Article published in the «Intellectual History» — 2015 — DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2015.1031577
The issue of Wittgenstein’s relation to his times has not so far received as much attention as the “core” areas of his philosophy (logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology/mind, and epistemology). Nevertheless, there has been a growing number of works on the issue, especially since 1973 when Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna was published. That work constituted the first contextual approach to Wittgenstein’s life and thought, and it has had a fairly wide impact. We can discern two main themes in the relevant literature, the first being the relation of Wittgenstein to various facets of modernism and the second his stance toward modernity. Despite the diversity of those approaches, there are two general common theses that emerge from them. The first is that Wittgenstein’s philosophizing fits in several intriguing ways with the modernist agenda. The second is that Wittgenstein constitutes a typical example of a thinker alienated from, or even hostile to, modernity. While both claims illuminate significant features of his work and personality, the present article attempts to show that they should not be accepted without qualification.