ABSTRACT
Perhaps the greatest difference between Schlick and Neurath was in their estimation of Wittgenstein. Was he the chief inspirer – almost the only begetter – of scientific philosophy in its new form? Or was he at heart a reactionary, who would preserve all the rights of metaphysics, provided it was his own metaphysics? A general answer will not be attempted here, but both attitudes may have overlooked the extent to which Wittgenstein was not a completed revelation but a questing philosopher, not a book but a man. His difficulties in working with others in the way Neurath wanted to work obscured the fact that while his main preoccupation may have been a whole philosophy of philosophy itself, he was also, and indeed as a necessary feature of this preoccupation, concerned with individual problems of philosophy, and in part with just those that – and in much the way that – they preoccupied the ‘ordinary’ members of the Vienna Circle. This could perhaps be shown for meaning and verification, as may emerge from other items in this collection. But here my subject is one broached in the Tractatus, left unresolved in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, and then carried further in conversations with Schlick and Waismann, and finally in Wittgenstein’s own manuscripts of the early 1930s, selections from which now from time to time get published, all of which are however available in the Bergen/Oxford edition.
