Rating: 
Summary: essential philosophy for intelligent reader
Review: A lot of philosophers today are dissatisfied with what they see as a contemptuous attitude of Wittgenstein towards the traditional method of philosophical inquiry: 1)looking at philosophical problem 2)analyzing it 3)formulating a theory capable of explaining it. They are right. Wittgenstein really had an intention to "prove philosophy to be a worthless activity". He possessed a method of his own: 1)looking at a traditional philosophical problem 2)analyzing it 3)finding inconsistencies in the logic of the problem or conceptual confusion involved in formulation of this problem. Whether or not he was right in thinking that this method is capable of solving ALL philosophical problems, there are some interesting arguments in this book.
I would like to list some of them to give an impression of what this book is like.
Famous PRIVATE LANGUAGE, for example, is directed against a version of scepticism called SOLIPSISM. (solipsism is the view that any assertion of the existence of external world and /or minds of other people is meaningless because we can perceive only contents of our own mind). Rather then trying to find an argument justifying the inference of the existence of other human minds from the observable human behavior, Wittgenstein challenges the common-sense conception we have of our consciousness (the one we share with Descartes). His perspective is interesting, especially the idea that our familiarity with our sensations is dependent upon our understanding of language.
Another argument, which I call VISUAL ROOM ARGUMENT, concerns itself with the supposedly private nature of perception (looking, imagining). Problem which Wittgenstein discusses is so subtle that readers who didnt previously "discovered" this problem independently will not understand what the hell is he talking about. Those, however, who already felt troubled by it will be puzzled by sheer power of Wittgenstein intellect, when they grasp the connection between the this problem and the cluster of other problems concerning personal identity.
Apart from "dissolving" traditional philosophical problems, Wittgenstein also provides some simple but precise observations that drive us to the boundary of the territory where reason could be applied. He discusses the process of reading by urging us to engage in series of practical experiments, such as reading the numbers on wrist watch, while observing our mind processes in a way he suggests, or reading a line of nonsense while silently "saying to ourselves" meaningful sentence and then comparing the experience to our ordinary experiences of reading. Wittgenstein never forces us to adopt any particular doctrine (apart from his philosophy of language, which became rather notorious in academic circles), but anybody who will perform these experiments honestly will certanly look on his own mind from different perspective.
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Those who dont have any philosophical education need not worry. Wittgenstein despised philosophical jargon. He didnt use word "solipsism" in the private language argument. You wount find any logical formulas in PI. (this is not Quine). There is no references to other philosophers (apart from one or two mentions of Frege and James). HOwever Wittgenstein is not easy. Logical rigor of analytical philosophy can be overwhelming to those used to reading of Nietzsche and Kirkegaard.
Rating:
Summary: Recursive Dialogue
Review: A useful way of understanding the later Wittgenstein is to take him as a rhetorician. That is, by taking him as saying that understanding in general is analogous to going up to someone and having a conversation, one may grasp that understanding involves a triangulation between the speaker, the audience, and the world, which last is comprised of these conversations or language games.
As the meaning of the speaker's utterance is inseparable from how the audience takes this utterance, so the world is inseparable from utterances in general, for utterances are the very effects the world has caused.
So,I hear you speak in the way that I do because I have expectations about what you're going to say. Indeed, because I can test my expectations of what I think you're going to say against the actual outcome of what you did say, the concept of "mistake" thereby becomes meaningful. Whenever the concept of "mistake" is meaningful in this manner, I escape a would-be private world wherein other minds are merely the projection of my own ego.
I'm adjusting my expectations of what's coming next even as you speak. Moreover, you have expectations about how I'm going to take what you say. However, if you hear me respond in a way that surprises you, you may want to make an adjustment in the way that you're speaking to me so that you modify my expectations. Perhaps then I'll better know what to expect next. You, after all, expect me to hear you in the way you intend, and when my response indicates otherwise (by surprising you),you'll want to make sure that I understand how you wish me to proceed. In this way, we create,a posteriori, a means of understanding rather than depend on some reservoir of meaning that exists beforehand, in a priori relation to our utterances.
