The Standard Interpretation of Wittgenstein's Concept of Philosophy

Abstract

The article presents Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy and a surveyable representation of different origins from which philosophical problems emerge. Wittgenstein's later philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge but to human understanding because, in philosophy, there is no room for theories, hypotheses, or explanations of natural and social phenomena anymore. In this sense, philosophy cannot consist of knowledge but is transformed into a method. An essential part of the philosophical method is philosophical grammar, characterized as autonomous, arbitrary, and constitutive. This means that it is entirely independent of how things are. The aim of philosophy is not to solve philosophical problems but to resolve them through the discovery of linguistic nonsense and misunderstandings from which they emerge. In the last section, the article tries to sketch an answer to criticism of the philosophical investigations conceived in this way.