Maybe someone here can explain: I've come across more than a few philosophers, of the PhD/academic flavor, who are dismissive of Wittgenstein's work. I have a gist-level understanding of his work, and a hobbyist's knowledge of the history of Western thought up through, say, Foucault.
Am I seeing a biased sample or is LW out of fashion these days? If so, why?
Here's my take on it. Academic philosophy in the US is highly focused on making completely clear claims with a rigor approaching that of mathematical logic. It is more or less pursuing the program Wittgenstein sketched in his first book, the Tractatus, creating a collection of concepts and network of relationships among them in which apparent philosophical paradoxes vanish. This is the analytical tradition. It is nice because it is indeed rigorous, but it can be limiting because it severely constrains the topics you can talk about. Something as big and multifarious as, say, Heidegger's notion of Dasein does not fit into this mold. And certainly nothing written as poetically as Nietzsche would pass muster.
In his second book, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein completely rejected this approach, and his earlier work. He claimed that....well, no one's really sure what he claimed, or that he really claimed anything, and that's exactly the problem academic philosophers have with him. To a first approximation, he claimed that the whole idea of language as a formal system was either wrong or a waste of time, and that language is better thought of as some kind of game.
The thinking, then, is that later Wittgenstein was not making a clear point, was not interested in making a clear point, and possibly was not even serious at all. Philosophical Investigations is an enigma, and modern academic philosophy doesn't deal in such things.
I've never felt enticed to read a book by any philosopher, but that kind of made curious!
Especially given the comment about language could be seen as some kind of game, about which I'd say he's at least then partially been shown to be right? Being understood is very much a game, as you without anticipating your counterparts expectations and knowledge are often hopefully lost. Though I don't know if that's even close to what he was referring to, so yes, a but curious.
The idea of a "language game" was merely an analogy. It wasn't meant to trivialize the subject. The point is that language is an activity that operates according to conventional rules. (This also relates to his argument against "private language", though I'm personally not as convinced by that.) If you were to give a short summary of Wittgenstein's philosophy, I think it's better to say that he claimed meaning is use. "For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." This is in opposition to traditional analytic philosophy which holds that the meaning is specified by external references and truth conditions.
Somebody should tell Philosophers about the Curry-Howard-Lambek isomorphism.
Because that's all there is to the Mathematical notion of "rigorous proof".
And the 'next step' in scaling up this process is the mission undertaken by the NuPRL project [1] well on our road towards internalising systems theory as the mode of scientific discourse [2]:
Starting with the slogan "proofs-as-programs," we now talk about "theories-as-systems."
It's not surprising, because Wittgenstein himself was in a sense dismissive of academic philosophy. He turned against his former self, of the Tractatus, which was highly regarded among so-called "analytic" philosophers. The controversy began almost immediately: Bertrand Russell, who had previously been Wittgenstein's biggest supporter, had nothing but scorn for the Philosophical Investigations.
Wittgenstein was a kind of anti-philosopher, as was Richard Rorty. Their goal, as I see it, was not to "solve" traditional philosophical problems as such, but rather to dissolve them. They believed that many philosophical problems were misunderstandings, projections of our human languages onto reality, false anthropomorphism. Rorty also started in academic philosophy and left the field later in his career, while generating similar controversy. If they're right, then it's unclear whether philosophy as it had traditionally been practiced has a proper place in society. Academic philosophers deem their own projects to be "foundational", but Wittgenstein was a threat to that way of thinking.
You can't be a philosopher and posit "most philosophy is non-sense" at the same time. If language is the product of ephemeral transactions between subjective people on a need to communicate basis, then does it possess the objective rigor needed to accurately investigate the true essence of the world? If philosophy can only be expressed with language, where does that leave you? Setting aside Wittgenstein while you work on your philosophy may do the trick.
I've been listening to a lot of George Carlin recently. I feel much of his late best work is linguistic absurdism. If we are to take Carlin's assertion that most of us are dumb and society is glued together by bullshit, then so would be our language. If that is the case, then Carlin's stand up is the perfect example of taking language for what it truly is and applying objective rigor and logic to it (which he explicitly claims to be doing in many of his routines), only to reveal the true essence of the world. If anything, Carlin proved that reality is just as absurd as the language we use to describe it.
I'm not up on current PhD philosopher's tastes, and I'm biased since I'm a major fan of Wittgenstein, but, assuming you don't have a biased sample, I'd say this phenomenon is explainable through some of the Frankfurt School's theorizing on specialization, the professionalism of philosophy, and the general bureaucratic turn of society.
Personally, I like to view philosophy and academic philosophy as two distinct things. The former is represented best by the famous philosophers, many of whom would never make it past a peer review, e.g. Wittgenstein himself, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, Adorno, even Foucault to an extent, etc.--I think the reason for this is that all of these famous, epoch shaping philosophers have a certain mysticism or poeticism about them--their work doesn't really hold up to the standards of academies, since these are institutions with very specific mechanisms and rules. All the great philosophers have a certain creativity and ingenuity to them that defies the confines of convention and reason.
Wittgenstein is in many respects a key player in shaping our modern though on logic, yet he was also an undeniable mystic who went so far as to say certain things escape representation and codification as formalized knowledge altogether, which is not amenable to the motives of academies--producing formalized knowledge that they can sell. I say this, again, as someone who entirely lacks context but who can imagine certain structural tendencies that would disfavor a philosopher like Wittgenstein.
Academic philosophy is, in my opinion, quite a different beast that's focused on solving very specialized and particular abstract problems deemed to be foundational, meta, or novel enough to escape analysis in the fields of application they'd otherwise belong to (the foundations of mathematics, of great concern to Wittgenstein and Turning as this post illustrates, is a good example of such a topic--it's too meta to be the concern of mathematics proper, too narrow to be the concern of a philosopher in the classical or "true" sense, who is supposed to concern herself with the broad problems of existence (like Wittgenstein points out, the living (assuming to philosophize still means to theorize on what it means to live a good life don't really need to concern themselves with such issues), so it falls to specialized academics).
It sounds to me that what you are labelling as 'Academic philosophy' (solving abstract problems) is very much the general process of meta-linguistic abstraction.
Obviously just one anecdote, but my brother has a PhD in philosophy from Oxford and now teaches philosophy (albeit at a small college, not one of the major ones). Wittgenstein is one of his three big philosophy heroes (the others being Thomas Aquinas and a medieval Islamic scholar that I can't remember the name of).
Am I seeing a biased sample or is LW out of fashion these days? If so, why?