Wittgenstein as a philosopher of immediate experience

Jaakko Hintikka

pp. 155-167

in: Rudolf Haller, Johannes L. Brandl (eds), Wittgenstein — eine neubewertung/Wittgenstein — towards a re-evaluation, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

Wittgenstein is reported to have uttered: "You can say of my philosophy that it is "phenomenology'."¹ Yet the really interesting thing is not that Wittgenstein should have said this, but the question: What precisely did he mean by his delphic statement? One thing he most certainly was not doing is to try to locate his own thought on the map of twentieth-century philosophical movements. About organized philosophical schools Wittgenstein could not have cared less. And even before we can properly ask what Wittgenstein meant by phenomenology, we must make it clear to ourselves in what sense Husserl's philosophy, the fountainhead of the movement known by the name, is really phenomenology.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Wittgenstein Ludwig