Wittgenstein On Philosophy Of The End

With the various special sciences divorced from philosophy since the modern time, a question presses hard upon philosophers: what on earth does philosophy study? What is closely related to it is: by what method should philosophy be studied? Wittgenstein gives brand-new answers to the two questions, appearing as an anti-traditionalist. His conception of philosophy with double senses is clarified in this thesis: one is philosophy of "what is", i.e. what, in his view, philosophy was in the past; another is philosophy of "what ought to be", i.e. what philosophy ought to be in the future. What traditional philosophers investigated, in Wittgenstein's view, cannot be put into words at all. Therefore, what they should do is only to analyse language, which, in his early stage, is logical analysis; which, in his later stage, is to analyse everyday language. That means the end of philosophy.This thesis reconstructs Wittgenstein's argument of ending philosophy in both early and late stage. In the early stage he thinks that language and the world share common logical form therefore the former can depict the latter completely. What traditional philosophers try to investigate, however, is not within the world, therefore, cannot be put into words. But this argument is based on his intuition: the relation between language and the world is so and so. His later thoughts share the common characteristics. First he criticizes the essentialism of language which includes his Tractatus, then gives the argument of the impossibility of private language. What he intends is to show the falsity of the way he ends philosophy in the Tractatus, and to point out the impossibility of any philosophy which claims itself to have mastered the essence of language therefore thinks the function of philosophy is merely to describe ethical emotion, aesthetic experience and other inner experience by words.What Wittgenstein does means the end of any philosophy which regards as a cognitive object the man as social being. Karl Popper and other philosophers of epistemology misunderstand him completely. "Cognize yourself as a philosophical task should give place to language game as public life.