Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein

Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?". I answered:

The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge.

Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off.

Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent. He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts."

As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing. It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real.

A Hegel/Wittgenstein link? That is a different trick. You COULD try to see the movement from the early to the latter Wittgenstein as akin to the movement in German critical philosophy away from Kant in the direction of Hegel, But it is an accidental relationship at best.

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