To the anniversary year of L. Wittgenstein: The experience of the French national reception

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of the reception of L. Wittgenstein’s philosophical ideas in the French-speaking philosophical tradition. The most important ideas of L. Wittgenstein are considered from the point of view of French-speaking philosophers and historians of philosophy. Reconstructions of different directions are compared. On a number of issues, the European, in particular the French-speaking, history of philosophy offers an interesting interpretation of certain aspects of L. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, reactualizes them. For example, Wittgenstein’s “linguistic turn” in philosophy is read as a turn to the discourse traditional for French-speaking philosophy, an appeal to detailed verbalized reasoning, culturally and historically defined communicative practice. And the European philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, first of all, of course, M. Foucault, are the successors of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. In our opinion, it is in relation to the philosophical heritage that the specificity of national philosophical thought, the peculiarities of reception and interpretation are manifested. French philosophy, which opens with Descartes’ “Discourse of the Method”, forms a special attitude to the language of philosophy, the process of reasoning in general and philosophizing in particular, its argumentative grounds and procedures. In general, the presented historical and philosophical picture is characterized by an interest in topics specific to national philosophy — political engagement, a claim to universality, attention to the process of persuasion and the unfolding of thought. At the same time, we clearly see the tendency of the entire analytical tradition, at the origins of which L. Wittgenstein stood, to turn today to these topics that were not considered the main ones for a long time.