The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site.
Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.
It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [. . .] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .
Absolutely brilliant! When I first read Moore and his remark to the effect that he would never have done philosophy if it hadn't been for the puzzling things he found in books by men like Bradley, I took that as almost the definition of an inauthentic philosopher: one who gets his problems, not from life, but from books. I should say, though, that over the years I have come to appreciate Moore as a master of analysis. But I can't shake the thought that there is something deeply perverse about finding the impetus to philosophizing in philosophical claims and theories rather than in the realities attendance to which gave rise to the claims and theories in the first place. Imagine a scientist or an historian or even a theologian who proceeded in that way.
In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:
The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.
I take the Gellnerian ball and run with it in What is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy? and How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism.
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