purpose of philosophy to clarify language wittgenstein

Lawn reveals his hand early on when he writes: 'Wittgenstein needs to be unhinged from the conventional contexts of interpretation and placed within the co-ordinates of Continental thought.'(p. However much the book decries the split between 'Continental' and 'analytic' philosophy and hopes to contribute to a 'post-analytic' philosophy of language, the book is written out of the so-called Continental tradition. The book developed from a doctoral dissertation at Ireland's National University (Dublin). Lawn's work provides a useful discussion of the current literature on this matter, scant though it is, and nicely lays out some of the central issues in the consideration of the philosophy of language of each philosopher and their possible convergence. Coming from different contexts and with different philosophical motivations, these two thinkers appear to many, including Gadamer, to have developed convergent views, at least in part, with regard to language - a central theme for both thinkers. Though Gadamer comments in several essays on the proximity of his views about language to the views of Wittgenstein, he does not explore the connection. Gadamer tells us that he had not seriously read Wittgenstein until after the publication of Truth and Method (1960).

Wittgenstein did not and could not have known Gadamer's work in this area. This is an important set of questions and, until this book, there has been no book-length comparative study of the philosophy of language of these two figures.

Chris Lawn's study considers the question of the relation of the philosophy of language in Gadamer and Wittgenstein and the contribution they make toward a 'post-analytic' philosophy of language.

Purpose of philosophy to clarify language wittgenstein