| The contemporary follower of Wittgenstein finds him or herself in a strange position in that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of this century and yet the central thrust of his work is emphatically rejected by the current philosophical community. As A.C. Grayling puts it, 'apart from work done by Wittgenstein's relatively small band of disciples, most of what has happened during and since his time consists exactly in what his writings proscribe: namely, systematic investigation of the very "problems of philosophy" which he says will vanish when one attends properly to language'. The implication of this is that Wittgenstein is not as great a philoso¬pher as had been thought and Grayling hints that, although he may have been a great philosophical personality, he was not in fact a great thinker. The one area of Wittgenstein's work which is still in some measure accepted is the so-called private language argument, which is treated as separable from Wittgenstein's implausible and perverse methodological claims. This has para¬doxical consequences. On the one hand, the argument appears as a philosophical jewel in a sea of nonsense, and, on the other, the argument itself starts to look odd, for if it is so important, why is it so irrelevant to the rest of modern philosophy? Doubts as to the validity of the argument have certainly emerged and one suspects that it too may eventually be rejected as interesting but ultimately flawed. |