When I first read this many years ago, I really struggled with it. The Tractatus had been so beautifully efficient and lucid, although it was wrong, it was still beautiful. Then I delved into the Philosophical Investigations (PI) and floundered.

On my second reading, I had a lot more peripheral material to assist me in grasping the ideas. What I truly wished I had back then was this:

Commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations by Lois Shawver

This site not only lists the complete text but also provides side-by-side commentary from Shawver. Generally, I don't like to read books like this online because I often feel the need to, *gasp*, mark them up for studying. However, this layout was extremely helpful in getting through some of the tougher sections. Even when I disagreed with a notation Shawver added, the mere fact that the note was there was beneficial in itself for clarifying my own thoughts on the lines. It really enhanced my understanding and made the reading experience more engaging and fruitful.

Exasperating, but worth it.

The syntax of the Investigations has a jaggedly Asperger’s feel to it. Wittgenstein often sounds like a malfunctioning android, pacing in frantic circles and waving its arms, jabbering its core protocols to itself in a vexed “Philosophy is the sickness and I’m the cure” manner. The loathsome blend of pedantry and vagueness in Part 1, with its hectoring tone and nebulous definitions, can be maddening. Part 2 is less punishing, with enticing stimulants on nearly every page, while large swaths of Part 1 are a morale-stunting crawl through banks of fog. But keep in mind that PI is a posthumous medley of notes and fragments that never had a final, rigorous copyedit. The 2009 translation by Hacker and Schulte is said to be less stodgy and peeving than the Anscombe version. An editor might be tempted to abridge Part 1, but the moments of profundity require the groundwork of the more wearying fragments.

The payoff is a panoptic voyage into speech and semantics that is both rousing and emancipatory, yet at times painfully obvious. We live in a (post)philosophical age that takes much of Wittgenstein for granted, and his expository style can seem like that of an amnesiac reconstructing language-use. Wittgenstein wants us to detox from “false problems” and return to the everyday. His presence in the philosophical canon is comparable to that of evolutionary models displacing theological sleight-of-hand. Wisdom, like with Kant, often means knowing our limits.

“426. A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied...” To prime yourself, download the two-part Partially Examined Life podcast “Wittgenstein on Language”. The roundtable discussion is good, though one participant bungles the Sraffa anecdote. PI gets an A+ for substantive vision and historical importance, but a C- for expository clarity. And for a special bonus track, check out “Was Wittgenstein Right?” by Paul Horwich.

Wittgenstein: Consider this situation: a man walks into a McDonald's and orders a Whopper. The worker gives him a Big Mac instead. What occurred here? What would it mean to say this is a valid move?

Everyone: Holy shit, this guy is some kind of genius.

Memes aside, I have a strange relationship with this book. Wittgenstein was implicitly present in my discovery of analytic philosophy over six years ago, and I've been reading and rereading parts of this book for four years. There was a time when I regarded Wittgenstein as almost a skeleton key for analytic philosophy, a notion I now find completely silly. For example, his TLP convinced me that formal logic was something I needed to be proficient in. After learning formal logic, I came back and found the logic he was doing to be incredibly odd and aberrant, addressing hyper-specific concerns that only he had. Similarly, I've had quite a few papers start from what I thought were insights from the Blue & Brown Books, On Certainty, and PI, only to go back to the inciting passages and find it to be about something else entirely.

I mean to personally illustrate what I believe to be the wider theme in Wittgenstein's legacy, which is that he is primarily someone from whom you learn. There are no pure Wittgensteinians. The pure Wittgensteinians left their Oxford classes to work in factories or rural schools. The flavors of Wittgensteinism in Analytic philosophy are wide, varied, and fruitful, and yet the most successful are the ones who take it in their own way. This passage from Daniel Dennett's appendix of Consciousness Explained sums it up best:

My debt to Wittgenstein is large and long standing. When I was an undergraduate, he was my hero, so I went to Oxford, where he seemed to be everybody's hero. When I saw how most of my fellow graduate students were (by my lights) missing the point, I gave up trying to "be" a Wittgensteinian and just took what I thought I had learned from the Investigations and tried to put it to work.

Nobody would ever accuse Dennett of being a die-hard Wittgenstein acolyte, nor would anyone insist that one is hopeless to understand Dennett without a thorough study of PI. Rather, Wittgenstein's influence is oddly diffuse. This book characterizes what some might call his "therapeutic" method, and it does seem that his place in philosophy broadly has been that of a therapist. You don't credit your therapist for your own personal growth as much as their catalyzing role.