The better I understand either you or the world, the further I should be able to proceed without great surprises. A surprise on my part,however, indicates that perhaps I should reconsider something that I thought I had grasped earlier. In light of the unexpected, my earlier response may prove less useful now--on its basis, I did not anticipate this.
No response is ever truly wrong, though, for each was at least useful at some point along the way, and, taken together, each makes up the object of our ongoing discourse. However, those reponses that prove most useful are those that, by minimizing surprises, let me know how to go on.
Rating:
Summary: Recursive Dialogue
Review: A useful way of understanding the later Wittgenstein is to take him as a rhetorician. That is, by taking him as saying that understanding in general is analogous to going up to someone and having a conversation, one may grasp that understanding involves a triangulation between the speaker, the audience, and the world, which last is comprised of these conversations or language games.
As the meaning of the speaker's utterance is inseparable from how the audience takes this utterance, so the world is inseparable from utterances in general, for utterances are the very effects the world has caused.
So,I hear you speak in the way that I do because I have expectations about what you're going to say. Indeed, because I can test my expectations of what I think you're going to say against the actual outcome of what you did say, the concept of "mistake" thereby becomes meaningful. Whenever the concept of "mistake" is meaningful in this manner, I escape a would-be private world wherein other minds are merely the projection of my own ego.
I'm adjusting my expectations of what's coming next even as you speak. Moreover, you have expectations about how I'm going to take what you say. However, if you hear me respond in a way that surprises you, you may want to make an adjustment in the way that you're speaking to me so that you modify my expectations. Perhaps then I'll better know what to expect next. You, after all, expect me to hear you in the way you intend, and when my response indicates otherwise (by surprising you),you'll want to make sure that I understand how you wish me to proceed. In this way, we create,a posteriori, a means of understanding rather than depend on some reservoir of meaning that exists beforehand, in a priori relation to our utterances.
The better I understand either you or the world, the further I should be able to proceed without great surprises. A surprise on my part,however, indicates that perhaps I should reconsider something that I thought I had grasped earlier. In light of the unexpected, my earlier response may prove less useful now--on its basis, I did not anticipate this.
No response is ever truly wrong, though, for each was at least useful at some point along the way, and, taken together, each makes up the object of our ongoing discourse. However, those reponses that prove most useful are those that, by minimizing surprises, let me know how to go on.
Rating:
Summary: A book on language not argued, but spoken.
Review: After immersing myself into the often tedious world of philosophy for quite sometime now, I have to say that I am
none to impressed. Of course a glimmer here, a flash there,
but often enough philosophers are so caught up in chasing down truth that they have forgoten the tools that
will get them there. But then there is this little jewel, a piece which is not so much a linear argument as a chorus of
voices, a play of the mind's inclinations both profound and ridiculous.
In Philosophical Investigations, you will not find anything resembling the traditional forms of argumentation,
and it is often difficult to discern who is saying
what and with what tone (which is fascinating because, unlike the Socratic dialogues, there is only one 'person' speaking). But one thing begins to crystalize as you dig into the work: Wittgenstein has an acute attunement to language and its fine meshing of both system and abberation, of logic and eccentricity. If you are sometimes
amazed at the fact that we speak, and most often without a
second thought, and if you as well sometimes wonder why anyone would wish to make our language 'better' or somehow more 'perfect', then you should find this work of small,
seperated paragraphs stimulating.
