Heidegger and Wittgenstein: a common path of thinking

This project deals with two important thinkers of the 20th century, who deeply marked the subsequent philosophy - founding important but very different philosophical trends - and who, on the other side, have always been assimilated to positions which seemed for a long time to be in an unsurpassable incompatibility. Even though there was an early attempt to find `points of convergence` or `corresponding themes` between their philosophical positions and conceptions, this enterprise was and remained extremely provocative. Despite the fact that the research in this field made a considerable progress in the last decades and the bringing together of the two thinkers is nowadays, to a certain degree, a consistent viewpoint, the decisive step towards a conciliation of the two philosophies is still missing. In this respect, our research offers a new attempt to associate the two names, i.e. an attempt which has its solid starting point in the internal development of the path of thinking of the two philosophers, who, as it is well known, each of them practiced a different philosophy, both knowing a `transition period` from an early philosophy to a later, totally different one. This is, in our opinion, the first and most important `point of convergence` of the two thinkers. Martin Heidegger was the one who talked about a `Kehre` (turn) within his own thinking and made out of this word one of the main concepts in his late philosophy. He sustained that this `Kehre` actually happened `within the things themselves. It is not something I invented and it isn`t something relating only to my thinking` 1 . Starting from this dimension of the `Kehre`, we`ll try to show to which degree one can talk about a `Wittgensteinian Kehre` and its importance for understanding the continuity in Wittgenstein`s thinking. The exegets never stopped, so far, making a problem out of this continuity. We will also try to describe a common paradigm of the two philosophers, in order to shed a new light on them, namely on two philosophers who confronted in an extreme fashion the traditional metaphysics. 1 Letter to W. J. Richardson, April 1962, first published as Vorwort zu W. J. RICHARDSON, Through Phenomenology to Thought, Den Haag, 1963.