Incidentally, I do find that the "therapy" readings of Wittgenstein miss the point. A method is a means to an end; after all, it's not like the Incompleteness Theorem was just because Gödel liked numbering things. I'm also not fond of the reading that Wittgenstein was simply repudiating everything about the TLP. I find that the most common thread throughout Wittgenstein's career is his anti-psychologism. In Frege before him, anti-psychologism was a tool of a positive mathematical logic program and was fairly narrowly confined to that. In a move of inversion, the TLP was Wittgenstein's attempt to turn a logic program against psychologism. Here in PI, he realizes he can cast off those last remnants of Frege and pursue that same project of Anti-psychologism from a newfound appreciation of social practice and a continuing interest in language. And from there he engages in a dialectic of thinking through the various counter-intuitive dimensions of such a position. He didn't have the Anglo muscle of being able to simply stake down an obstinate claim; in his temperament, he unavoidably had to work through it.

So what lessons do I gain from reading him work through it? Particularly since I'm in a strange position of coming back and finally finishing the damn thing having already absorbed what I believe to be its lessons both in the SEP overview way and in whatever it was that spoke to me personally. The answer I don't want to give is that I accidentally gained a bunch of insights on issues from varying irrelevant contexts. Brainrotted literary scholars have tried to paint him as a poet. Is reading him for accidental insight no better than reading him as poetry?

Whatever the case may be, I still find this work somewhat obligatory, whether in excerpts or not. The general move in the broad strokes - the shifted focus towards language and social forms - is, I think, beneficial in a broad sense to have impressed upon us. And it's unique enough in form for your pretentious friends to feel there's something in it for them too. Analytic skeleton key it is not, but it doesn't really have to be.

Oh my goodness, Ludwig Wittgenstein was such a tortured soul. This man gazed into the unfathomable darkness that was the complex midnight jungle of his own inner being. He sharpened his machete and plunged right in, hacking, flailing, and lunging wildly. He mainly grappled with the concepts of language, meaning, understanding, and states of consciousness.

Part I consists of 693 short numbered sections, approximately 4 to a page. It was sent to the publisher but was pulled back at the last second, five years before Wittgenstein died. After his death, his additional writings were gathered and make up Part II, which is loosely divided into 13 short sections plus 1 long one. There is no consistent development, but sometimes there are long chains of remarks on one topic, and sometimes sudden changes of topic. He often puts statements or questions in quotation marks, as if they were thrown at him by someone playing devil's advocate. It is all extremely personal, written very much in the first person.

The first half of this book is so much better than the second half. I looked in my notebook and found that I jotted 111 notes from the first 120 pages, and only 34 from the last 110 pages. By the end, I was quite relieved for it to be over. So maybe it doesn't deserve 5 stars. But some of it is truly amazing. He concludes the introduction with these words:

"It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another -- but of course, it is not likely.

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it."

Just for that, he gets 5 stars from me.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein, having grown weary of grappling with tautologies, embarks on an epic odyssey of exploration into the idiosyncrasies of intention, memory, and communication.

Taking Saint Augustine's Confessions as a springboard, he commences with some exquisitely written ruminations on the enigmas of language and its acquisition. One passage that particularly lodged in my mind is this:

I think we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one.

To me, this passage prefigures the overarching philosophical methodology of the book: to direct our attention to the delicate paradoxes that mold our comprehension of language—and, by extension, our sense of knowledge and experience.

Yet, Wittgenstein appears to recognize that endeavoring to undermine the validity of lived experience on a philosophical footing is akin to proving that a bumblebee cannot fly. Even though the chasm between language and meaning might be insurmountable, an imprecise account of an experienced phenomenon is not equivalent to a useless one. This prompts him to pen:

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

In the latter portions of the book, Wittgenstein initiates a series of inquiries that I believe fall into two principal classifications. The first category pertains to how phenomena such as perception and knowledge are processed—what David Chalmers might term the "easy problems" of consciousness. These struck me as marginally less captivating, perhaps because we now possess a superior understanding of how information can be stored and manipulated in the guise of electrical impulses.

The second category impinges upon the "hard problems" of consciousness, such as the essence of experience and free will. Here, Wittgenstein largely refrains from attempting to proffer solutions and instead poses some highly intriguing questions, once more frequently drawing inspiration from Augustine. I think this more inquisitive approach elucidates his personal evolution as a philosopher since his inaugural book.

