Abstract

In The Principles of Mechanics, physicist Heinrich Hertz argues that instead of replying to the question “what is force?” like physicists and philosophers had been doing unsuccessfully, Newtonian physics should be reformulated without considering “force” a basic concept. Decades after Hertz’s book, Ludwig Wittgenstein considered the physicist’s proposal a perfect model for how philosophical problems should be solved, to the point that he made it the foundation of his way of doing philosophy. This article addresses Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, while it also proposes the reason why he failed in solving the philosophical problems — as did Hertz in his project on reformulating Newtonian physics without considering the concept “force”. And to illustrate Wittgenstein’s failure, it examines his disputes with mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing on the foundations of mathematics.