The Grammatical Investigation And History Of Concept

Philosophy, in a broad sense, can be defined as the critic of notions, while, in a narrow sense, the systematic dianoesis. And both lead to the core of conceptual investigation, i.e. the concepts analysis, which, from the perspective of philosophical history, is typically represented by Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation and Gadamer’s conceptual history. This is introduced by the first chapter.In order to find the essence of each conceptual investigation, the second chapter deals with wittgenstein’s account of philosophy as a grammatical investigation. Considering the complicated, unsettled and profound thought of wittgenstein, firstly this chapter divides wittgenstein’s writings into three phases, i.e. early, middle and later phases, so that we can describe the development of wittgenstein’s thought clearly. Secondly, due to wittgenstein’s peculiar understanding of philosophy and grammar, this chapter divides Wittgenstein’s remarks about philosophy into ’philosophy as a confusion’ and ’philosophy as a clarity’, and the remarks about grammar into three levels, i.e. about language, about propositions and about words. Finally, this chapter expounds these remarks with the aim of illustrating the development of wittgenstein’s thought about philosophy and grammar, illustrating why he understands philosophy as grammatical investigation, understands grammar as grammar about words rather than about language and propositions and at the end understands grammatical investigation as conceptual investigation, as a reason-giving style that purports to finish two tasks through investigaing the ordinary uses of some concepts:one task is to clarify the meanings of some concepts or our understanding condensed in concepts, and deepen our understanding about the world; the other is to provide strong support for reson-giving through integrating systematic dianoesis with our empirical world or life worldGiven that this dissertation is about the comparison of Wittgenstein and gadamer, the third chapter describes gadamer’s exposition of Wittgenstein and especially makes a comparison between their thoughts about language games. The conclusion is that gadamer’s thought about language agrees with his general understanding about philosophy or philosophical hermeneutics and also determines his understanding about conceptual history.The fourth chapter deals with the problem that how gadamer understands conceptual histoy as the core of philosophy. Firstly, combined with gadamer’s thought of philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method, this chapter expounds his general philosophical positions and concerns, and shows some of the important viewpoints of gadamer’s such as:lingusticity is the characteristics of the experience of human world, the essence of language is speaking etc. After this, this chapter exhausts all of gadamer’s accounts about conceptual history in his writings, and then makes a detailed analysis and gets the conclusion that the essence of conceptual history is to expound the deep meanings of some concepts in some philosopher’s thought, to get clear the truths or understandings behind these concepts and tap the truths that’s important to the present through historical retrospection. With this, the concepts are understood and the truths are grasped. Comparing to grammatical investigation, conceptual history doesn’t involve the investigation into the uses of concepts.Finally, according to the above analysis, this dissertation describes wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation into the concept of understanding and gadamer’s conceptual history investigation into the concept of language through case study at first; Then after compared and analyzed both different philosophical positions from the viewpoint of conceptual investigation, it explains their characterics and their difference caused by their different positions, and attempts to discuss the tensions between them. In the end this dissertation discusses the relationship between philosophy and philosophical history.