Wittgenstein’s Hegel – "Perspicuous Representation" and "Speculative Philosophy"
According to standard histories of the origins of Anglo-Analytic Philosophy, Hegel's work represents the very essence of what Moore, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein were combatting. In this talk, Dr. Alexander Berg (University of Zurich), will argue that the reality, at least as far at the later Wittgenstein is concerned, is more complicated than the traditional picture would have it.
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A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’
Everything belongs to everything. (I think this is what Hegel meant.)
In his philosophical analyses, Wittgenstein not only examines a wide variety of philosophical objects, but also asks about the particular and regularly recurs in these analyses, hence about the characteristic of his own philosophy. The motivation for this is to a large extent inspired by the desire—after the Tractatus—to also preserve his new philosophy, and hand it down to later generations. This later opus magnum by its very nature should again take the form of a philosophical book.
Once in the process he even tries to conceptualize the characteristic of his philosophical practice, and to develop a notion for it, the perspicuous representation. In the fall of 1930, he finds surprising inspiration for this attempt in an introduction to the various methods of philosophy by his colleague C.D. Broad at Cambridge University, especially in Broad’s description of the speculative philosophy and its most prominent representative—G.W.F. Hegel.
