Wittgenstein on Logic and Philosophical Method

This Elements outlines Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic and its relevance to philosophical methodology, offering a novel interpretation of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy.

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This Element outlines Wittgenstein's early and later philosophies of logic, and explains Wittgenstein's views regarding the methodological significance of logic for philosophy. Wittgenstein's early philosophy of logic is presented as a further development of Frege's and Russell's accounts of logic, and Wittgenstein later philosophy as a response to problems with his early views, including confusions about idealization and abstraction in logic. The later Wittgenstein's novel logical methods, such as the method of language-games, are outlined, and the new kind of logical naturalism developed in his later philosophy described. I conclude by discussing the later Wittgenstein on names.