An Outline of Wittgenstein’s Investigation of Time: A Grammatical Approach

This article is an exposition of the problem of time in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). It focuses primarily on the works from his so-called middle to late period (1930–1951), which are explicitly concerned with the problem. The aim is to clarify how time is presented in his philosophy and what consequences can be drawn for the question of the reality of time from employing Wittgenstein’s approach. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on time during this period are marked by the distinction between memory-time and information-time, based on the principle of verification: the former is verified by recalling an event from memory, while the latter is obtained from an external source. From the perspective of the grammatical approach, which he developed at the time, the distinction is shown to be superfluous. Memory-time can be reduced to information-time, and inquiry into the nature of memory requires devising phenomenological descriptive language, which is contrary to Wittgenstein’s philosophical stance. Thus, only instances of information-time can be used to investigate time. However, this investigation demonstrates that the convenient philosophical approach to the problem of time is prone to misconceptions about its nature, which stem, first, from misunderstanding the language and, second, from deriving theories of time from its grammar.