The concept of showing in the early writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein

This is an investigation into two philosophical developments that took place between 1912 and 1929. I examine Ludwig Wittgenstein's confrontation with Bertrand Russell's views of the nature of logical truth and proof; and Martin Heidegger's confrontation with Edmund Husserl's views of perception and language. There are striking and surprising parallels between these two confrontations, and comparing them helps to illuminate some of the underlying issues at stake. I argue the following. (1) Wittgenstein and Heidegger provide both a criticism and an alternative to their mentors' accounts of these respective sets of issues. (2) Central to Wittgenstein's and Heidegger's accounts are two members of the family of the concept of showing: "logical showing", and apophansis ("showing-up", or "pointing-out"), respectively. This family resemblance can be seen in a structural affinity between these two concepts: they both involve something "showing itself" as something to someone. (3) Russell's and Husserl's theories reveal deep commitments to two traditional doctrines: Platonism and Cartesianism. (4) Wittgenstein's and Heidegger's uses of their concepts of showing purge the Cartesianism and Platonism from their mentors' theories. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger reject their mentors' views that proper philosophical accounts of these issues must appeal only to objects that can be certainly known. Neither Wittgenstein nor Heidegger holds that what shows itself must be an "object" at all. And both develop an account of generality without appealing to Platonic universal objects.;My focus is closely related to two novel interpretations that I present of the early writings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I challenge "received" interpretations of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by placing Wittgenstein's view of logical truth and proof much closer to the center of his philosophical concerns during this period than has traditionally been thought to be the case. I also challenge a common interpretation of the relation of Heidegger's phenomenology to Husserl's, arguing that Heidegger's accounts of both language and present-at-hand perception are substantially different from Husserl's. I suggest that the root of the differences between Heidegger's and Husserl's analyses lies in their phenomenological methodologies, and ultimately in their concepts of phenomenon.