Time and Language in the Transitional Period

Abstract

When Wittgenstein took up philosophy again in 1929, he was convinced that the theories he had put forward in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were not sustainable as they stood. He began to produce a vast series of texts which were to lead him within a few years to formulate his mature philosophy. It would be pointless to locate the formation of this mature philosophy in a specific text or a particular time. It was by no means a linear process and involved several intermediate stages. However, there is no doubt that when Wittgenstein dictated the Blue Book in 1933-34, he had gone well over half-way down the road that was to lead him to the Philosophical Investigations. Prior to the Blue Book we find a series of manuscripts and typescripts, which are only now beginning to be published and investigated in depth. If examined in chronological order, these texts undoubtedly show Wittgenstein's ideas moving further and further away from the Tractatus. The critiques and divergences are steadily sharper and more profound. It is one of these ruptures that I want to discuss in what follows.