ABSTRACT
The visits of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to the west of Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s are often considered escapes from the “modern”, romantic retreats to the periphery. The west of Ireland was more than an exotic location, however: it played an important role in rethinking modernity itself in Irish culture, and wider afield, as in Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. In Wittgenstein’s critical engagements with the modern, language is recast in terms of landscape, a topography of thought attempting to retrieve it from Western theories of progress and universal reason. The west of Ireland offered an appropriate mise-en-scène for what might be termed “coast-modernism”, a grounding of the modern to take account of the margins and what lies at the edges of reason.
