Toward Wittgenstein as a Common Sense Philosopher

Abstract

In that talk, my main purpose will be to point out some resemblances between the
second Wittgenstein’s works and the program of common sense philosophy. Here, we
shall not have time to argue that contrary to appearances (that is, contrary to
the fact that he repeatedly says that philosophical propositions are nonsense
and that the philosopher’s task should be to make it explicit), the second
Wittgenstein has indeed offered a common sense philosophy. Our talk will be too
sketchy for that purpose. However, we hope for showing that it could be an
interesting and fruitful way of understanding his later works. Our talk will be
divided in two main parts. In the first part, we will portray a common sense
philosophy program and, in the second part, we will point out some important
resemblances between this program and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We will finish
by raising objections against the idea that the second Wittgenstein’s works are
closed to com-mon sense philosophy.