Philosophy from an ‘Anthropological’ Point of View
AbstractIn this paper I shall try to introduce a few aspects on the possible influence Piero Sraffa had on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Although we do not have many explicit sources, we find a few remarks in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts that contain Sraffa’s name in brackets. And interestingly enough they almost all deal with the fundamental relation between rules and empirical propositions. Wittgenstein raises questions such as: Do grammatical rules only say that words are actually used in a particular way? Do mathematical propositions describe how human beings usually calculate? Are the rules of chess descriptions of how the game has always been played? Wittgenstein’s discussions of these questions also had an impact on his philosophical turn towards an ‘anthropological’ point of view.