He begins by stating that words signify whatever one believes they signify.

This initial concept sets the stage for an unexpected exploration.

The remainder of the book then delves into the fascinating realms of dinosaurs and spaceships.

It takes the reader on a journey through prehistoric times,描绘 the mighty dinosaurs that once roamed the earth.

From their enormous sizes to their unique characteristics, the details are vividly presented.

Simultaneously, it also ventures into the future, imagining the possibilities of spaceships and interstellar travel.

The combination of these two seemingly disparate topics creates a captivating and thought-provoking narrative.

Readers are left to wonder about the connections between the meaning of words, the mysteries of the past, and the frontiers of the future.

It challenges them to expand their perspectives and consider the limitless potential of language and imagination.

Overall, the book offers a truly engaging and original reading experience.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein dice that it is often thought that animals do not think because they do not speak. However, the Austrian philosopher objects that animals “simply do not speak.” And it is curious because often I think that humans believe they think because they speak, but in reality, humans simply speak.

Wittgenstein's observation challenges our common assumption about the relationship between language and thought. We tend to associate thinking with the ability to express ourselves through language, but perhaps this is a limited perspective. Just because animals do not have a language as we understand it does not necessarily mean they are incapable of thought.

On the other hand, our own reliance on language may lead us to overestimate our thinking abilities. Maybe we are so accustomed to using language to communicate and make sense of the world that we assume that thinking cannot occur without it. But what if there are other forms of thought that are not dependent on language?

Wittgenstein's ideas prompt us to question our assumptions and consider alternative ways of understanding thought and language. They remind us that there is still much we do not know about the nature of the mind and the relationship between language and cognition.

Wittgenstein's philosophical journey is a captivating one.

First, we have his Tractatus, where he argues that language's primary function is to state facts, seeing it as a logical picture of the world. This led him to consider many utterances as nonsense.

However, after leaving professional philosophy, he had doubts. Certain everyday uses of language couldn't be accounted for if it was just a truth-stating tool.

This led to his return to Cambridge and the development of his later views, fully expressed in the Philosophical Investigations.

The writing styles of the two works are both extraordinary, but the structures are different. The Tractatus has a unified argument, influenced by Russell's logicism, while the Investigations is more fragmentary and anti-systematic.

Wittgenstein replaces the old picture metaphor with a new tool metaphor in the Investigations. The meaning of a word is now seen as synonymous with its social use.

He also attacks traditional theories of meaning, both the external and internal ones. His examples, like the duck-rabbit and the discussion of pain, show the flaws in these theories.

Moreover, Wittgenstein's argument about private language challenges the Cartesian tradition. He shows that knowing anything requires social confirmation, making the Cartesian project of founding knowledge on subjective experience doomed.

Despite the dramatic changes in his views, there are still some similarities. In both works, he believes that philosophical problems result from the misuse of language.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Wittgenstein, he has the merit of provoking thought about fundamental questions. His books are worth reading for the writing alone, as they can have a powerful and overwhelming impact, like taking straight shots of vodka.

Upon contemplating Wittgenstein's Investigations, I was vividly reminded of a scene from Monty Python's corking Holy Grail. The one where Palin the landlord is pontificating over the great history of his swamp kingdom to his son, promising that one day all "this" would be his. To which Jones the son replies: "What, the curtains?"

I could easily envision ol' Ludwig watching the cinematic romp with his chums and being plunged into a soul-shattering spell of vertigo over language, sign, and meaning when Jones delivers that cracking line. (While the rest of the entourage would naturally just fall about, or, if they're Wittgenstein's compatriots, continue watching without any signs of merriment on their graven Teutonic maps.)

What makes this book such a fascinating piece of work is that Wittgenstein clearly shows how deeply he has let himself be led into the gaping abyss of human communication. Being such an acute observer, he has seen how very little people's words seem to mean when weighed against a single yardstick. Indeed, "weighing" and "yardstick" alone would elicit a frustrated frown from Bernard Woolley. He was determined to make some sense of what lies there underneath the motley guises of lingual interaction, yet without falling prey to presumption. For he does not start by stating that we all spout tosh and nonsense, but rather, that we engage in various games in our communication, and that it cannot all be waffle! So unlike some philosophers, who would merely buttress their arguments with mentions of how language is used every day, Wittgenstein seems to make it as his point of departure. But what makes it interesting is that, in spite of what he insinuated, he is not writing all this only to be descriptive. My personal view is that he also wanted to be able to draw the line between sense and nonsense somewhere!

