Os precursores esquecidos de Ludwig Wittgenstein

Abstract

In his preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein reveals that he owed "the most consequential ideas" in his work to the "stimulus" of economist Piero Sraffa. However, and curiously, Amartya Sen (2003) claims that Sraffa not only considered his own view to be "rather obvious", but also found it tedious to talk to Wittgenstein and never got really excited for having decisively influenced his later works. According to Sen (2003), Sraffa considered his social approach to language, which opposes Wittgenstein's logical approach in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to be trivial due to his Marxist theoretical background. In contrast to Sen’s (2003) justification, I aim at discussing the "rather obvious" Sraffa's social approach to language based on a long list of older philosophers which goes back to ancient Greece. To do so, I will pick up on the works of philosophers to which Wittgenstein refers in his texts, such as Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine, as well as examine the works of other prestigious authors whom Wittgenstein apparently did not know, including linguists William D. Whitney, Hermann Paul, and Ferdinand de Saussure.