Rating:
Summary: Study guide to the mind, language
Review: Could this have been a better book? Philosophical Investigations and Darwin's "Origin of Species" were both the "precipitate" of 20 years of personal exploration of intellectual problems. Darwin had reasons for publishing his work that Wittgenstein did not have. Alfred Wallace independently discovered some of Darwin's ideas, forcing Darwin to rush his work to print. In contrast, Wittgenstein lamented the poverty and darkness of his time and had to hope that his ideas might be appreciated in the future. Given the difficult conditions of its construction, it is hard to fault the form of this book. Is there anyone who could have been the equivalent for Wittgenstein of what Wallace was for Darwin? Darwin and Wallace could both get out in the world and make the types of observations needed to discover the same ideas. Wittgenstein had to create the Tractatus, an experience that eventually led him to reject the conventional approach for trying to explain language. However, other philosophers seemed to be immunized against coming to interpret the Tractatus in the way that Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was dealing with ideas that were also starting to be incorporated into other intellectual disciplines, so could Wittgenstein's Wallace have come from another discipline such as computer science? Maybe Alan Turing could have tried to program computers to use human language and in so doing taken another path to the conclusion that formal logical systems cannot account for human language behavior. Unfortunately, when Wittgenstein was done working on the material that was later published in Philosophical Investigations, the first computer programs were just being run. Turing was interested in the idea of artificial intelligence, but the computer hardware was not there in time. That only one man was able to make the intellectual journey described in Philosophical Investigations is the great story behind the story. The problems Wittgenstein confronted "from inside", by way of introspection, are the problems that neurobiologists are now confronting "from the outside". For example, Wittgenstein used the "duckrabbit" as an example of "aspect seeing". The drawing of the "duckrabbit" can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made explicit the analogy between the meaning problem for human language and our mental power of aspect seeing. Sure, we can write a definition for a word to put into a dictionary, but does that mean that we have "captured" THE meaning of the word? No more than seeing one aspect of the duckrabbit means that we know its meaning. Wittgenstein was horrified by the way Freudians had abused the term "unconscious", so he mostly avoided using it. "We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike." This one sentence indicates the main point of the entire work and gives a short answer to the question of what went wrong in the Tractatus. Philosophical Investigations is a workbook in which Wittgenstein attempts to march across this central idea in so many ways that eventually the disease of our former way of thinking about language is cured. In the last section of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein condemns psychology for its conceptual confusion and barrenness, noting that psychologists get bewitched by their experimental methods. Psychology, as a black-box study of the mind, must fail as surely as do the attempts by philosophers to describe mind and language as formal systems. Only after the death of Wittgenstein did the black-box of the mind begin to be opened and understood well enough to start the process of explaining mind in terms of brain physiology. We now know that the human ability to think of something and form a mental image of it (which gets extensive investigation in Philosophical Investigations) is mediated by the spread of activity down into the lowest domains of the visual cortex in a way that reverses the flow of information that makes perception possible. We can now begin to understand aspect seeing in terms of the existence of mutually competitive semantic networks in brains, only one of which can stabilize within consciousness at one time. Our experience of word meaning is just a special example of how our brains deal with fluid concepts and can shrink associative networks around individual words or relax them to encompass phrases or entire sentences. Just as no living organism makes sense outside of the network of life within which it is embedded, nothing within human language has meaning outside of the semantic networks that form inside the brains of human children. Of course, most of the activity of these networks takes place within what George Lakoff calls the "cognitive unconscious", the ocean of unseen brain activity upon which our introspectively accessible and behaviorally expressible brain activity floats. It will be a fitting tribute to Wittgenstein's courage and vision if the neuroscientists who are working from the outside of the brain to reveal the workings of the cognitive unconscious will be able to join with those philosophers who are working on Wittgenstein's research project and building towards the same goal from the inside. Towards this end, Philosophical Investigations deals with issues that are still very much on our "to do" list. Is it useful to read some of Frege's work or Wittgenstein's Tractatus before reading Philosophical Investigations? An alternative is to make use of the secondary literature, for example Garth Hallett's thick Companion to Philosophical Investigations. I suggest opening up Philosophical Investigations and pretending that you are sitting right in front of Wittgenstein in a classroom. When he says, "now think about this," put the book down and think about it! When he asks a question, write it out in your own words and then write out your answer. If you see a word or phrase that confuses you, write it down in your personal glossary along with the location in the text where you find it. Check in Hallett or online for help with these confusing words. Think in the direction that Wittgenstein pointed.
