Abstract

Professor Gier intends to offer a revisionist reading of Wittgenstein: “It is the analytic or positivist Wittgenstein who is the odd creature”. Wittgenstein was not, as opinion often has it, contemptuous of the classical metaphysicians or dismissive of such contemporaries as Husserl and Heidegger as purveyors of nonsense. In fact, he even came to an “explicit and positive use of the term ‘phenomenology’”. Professor Gier attempts to establish the nature and significance of this claim by examining a broad range of Wittgenstein’s texts and by comparing Wittgenstein’s phenomenology to the versions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, arguing that Wittgenstein’s own development parallels the evolution from “pure” to “existential” phenomenology. He states explicitly that he intends neither to criticize nor to support the views he sets forth.