[d0odk]

My gripe is that the commenter above cites early Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware) that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon". I'll concede there is some debate about how Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I wrote.

[glenstein]

I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.

But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.

[knightoffaith]

What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.