Unfounded foundations, grammatical relativism and Wittgenstein, the educator

Abstract

This is a critical review of Michael Peters' book, Wittgenstein, Education and the Problem of Rationality, in which I focus on the following assumptions in order to problematize them: Wittgenstein's supposed relativism and anti-foundationalism; his status as the leading representative of analytic philosophy; and the absence of mention in Peter’s book of the publication of Wittgenstein’s spelling dictionary in 1926, after a period in which he became a primary school teacher. The philosopher's preface to this dictionary, in my view, contains some evidence that may have led him to revise his main theses in the Tractatus, giving rise to a second linguistic turn in his thinking, in which the concepts of "language game", "family resemblances" and "following rules" are forged by him in view of the grammatical description of the uses of problematic philosophical concepts. I argue that this phase of his life as an educator was intrinsically linked to that of the philosopher, leading him to an intermediate position between relativism and dogmatism.