ABSTRACT
Recent years of scholarship, benefiting from easier accessibility of an increasing amount of material from the Nachlaß, have revealed that questions of writing and style are of enormous importance in the assessment of Wittgenstein’s philosophy—something that had gone largely unacknowledged by the adepts of so-called ordinary language philosophy and its analytical heirs. One remarkable effect of this renewed ‘continental’ interest has been to call upon Wittgenstein as a witness in defense of the major tenets of philosophical hermeneutics. Eschewing the psychologistic tendencies of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, the later Wittgenstein is thus regularly presented as an ally of Gadamer, with language games handily transformed into the epitome of the hermeneutic situation. 1 Wittgenstein’s insistence on the necessity of shared knowledge for the possibility of understanding suggests to these thinkers that Wittgenstein’s later work, cleansed from the positivistic errors of the Tractatus, comes in handy as a defense against the objectivism of what is perceived to be a hostile philosophical tradition. 2 Needless to say, the members of that tradition don’t agree. 3 Sometimes the pendulum swings back the other way and we are being assured that if framed in Wittgensteinian terms, the “anti-objectivist” threat of deconstruction either self-destructs, or may be safely contained. 4
