ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet, his philosophy has had little influence on the study of film, at least until recently. This is due in part to the outsized influence of continental philosophy on film studies (Allen and Smith 1997: 1–41). Although Wittgenstein was born and grew up in Vienna, he received his philosophical training from Bertrand Russell, one of the pioneers of modern analytic philosophy, and his work was analytic in orientation. But it is also due to the fact that many analytic philosophers, including analytic philosophers of art and film, have themselves rejected central tenets of Wittgenstein's philosophy, principally his claim that philosophy is not continuous with the sciences and is not a theoretical or empirical discipline. While the philosophical topics he addressed – the nature of meaning, the mind, truth, etc. – are ones that have long preoccupied philosophers, unlike most of them he believed that the philosophical problems raised by these topics stem from misunderstandings of the workings of language. Thus, instead of trying to solve these problems by constructing theories or by investigating the world empirically as the scientist does, philosophers, he argued, should clarify the way our language works, thereby dissolving away these philosophical problems and the misunderstandings of language from which they derive. Although this conception of philosophy has been kept alive by philosophers such as Norman Malcolm, Anthony Kenny, and Peter Hacker, it is not widely adhered to in analytic philosophy today, which tends to be scientific – some would say scientistic – in character and to be dominated by post-positivist ideas, due largely to the influence of W. V. O. Quine (see Hacker 1996: 183–227). Wittgenstein's defenders claim that this state of affairs is not the result of Wittgenstein's arguments having “been shown to be flawed or inadequate, but simply because of the impact on philosophical fashion of variations in the prestige of a number of non-philosophical disciplines” (Kenny 1989: vi). If they are right, then his philosophy still has much to teach us, including those of us who study film and art.
