Die Gewissheit der Orientierung

Abstract

Abstract In his treatises A Defence of Common Sense (1925), Proof of an External World (1939), and Certainty (1941), G.E. Moore wanted to put an end to the modern doubts about the certainty of reality and the ‘external world’ by pointing to the undeniable plausibilities of ‘empirical propositions,’ such as ‘I know that this is my hand’ or ‘I know that the earth had existed before my body was born.’ Wittgenstein, who was intensely grappling with Moore’s proofs during the last one and a half years before his expected death, still questioned these proofs and countered them with his concept of language games – including a different logic of the ‘connection with reality.’ Philosophically, he thereby left many loose ends in all places and admittedly a ‘gap’ between them, which he was no longer able to close. But he prepared for closing the gap by means of his concept of orientation, which he had initiated in his Philosophical Investigations without defining it in this term. In a new interpretation of On Certainty from the perspective of the Philosophy of Orientation, this paper tries to show how the attention to the phenomenon of orientation and the language game in which it is expressed can close this gap and thus carry on Wittgenstein's late philosophy to a certain point.