Rating:
Summary: An apple is just an apple
Review: For some reason I keep this book around, although I do not understand it. When I read through it, I feel I must be missing something. It is said that sometimes Buddhist masters smack their students with reeds during their meditations to blast them into awareness. When I read this book, I want to smack Wittgenstein, to get him to clearly explain to me what the heck he is talking about. It always seemed to me that you don't have to explain the use of language. Everyone understands language from the time they know how to use it. Yes, words refer to things. We know this intuitively. The whole process is muddied up if you try to explain it. I said to my nine-year old boy recently, who is in a smart-aleck stage, "watch what you say!" And he retorted, "Well, I can't really watch what I say. You can't see your words." And I said, "HEY! You know what I mean." And there it is for me. I like reading this book, because it feels like mental exercise to do so. But I wonder what he was thinking, because I am not sure what he is getting at. I took a Wittgenstein course in college that had six students in the class, and I got an A. I remember being puzzled how I could have gotten an A, since I felt I did not really grasp what W. was saying. Maybe, as another reviewer recommends, I should just read through it again, slowly and carefully. It is a perplexing book, but I cannot deny its beauty. I am glad that I still own my nice hardback copy from college. The blue and brown books are good too, especially since he wrote at least of them in the trenches in world war I.
Rating:
Summary: An apple is just an apple
Review: For some reason I keep this book around, although I do not understand it. When I read through it, I feel I must be missing something. It is said that sometimes Buddhist masters smack their students with reeds during their meditations to blast them into awareness. When I read this book, I want to smack Wittgenstein, to get him to clearly explain to me what the heck he is talking about. It always seemed to me that you don't have to explain the use of language. Everyone understands language from the time they know how to use it. Yes, words refer to things. We know this intuitively. The whole process is muddied up if you try to explain it. I said to my nine-year old boy recently, who is in a smart-aleck stage, "watch what you say!" And he retorted, "Well, I can't really watch what I say. You can't see your words." And I said, "HEY! You know what I mean." And there it is for me. I like reading this book, because it feels like mental exercise to do so. But I wonder what he was thinking, because I am not sure what he is getting at. I took a Wittgenstein course in college that had six students in the class, and I got an A. I remember being puzzled how I could have gotten an A, since I felt I did not really grasp what W. was saying. Maybe, as another reviewer recommends, I should just read through it again, slowly and carefully. It is a perplexing book, but I cannot deny its beauty. I am glad that I still own my nice hardback copy from college. The blue and brown books are good too, especially since he wrote at least of them in the trenches in world war I.
Rating:
Summary: Best introduction to the later Wittgenstein
Review: Forget what others have to say about the "later" Wittgenstein (which, I find, is often what they read into it). If you need to do some background reading for context, I'd suggest the two brief chapters on W in Nicholas Fearn's "Zeno and the Tortoise". After that, just read this text carefully and don't rush. W is very clear, though he has somewhat of a rambling style, and it is not that difficult to understand what he thinks the purpose of philosophy should be: dissolving philosophical problems by whatever method is suitable - mostly by seeing how ordinary language is misused to create confusion. This is not to say that there aren't real philosophical problems, but that many call more for clarification rather than a solution. You may not agree with W's approach to philosophy, but if you are interested in modern philosophy it's hard to dismiss his plea to examine the way you are asking questions. And he is his own best introduction to his own way of doing philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: Best introduction to the later Wittgenstein
Review: Forget what others have to say about the "later" Wittgenstein (which, I find, is often what they read into it). If you need to do some background reading for context, I'd suggest the two brief chapters on W in Nicholas Fearn's "Zeno and the Tortoise". After that, just read this text carefully and don't rush. W is very clear, though he has somewhat of a rambling style, and it is not that difficult to understand what he thinks the purpose of philosophy should be: dissolving philosophical problems by whatever method is suitable - mostly by seeing how ordinary language is misused to create confusion. This is not to say that there aren't real philosophical problems, but that many call more for clarification rather than a solution. You may not agree with W's approach to philosophy, but if you are interested in modern philosophy it's hard to dismiss his plea to examine the way you are asking questions. And he is his own best introduction to his own way of doing philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: This book will not necessarily make your eyes bleed
Review: I read the PI as part of a class on Wittgenstein that I took in my final semester of college, and I don't think I would be going too far in saying that it tied together everything I had read up to that point. For me it made clear how and in what sense every preceding philosopher had "gone wrong" and opened the door for a meaningful examination of the language we use not just in philosophy, but in everyday life. In addition, it showed me how the language we use to make sense of the world is a sort of framework that we lay over what is, in some sense, still a mystery. This is the most important and one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Of course, it follows from what is written in the book that different readers will interpret it (and any other work) in different ways. All I can recommend is that you read it and see what you get out of it.
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