This paper aims to explore later Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy and its methods. Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy is intertwined with his rejection of the idea that philosophy is a cognitive discipline. Already in his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Wittgenstein criticizes the traditional conception of philosophy as providing new knowledge; instead he views philosophy as a purely critical discipline and rejects the idea that philosophy should construct new theories. Wittgenstein maintains the distinction between philosophy and cognitive disciplines in his later philosophy and its central work Philosophical Investigations (1953), however, the distinction is no longer based on a metaphysical theory about the nature of language (as it was in Tractatus). This paper focuses on the following questions: in what sense, according to later Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline and, accordingly, what are the proper aims and methods of philosophy?
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