Zachary Altman

This paper argues that the late Wittgenstein is a systematic thinker in a Kantian sense – not the architectonic systematicity of the first Critique, but the reflective, regulative systematicity of the third Critique. The argument turns on a structural parallel between Kant and Wittgenstein at two points. First, Kant’s observation at A133/B172 – that the power of judgment cannot be governed by a rule without generating an infinite regress – is the structural predecessor of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox at PI §201. Both identify a ground of practice irreducible to rule or interpretation. Second, Wittgenstein’s hinge certainty in On Certainty functions as the late-Wittgensteinian analogue of Kant’s regulative principle of systematicity: an orientation that grounds our epistemic practices without being determinable from within them. Informed by Vaihinger’s account of heuristic fictions, these parallels support a reading of the Philosophical Investigations as exhibiting a principled, self-similar order – systematic without being architectonic – in which each local inquiry recapitulates the structure of the whole. This reading navigates between the doctrinal metaphysics that the resolute reading rightly resists and the quietism that would deny Wittgenstein any positive systematic orientation.