Thomas Wallgren: Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (2006)

Transformative Philosophy asks what one can do today of the notion that philosophy carries within itself a promise of emancipation through enlightenment.
     This topic in the philosophical discourse of modernity and the philosophy of philosophy is addressed through a genealogy of "philosophy" leading to a diagnosis of the current state of the art in the understanding Western academic philosophers have of their own discipline. (Chapters 1-3.) A scrutiny of the conceptions of philosophy informing the work of some influential analytical philosophers provides the motivation for a study of the new resources for philosophical self-understanding and method made available by Wittgenstein. (Chapters 4 and 5.) The question of philosophy's relation to its time, that has been studied above all in the Kant-Hegel-Marx -tradition, is studied as a challenge to Wittgensteinian philosophy. (Chapter 6.) The study of Socrates' conception of philosophy is drawn upon as a resource in a constructive effort to move from the idea of Wittgenstein's work as primarily a therapeutic enterprise to a more comprehensive and refined view. The democratic dimensions of Wittgenstein's later polyphonic method are worked out, as well as the inevitably transformative power of philosophical investigations that take the form of ethical work on oneself as well as a kind of caring for others. (Chapters 1-3, 5 and 7.)