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Summary: One of the two great philosophical works of the 20th century
Review: The two greatest works of philosophy of the 20th century are, I believe, Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS and Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. The famous distinction between Analytical or Anglo-American Philosophy on the one hand, and European or Continental Philosophy is symbolized by these two books. I have to confess that I found the Wittgenstein absolutely fascinating, and has become one of the most important books in my life and library. I have studied the Heidegger, but perhaps because of the extraordinary moral failings in his life (he was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945, though he apparently was more of a fan of Nazism than Hitler, his great break with Hitler being that he saw the Jewish problem as being an intellectual problem, and not a biological one, i.e., he felt like traditional anti-Semites that Jews need only change their beliefs to be reintegrated into society, while Hitler felt the problem was in their blood, and the only solution was isolation of the Jews or their destruction), or perhaps because of the tortured and obscure mode of writing that he felt he had to use to express his thought, I found the Heidegger to be remote, uninteresting, and inaccessible. Ultimately, not worth the effort. But BEING AND TIMES's status as a classic is incontestable.As a grad student in philosophy at Yale and the University of Chicago, I was subject to a growing conviction that most university professors teaching Wittgenstein should, perhaps, not. The problem is that most American professors teaching Wittgenstein teach him as an extension of Russell, Tarski, and Carnap. Their background is logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and their philosophy of language is rooted in logical and scientific issues. Although Wittgenstein was interested in these issues, there is a definitive amount of information that indicates that while he possessed a knowledge of mathematics, logic, and philosophy of language, his own philosophical background was much, much broader. His own cultural concerns ran much more broadly than most of these professors. It is not merely that they have not read Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Lichtenberg, Karl Kraus, Goethe, or the prayers of Samuel Johnson: they have no interest in doing so, and little sympathy for these writers, whom Wittgenstein himself found congenial. One is, therefore, in a dilemma with Wittgenstein. Unless you have taken several courses in philosophy, taking up the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS can be an almost overwhelming challenge. Most of the books on Wittgenstein are either weak or very misleading because of a lack of sympathy with his wider interests. For an ordinary individual, perhaps well read, but not especially knowledgeable of the work of philosophers like Russell and Frege and against whom he developed much of his thought, my first recommendation would be not to read the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, but to read instead Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. This is a excellent biography, and does a very good job of acquainting the casual reader with the highlights of both Wittgenstein's thought and life (and his life was a very interesting one indeed, in contrast to Heidegger, whose life, apart from his involvement with Nazism, was pretty uneventful). I would then recommend that one try reading one of Wittgenstein's other books first. I believe that either ON CERTAINTY or ZETTEL or CULTURE AND VALUE would be a much easier way into Wittgenstein's work than reading the INVESTIGATIONS.
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Summary: english edition
Review: There isn't much point in my criticizing Wittgenstein's crowning work, which is without a doubt one of the most important philosophical works of all time. Philosophers must read it. This edition is good, but readers should be aware that it carries only the English text (in Anscombe's translation). The translation is standard and superb, but I advise serious students to consider buying the bilingual edition of the _Philosophische Untersuchungen_ (Routledge).
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Summary: top of the heap
Review: This book inspires heartfelt testimony. My own experience is that it liberates. Wittgenstein introduces a method that's fitted to the questions he treats, so that anyone who is bothered by the same questions can finally get a decent grip on them. The questions I mean are the usual philosophical ones: what is value? what is a fact? what is logic? what makes a thing what it is? what is essence? what is explanation? what is thinking? and so on. But (and this is a clue to his method) the basic question among all of these is about meaning: what is it, what conditions it, and what is the relationship between meaning and world (it turns out to be intimate). A couple of "warnings": Wittgenstein is not a philosopher who likes jargon, in fact the tendency to jargon cuts directly against his philosophical point that language is just fine the way it is. But he can be weirdly hard to read anyway and very smart people walk away from him bewildered all the time. Mostly (I think) that's because the questions are uniquely "close to us" and Wittgenstein's approach is totally unlike familiar approaches to problem-solving (in science, math, politics, car mechanics, etc.) It's as though we are used to inspecting things at arm's length but what's at issue in these questions changes at arm's length, the problem is only right at our noses. So he takes another approach which you'll have to see first-hand - what he himself called his "new method". Now every rule must have an exception, and that brings me to the second point. Actually Wittgenstein does rely on some technical vocabulary - nothing far-out, but it can present an obstacle to deeper reading. Words like "sense", "reference", "assertion", "truth-value", "concept", and "object" stem from logic and the theory of meaning as Frege developed them. To go more deeply into PI, a person would have to read - or somehow be comfortable with ideas from - at least two of Frege's articles: "On Sense and Reference" and "On Concept and Object" [collected in The Frege Reader, Beaney ed.]. These articles are practically the fountainhead of analytic philosophy and also clear, precisely written, and intensely brilliant. More to the point, they contain many of Wittgenstein's insights in germinal form, and many of Wittgenstein's most significant moves are implicit or explicit criticisms of Frege. So to really get to the bottom of PI you'll probably need to read Frege. Anyway, the bottom line is: if you've come this far, it's for you.
