined by striking (apparently impossible) contradictions —about conflicting types of meaning thrown up by maths and scientific explanations.

Wittgenstein’s big stumbling block was the meaning of maths. He had insisted that one had  <<not to look for the meaning>>.  What was needed was <<look for the use!>>.  But whatever was the bona fide “use” of maths?  Charles Peirce had found the answer fifty years before, but his insights had been brushed aside both in Vienna and Cambridge.  This was Wittgenstein’s Achilles Heel.

It mattered, because in the absence of a credible answer, his whole analysis of ordinary meaning was under the cosh.       .    After WW2 Wittgenstein was shocked to the core by a comment in Mein Kamph which referred with contempt to a rich Jewish boy (actually Wittgenstein) who attended the same Austrian school as Hitler.  This might have been the origin of Hitler’s brutal, obsessive, murderous anti-semitism. It was probably this dreadful thought, added by the fact that the mathematic hierarchy had set their attack dogs onto him, which turned him round from being an optimist to becoming a pessimist.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st September 2025