Yet the line-drawing seems rather difficult for a man of Ludwig's caliber. He addresses issues such as defining terms, achieving certainty, knowing what is being referenced through words, seeing different aspects of objects, and how feelings translate to words, to name a few. But the more issues are found, the more elusive any kind of definite answer becomes. And perhaps it was never his aim to come up with anything definite, since that, too, is but one language game.

The book doesn't strive to expound on anything. It's rather a collection of loose observations, which mainly aim to serve the reader with food for thought. This could be a sign that Wittgenstein gave up on trying to develop his thoughts further, or it could be his pedagogical bent that led him to this approach. Either way, or any way, he offers titillating questions for you to rack your brain with. He asks what certain sensations feel like (like when you're certain about something). He ponders about the temporal limits of knowledge: if you know something, how long do you know it and when must you be able to summon up the tidbit in order to be qualified as a knower? (What I love about this book as well is that it doesn't treat knowledge as something unattainable, but rather as something that is generally accepted as a concept. No need to nitpick if people generally talk about knowing—it probably means something, even if from a purely logical perspective it might be a dumb concept.) How can we be sure that we know what certain colours are like, even if we couldn't even begin to describe them? What is the mystical thing called application, for example in conjunction with mathematical formulae?

Some of my favourite observations included the bit about how someone can be certain about something, even if it was refuted right after. And the one where he called it a great handicap to language learning when people get the idea that they know how to apply certain things in a new language (I think it was called an intellectual handicap by Ludwig). This book is simply bulging with poseurs and brain-teasers that nonetheless do not feel like nitpicking, but rather everyday mysteries brought to light. The book makes you flick open the inner eye and follow your sensations closely: you know when you're cock-sure about something, and you know what it feels like to fumble and sit on the fence. But where do those things come from? Is there any way to answer these things through thinking, or is it already a biased medium? Why does someone know that they're supposed to look in the direction pointed by the fingers, instead of looking at the tip of the finger instead? Etc. etc., you catch my drift.

The problem with this work is, though, that it's really difficult to read through because of its form. As I said earlier, it's very, very accessible, yet because of its question-oriented approach and its Nietzschean divisions, it's difficult to get into any kind of a reading flow. Personally, I don't like reading books that progress in short bursts or that refer too much to extra-textual things. As much as I love thinking, I pick up a book because I also want to be immersed. I don't want to constantly refer to myself while I'm reading a book. Might be a small quibble, but I also don't simply want to "accept how it is" and continue reading, because it would perforce entail ignoring a lot of things. (Goodness me, what a neurotic I am...)

Yet, yet, this might only be a personal deficiency. The book itself is accessible because it uses the simplest of vocabulary, and refers to other works very rarely. There are plenty of moments where Wittgenstein is being a bit too opaque or too pithy to the extent that such characteristics are inimical to comprehension, but the good thing is that those moments of incomprehension do not feel like you're lacking in the brain department. Or that you're insufficient.

No, because herein, Ludwig Wittgenstein addresses some of the most universal issues known to Mankind: those of language. He pores into the very medium of our communication, and sees the curtains, where others peep outside into the marshes and dream about huuuuuge... tracts of land.

Wittgenstein was a truly remarkable figure. He was an apostle, a soldier, a school teacher, a hermit, a mathematician, and an architect. He was also the inheritor of the Chair of the Moral Sciences Club from Moore at Cambridge and the cousin of F. von Hayek. He came from the wealthiest (Jewish according to the Nuremberg laws) industrialist family in Austria, yet he renounced his fortune.

W was one of the most intimidating characters in the English philosophy scene. The book Wittgenstein's Poker gives a sense of just how impossible a character he was.

He has had a profound influence on every significant philosopher who followed him. What is perhaps most remarkable about him is his turning away from the views (the picture theory) expressed in the only book published during his lifetime, the Tractatus. This book made him the revered Wunderkind of Logical Positivism. The PI takes this theory to task. Any person who wishes to consider herself educated in this century should have read at least the first 50 pages of the PI, which explain W's rejection of the picture theory in favor of a theory of language games as the way to understand meaning. Russell, who wrote the introduction to the Tractatus, never fully grasped it. But if we make the effort, we can.

