The thesis I want to discuss is that Wittgenstein often places gratuitous limits on the explanatory potential of empirical enquiry, allots to reflection explanatory powers it doesn't have and, when not guilty of these narrowly conceptual errors, manifests a defective epistemic sensibility in preferring to empirical enquiry and its results something he variously characterises as ‘the understanding which consists in seeing the connections’, ‘formal relations’, ‘further description’, ‘getting clear’, and, on one occasion, something as non-epistemic as ‘consolation’

I will refer to the first of these charges as limits obscurantism, the second as method obscurantism and the last as sensibility obscurantism. One of the more notorious examples of limits obscurantism is August Comte's proscription on speculation as to the chemical composition of the stars on the score of its futility. Equally familiar specimens of method obscurantism are the belief that the planets must move in circles because being supralunary bodies only an orbit which was a perfect sphere was befitting and Hegel's (apocryphal) conviction that there was no need for astronomers to search for further planets after the discovery of Uranus since for a priori reasons there could be no more than seven. A specimen of sensibility obscurantism, at least if you concur in deploring it, is given by Macaulay in his famous contrast between the behaviour of a follower of Bacon and that of a follower of Epictetus in their reactions to disaster. The Baconian takes practical measures to mitigate the harm. The Stoic attempts to revise the victims’ conception of evil.