Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections

Wittgenstein dominated analytic philosophy from the 1920s until the 1970s. His followers were numerous, his influence was extensive and even those who were not attracted by his thought were forced to orient them-selves by reference to the landmarks he had established. After the 1970s, his influence progressively waned, first in philosophy of logic and lan-guage, where Fregean and Tarskian influences came to predominate, and later in philosophy of mind, which engaged in speculative debates concern-ing brain/mind relationships, on the one hand, and the ‘mysteries of con-sciousness’, on the other. It is striking that this turn against Wittgenstein’s philosophy was not accompanied by a firm understanding, let alone by an argued refutation, of his grammatical overviews. Rather, these develop-ments in the last decades of the twentieth century exemplified the philoso-phical scientism of our times. While Wittgenstein’s influence waned, Wittgensteinian scholarship continued to flourish for another two or three decades. By the end of th