Abstract

In this paper, I respond critically but sympathetically to Adrian Moore’s treatment of the early and the later Wittgenstein in his book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. With respect to the later work, I utilize Cavell’s reading of the status of the first-person plural in Wittgenstein to undermine Bernard Williams’s interpretation of it, and thereby to question Moore’s skepticism that the later Wittgenstein can accommodate the possibility of radical conceptual innovation (the Novelty Question). With respect to the early work, I utilize a resolute reading of the Tractarian treatment of value to contest Moore’s understanding of the way in which transcendental idealism is woven into that treatment, and so into the book’s more general treatment of sense-making.