SOURCE: "Reflections on Wittgenstein," in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy, State University of New York Press, 1983, pp. 293-305.

An American philosopher and writer, Hartshorne is the author of numerous books about philosophy and metaphysics. In the following essay, he discusses Wittgensteinian metaphysics.

With all famous philosophers, but especially with some of them, what they say or think is one thing and what they somehow cause many others to say or think that they think is another. Some have taken Ludwig Wittgenstein to be an extreme or (in B. F. Skinner's sense) "radical" behaviorist, reducing the mental to the behavioristic or physiological. It is not apparent to me how this interpretation can survive even a casual reading of the Fragments (Zettel). (Note especially Remarks 523, 608f.) In that work the author seems farther from radical behaviorism or sheer materialism than Ryle in his Concept...