João Esteves da Silva

James Conant has described Oskari Kuusela’s first book, The Struggle against Dogmatism (2008), in the following way:

Rather than being framed around the assumption that the crucial difference between an early and a later Wittgenstein lies in their respective philosophical doctrines, it takes its point of departure from the assumption that early and later Wittgenstein equally aspired to practice philosophy in a manner which eschewed all doctrine. The book then seeks to articulate the crucial differences between early and later Wittgenstein in terms of the details of the respective ways in which they sought to realize such an aspiration. (Conant 2011, 623)

There Kuusela sought to expound Wittgenstein’s general conception of philosophy as “an activity . . . [that] consists essentially of elucidations” (TLP 4.112), that aims to clarify our thought and talk, not to put forward doctrines or theses. (“Philosophy is not a theory . . . [it] does not result in “philosophical sentences”, but in making sentences clear” (ibid.).) Now, with Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy (2019), his second book, he further develops the picture laid out in the former and examines its place within the context of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. As the title indicates, the primary emphasis is on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logic and metaphilosophy, which, from the point of view recommended by Kuusela, emerge as virtually one and the same. Arguably, his central claim is that the conception of philosophy as an activity of logical clarification, a Fregean and Russellian inheritance, should be understood as applying to all of Wittgenstein’s thought, unifying it to a considerable extent. Far from denying its radical transformations, what Kuusela proposes is an alternative assessment of Wittgenstein’s development, notably as involving a largely unnoticed “paradigm shift” (Kuusela 2019, 143) in philosophical logic. By drawing attention to such a shift and offering an account of the novel paradigm he identifies in Wittgenstein’s later works, Kuusela also makes a case for a most needed change in contemporary analytic philosophy, through a renewal of its historical and metaphilosophical self-consciousness, as well as the adoption of Wittgensteinian logical methods. As he puts it, “this book . . . aims to rewrite parts of the history of analytic philosophy in order to uncover paths to the future that previous histories have covered up.” (Kuusela 2019, 1)