ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein’s greatness is tied to his capacity to combine a firm clear-sighted vision of philosophy as a non-scientific ‘a priori’ activity with a penetrating skepticism of the results of, and need for, a priori metaphysics. His discovery of ‘critique of language’ as a way of philosophizing anew allows him to appeal to his readers—as fellow masters of language—without the need to agree on matters of opinion. In this paper I defend two main ideas: (1) that the emphasis on language as a rule-governed activity in Wittgenstein scholarship is misguided and inevitably collapses into a metaphysics of language like that to be found in the Tractatus—precisely what Wittgenstein is trying to avoid; and (2) that we can only understand the philosophical therapeutic work that criteria perform in Wittgenstein’s philosophy if we abandon the idea that they are to be understood as expressions of linguistic rules.
