ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rise and fall of 'Wittgenstein the phenomenologist', with a view to uncovering the role that this figure played in the transformation of the author of the Tractatus into that of the Philosophical Investigations. It argues that the motivation of this figure and that of 'Wittgenstein the phenomenologist' is fundamentally alike; but this is first and foremost logical, a concern which a comparison with E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, or A. J. Ayer for that matter is unlikely to illuminate. The chapter draws articulating a metaphilosophical radicalism in the middle Wittgenstein that the author of Being and Time directly resists. The story of the rise of metaphilosophical radicalism is also that of the fall of 'Wittgenstein the phenomenologist' and 'Wittgenstein the verificationist', and of two further twists to the notion of a necessary 'liberation from grammar'.
