Research On Later Wittgenstein’s Anti-foundationalism

As a traditional mode of thinking, foundationalism has been driving people to pursuit the nature of human cognition or language for nearly a thousand years. People who believes in foundationalism has been attempting to explain the whole world with some basic elements like ’logic’,’concept’,’essence’ etc. as if the whole world was based on these ’rules’. After decades of research, though each philosopher has claimed that they had discovered the foundation of the world and they could explain the world satisfactorily, the fact is just the opposite. Not only had not they clarified the nature of the world and language, also they had made those concepts even more obscure.Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later time seemed t ired of such mode of thinking. Though he had been a strong member of foundationalism before, his view on the object of philosophy study has changed. He began to criticize foundationalism and became an anti-foundationalism philosopher. In his later works, Wittgenstein broke with former himself thoroughly, using the introduction of ’language game’, family resemblance theory and anti-private language theory to oppose and criticize the former and traditional philosophy of language. He argued that the traditional philosophy of language had misunderstood language. They had regarded language as existence and believed there is a strict contrasting relation in between which had rendered the predicament of philosophy of language. Therefore later Wittgenstein has brought up a new perspective of language. He thought that the task of philosophy was no longer to discover those terminative, essential concepts. Instead it should back to life, with an attitude of uncertainty, to discover and explain language again. Wittgenstein hoped to resolve the old philosophical problem with his ’therapeutic’ philosophy.The change of the mode of thinking of later Wittgenstein has promoted the change of new philosophers’views. They realize that traditional philosophy has many problems and a new perspective can be used into the mode and the object of philosophy study. Enlightened by Wittgenstein, philosophers of postmodernism like Richard Rorty, have begun to oppose traditional philosophy. Later Wittgenstein has promoted the development of postmodernism. Through a further study of some philosophers of postmodernism, we can also gain a better understanding of later Wittgenstein’s philosophy.