Wittgenstein, value pluralism and politics

Abstract

This article makes three main claims: (1) that the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, properly understood, has no normative or political implications whatsoever; (2) that scholars with otherwise dramatically conflicting interpretations of Wittgenstein should nonetheless all agree with this conclusion; and (3) that understanding the (non-) implications of Wittgenstein's philosophy helps to answer the two motivating questions of the literature on value pluralismwhether values are (or can be) plural (yes), and whether value pluralism leads to, requires, or reveals some particular normative or political response (no).Keywords epistemological contextualism, epistemological conventionalism, moral irrealism, moral relativism, value pluralism, Ludwig WittgensteinThe questions of whether the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein has any relevance to politics, and if so what that relevance might be, have evoked an astonishing variety of answers. 1 There are commentators who see Wittgenstein as a Burkean conservative, 2 a radical democrat, 3 a Pyrrhonian skeptic, 4 and a nihilist, 5 to name only the most extreme positions. And these relatively contained debates over Wittgenstein and politics are themselves situated within a much larger set of debates about how to understand Wittgenstein's writings (and whether 'understand' is the right word). 6 One of the main debates in Wittgenstein interpretation over the past 20 years has been whether Wittgenstein's writings were intended to (or do) express positive theses and claims, or whether they were intended to provide philosophical therapy by helping us to see the hopelessness of arriving at any satisfactory philosophical theories. 7 This debate stems from the next-to-last section of Wittgenstein's early Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. After having apparently articulated a theory of language, Wittgenstein

Winds of Change: The Later Wittgenstein’s Conception of the Dynamics of Change

“…positively or negatively evaluated cultural changes) have also been investigated and discussed -hereunder whether or not he was a conservative thinker (see e.g. Ackermann (1988); von Wright (1993); Holt (1997); Hill (1997); Crary (2000Crary ( , 2007; Pleasants (2000); Cerbone (2003); Tully (2003); Heyes (2003: 4-7); Cahill (2006Cahill ( , 2009; Moore (2010); Bouveresse (2011); Hermann (2015); Read (2016); Diamond (2012Diamond ( , 2019).…”