After the publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had exhausted his contributions to philosophy. He spent the 1920s engaged in diverse occupations. He was a schoolteacher in a small Austrian village, a gardener, and an amateur architect. During this time, he maintained some connection with the philosophical world. Notably, his conversations with Frank Ramsey about the Tractatus led him to realize its flaws. In the late twenties, he also interacted with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, who were inspired by his work.

Somewhat reluctantly, Wittgenstein accepted a teaching position at Cambridge in 1929, submitting the Tractatus as his doctoral dissertation. He spent most of the rest of his life there. He remained skeptical of philosophy and encouraged many of his students to pursue more practical careers. Throughout the thirties and early forties, he developed his more mature philosophy but did not publish it.

Wittgenstein wrote in painstakingly edited notebooks. He revised, cut, and edited constantly, going through numerous drafts before arriving at what is now published as the first part of the Philosophical Investigations in 1945. The same process applied to the formation of Part II, though it never reached a state he deemed ready for publication. Wittgenstein insisted that his work not be published until after his death. He succumbed to cancer in 1951, and the Investigations were published in 1953. Subsequently, other writings from his notebooks or lecture notes taken by his students at Cambridge were also made public.

The Philosophical Investigations were completed and published in a Europe emerging from the shadow of World War II. A sense of malaise pervaded Western Europe as it rebuilt and came to terms with the destruction. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union solidified its hold on Eastern Europe, developed the nuclear bomb, and worked towards space exploration. People feared communist domination.

This malaise and reconstruction were reflected in various aspects, including the arts and letters. The Holocaust and the war's devastation shattered the 19th-century myth of evolution and progress. In a world that made less sense, grand narratives explaining history or the arts seemed implausible.

Postmodernism lacks a straightforward definition, but Wittgenstein's piecemeal approach of language-games, his critique of ultimate justification, and his mistrust of general statements can be seen as characteristic of postmodern thought.

In abandoning logic, Wittgenstein broke with the analytic philosophy tradition established by Frege and Russell. However, his emphasis on language's significance was inherited from them.

Wittgenstein was also deeply concerned with the growing field of psychology. He criticized its fundamental ideas, fearing it was on the wrong track due to philosophical confusion.

The Investigations open with a quote from St. Augustine's Confessions, highlighting the connection between language and objects. Wittgenstein argues that meaning is determined by usage, not just the relationship between words and things.

The Investigations have a unique literary style, engaging in a dialogue with an interlocutor rather than presenting a monologue. This dialogue helps Wittgenstein explore various themes and objections.

One major theme is that the meanings of words are not rigidly defined. Wittgenstein uses examples like "game" to show that there is no single definition that encompasses all uses.

This criticism of fixed meaning sets the stage for Wittgenstein's later work, showing that there is no mental state corresponding to concepts like "meaning" and "understanding."

The Investigations are difficult to understand due to their unfamiliar themes and methods, as well as their new conception of philosophy. They criticize old ways of thinking and aim to lead us to recognize and subdue temptations towards metaphysical thinking.

Wittgenstein's "therapeutic" method is not about ending philosophy but rather about achieving self-knowledge and avoiding errors in abstract thinking.

His discussion of rule following shows that justification does not provide a definite ground for beliefs. Every rule is open to interpretation, and there is no ultimate ground of justification.

Wittgenstein does not deny the existence of ultimate justification or correct interpretation but suggests that we are looking for the wrong thing. Interpretation and justification are only applicable in cases of ambiguity.

The theme of privacy is discussed throughout the Investigations. Wittgenstein deconstructs the mystification we feel about our inner life, showing that our relationship to our sensations is not one of knowledge.

This is, of course, one of the great books of the 20th century, and it blew my head away when I first read it.

However, I have since come to mistrust its conclusions. The central task of language is communication. The central question in linguistics is "How is it possible for one person to understand another?" It is actually possible for people from quite different societies to come to understand each other. But how is this possible? I do not think Wittgenstein gives a satisfactory answer to this question.

Words seem to have a fairly narrow range of core meanings. For example, “elephant” generally refers to a particular kind of large grey animal. But the word "elephant" has other meanings that are not so close to the core meaning. There are wooden elephants, baby elephants, white elephants. However, this is a long way from saying that the meaning of words is determined by context or that the meaning of the word is determined by "family resemblances".

This applies to “games” too. Nearly all “games” consist of activities where one or more individuals try to overcome unnecessary problems (Suits). Some "games", however, do not comply with this narrow definition. But this last point does not require anybody to draw wildly significant philosophical conclusions.