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Summary: this book will make your eyes bleed (if you understand it).
Review: This book is the literary equivalent to those red buttons we were told not to press. Reading this book will make your life a living nightmare. And you thought Descartes or Sartre
creeped you out! This made my apron run amock!
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Summary: Learn from it but there is no need to worship it
Review: This is a book which at one time was worshipped. It was taken to be the holy text that gave the true answers to the philosophical puzzles that graduate students in philosophy were puzzling over. Wittgenstein was the hero and his manner of ' doing philosophy' of walking and holding his forehead, and waiting in silence and thinking for long stretches of time while puzzling it out was imitated by his many followers. The 'Investigations' did not like the 'Tractatus ' before it present the system that would tell the whole truth , answer it all , as it were. It instead put the focus on philosophizing as an activity. And it is a remarkable, enigmatic, aphoristic text rich in suggestions and quandaries. It truly is a book that presents perplexing questions and makes it seem as if ' thinking' is a most serious and difficult business.
From the work come key concepts which have been added to ' vocabulary ' of philosophical. Wittgenstein 'Seek the use not the meaning' puts him of course in the company of the pragmatists. The concept of ' family resemblance' in defining a concept in which one does not see a single clear definition, but rather sees 'variations' whose ' meanings overlap' as in a Venn diagram is another powerful tool of analysis. ' Letting the fly out of the fly bottle' another metaphor for philosophizing too suggested the turn to ordinary language and everyday common experience as central for philosophizing. And this away from the formal abstract logical thinking of 'The Tractatus'.
Another point. The 'Philosophical Investigations' is a hard book to understand. And part of the mystique of Wittgenstein is the sense of his incredible ' genius mind' which most of us even those studying philosophy, cannot grasp.
My own sense is that if you ask trivial questions you get trivial answers. And that of course much of the metaphysical and religious discourse philosophical analysis, logical positivism dismissed as nonsense is precisely what is important. 'The Investigations' opens more in the direction( I believe) of allowing for these kinds of meaning. But I am not sure about this.
Another point. I do not pretend to understand not only not fully, not even ' largely' 'The Investigations'. The sense of not understanding though puzzling over it of course said something to me about my own ' lesser powers' in philosophy.
Years later I would simply recommend to readers of the work to not take it with the kind of seriousness we did then. Take it as an interesting text, even a poetic text, and parse it and find meanings in it which hopefully will enrich your life and philosophical understanding.
Do not pray to it. Wittgenstein was a great mind , but a mind to be studied and understood, a frail and fragmented mind also, and not to be worshipped.
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Summary: Brilliant: The Linguistic Philosophy of Everyday Life
Review: This is obviously one of the most important books of 20th cent. philosophy, so no point in restating its fine points of linguistic theory etc. More important (to me) is how it makes you feel, particularly since its enduring value will be defined, not by how professional philosophers think of it, but by how its received by ordinary people (who work in drab offices, let's say). Wittgenstein unfolds a strange dialogue with himself and with hypothetical interlocutors. There are various problems presented. But just when your head is hurting from all the possibilities, like a Zen master, LW just disolves the problems with a subtle aphorism. It's a strange feeling, I tell you! Similar to reading eastern philosophy. His aphorisms such as "philosophy shows the fly out of the bottle" or "understanding language is like understanding a way of life" or (the best) "if a lion had language, we would not understand him" have a way of getting under your skin and forcing you to really observe the world in a new way. The other day I was speaking with a female attorney about hostile workplace law and how language can be a tool for keeping women out of certain jobs, and I kept thinking, "This is straight Wittgenstein." In fact a lot of "postmodern" ideas about language can be traced to this book. Whether Wittgenstein's ideas are technically right seems of more concern to linguists and psychologists. For me, good philosophers give the world fresh insights and new models. And P.I. certainly does that. If you aren't familiar with his work, I would check out Derek Jarman's elegant film "Wittgenstein" (screenplay by Terry Eagleton), then flip through this book and see if your perspective doesn't change and if you don't suddenly break up the next office meeting shouting: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world!"
