The Elusive Third Way: The Pyrrhonian Illumination in Wittgenstein’sOn Certainty

AbstractI argue in this paper that, like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, Wittgenstein’s response to negative–dogmatic skepticism inOn Certaintyturns on the attempt to free us from the demands of traditional philosophy and is therefore not a philosophical position, strictly speaking. Rather, it is a therapeutic metaphilosophy designed to bring into view (i.e., to illumine) the relationship between our everyday epistemic practices and those of philosophy such that we simultaneously come to recognize (a) what I call the pragmatic–transcendentalself–standingnessof the everyday and (b) its philosophical–rationalgroundlessness. The Pyrrhonian illumination of the everyday is therapeutic in that it aims to purify our metadoxastic attitudes of dogmatism.