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Summary: A philosophical monument
Review: To say that something is outside my frame of reference should tell me more about the current form of my sense-method than the value ,of spirit ,of my reaction to an external work. It is what I am internally which measures out my response. And it is my response which generates an objective distance from a piece of thought as much as it brings a closeness, a kinship. And the response is a factor of my being able to see objectively the value states of my association with material I have had cause to have at hand. I subject myself to formed thought written by others considering their work to be an expedient narrowing the choices, the selection of methods for deriving my own system for illustrating the different frames of reference sustaining association, the need to privacy in the act of absorbing another work. It is not logical elements that gives me a sense of error. It is the very general environment which describes (a landscape complete). But a complete environment means just that, complete. Not complete as a whole, filled with identifiable and necessary elements and the elements are constituents and can have elucidative practices made upon them. But complete in how it distinguishes by defining imposition upon the world. A statement has place as a work of inference, reason with method. But overall, the act must coincide with a tangible necessity which elementally anticipates a responsive gesture. And subsidiary gestures are made predetermined by the local conditions-language allows no constructivism. A picture can only have a local meaning (as much as a language). Although a picture can have meaning it is also known generally for what it is, a picture. And so a book can have a meaning. And in it's way of information and structure the meaning can be of a gradient, great or small. Yet it is still in reference what it is, what it is correctly surmised to be, a book. And a book is general to culture and so known as a thing and type. And the skills required for reading the book are certain. But a person who does not possess the skills required is no less involved in the world. Yet the skills can be described. And they can be shown in a way which arrives at a culmination of logical processes indicating that a nucleus lies at the bottom of that type of perception. And the center is central only in its reference to order in process. And the process is imposed as an act upon the book as much as the book by its nature of thought is imposed upon the world. The limits established by the process are shed away from reality as they post notice to declare order evolving from the processes own critical center, the increasing complexity of reference spreading outward concentrically automatically refers back upon its own method, its immediately previous statement, and defines as archaic, valueless, its necessary past. And in doing so it, as a must (which it is engineered to be), by its design-order, extinguishes any objective reference to inter-relative privacy which regardless of subject and intent is the origin point of the act of written extension before the fact. A series of remarks have a method of reason. They are examples and show more as indications (not as pseudo-empirical diagrams). They gesture in sense. And a gesture is more subtle because it causes no breaks in the flow of personal direction. And the reference's influence is partial not meant to change the course of focus. No immediacy is perceived by the individual in as much as the gesture is not referentially dramatic. And references which are pseudo and illegitimate are posed against immovable states of affairs. And a non-rigid reference is part of acknowledgment, a break in an obscuring focus where the nature of an association is seen not as what definitely is but rather noted naturally in the passing of time, for a moment. It is a not transcendental by any means, but rather a holistic and therapeutic instance of priority cognition. And here priority is defined as a unnatural relation, a fixation extending from the individual to a medium conveying propositional forms, written, verbal, or pictorial which by their intention convey autocracy. Such associations seem to numb the senses by imposing rigidity, a false sense of discipline that takes form as an internal structure, a mindset. And this mindset conforms to traditional knowledge practices. It acts, in function, as if to endorse them, support them. And it is within the confines of this area of rigidity that the central 'I' of function is logically premised from. All responses are there. All definable parts of elucidation are there. All limbs and organs complete, but only as allowed for that environment. The being inhabits only those edifices, walks those streets, speaks that language. And the result is a forming, a fixing of parts. And although apt description of being-in-place (once given) can be accepted, the sense behind the language does not quite fit because it is singular in its description-habitation. And this singularity excludes outside conditions which are defined as extras, i.e., superfluous functions.
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Summary: Read at least 4 examples
Review: What you see is abnormal writing. The well-being in special, normal and common writing is not here. Wittgenstein did something else. What did he do?
Rating:
Summary: Read at least 4 examples
Review: What you see is abnormal writing. The well-being of special, common and normal writing is not here. Wittgenstein did something else. What did he do?
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Summary: One of the best philosophical works I have ever read
Review: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is an intellectually stimulating discussion of language and more.
Instead of explaining the nature of language, Wittgenstein instead describes language in the form of various language games. By discussing various ways in which language works, Wittgenstein does not explain it, but all the same provides a very interesting way to view language. However, Wittgenstein does not only discuss language. His discussion of language games moves into areas of perception and thought as Wittgenstein shows how our perception of the world and language influence each other, and how language influences how we think. While Philosophical Investigations is written in the form of numbered paragraphs, the text still flows, with both descriptive analysis and brief dialogues. This work is one of the most enlightening works of philosophy written in this century, and is definitely worth reading.
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