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I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein star

I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations, but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part). These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought. I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb. One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener. I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it. [edits for typos]

mrleiter 8y ago
Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life" [0]https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...
- mbrock 8y ago
  I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted." "The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'." "When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together." "Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."
  - vertline3 8y ago
    I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.
    - contravariant 8y ago
      Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey. At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.
      - vertline3 8y ago
        Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. Some would argue that philosophy has never helped with any ordinary question (only purporting to), but has made contributions to society through logic's support of math.
ofrzeta 8y ago
Maybe it's worth mentioning that he didn't write most of "his" books apart from the Tractatus and Philosophische Untersuchungen. The others might still be worth reading but they are mostly notes from his students. Having studied analytical philosophy in university I also find it interesting that Wittgenstein is seen as a founding father of the analytical movement while his later philosophy can be understood as a refutation of analytical philosophy. You have some valid points about the transcendence of philosophy in stopping the pursuit of pseudo-problems. In relation to that there's also a hint in the end of the Tractatus about (the most important?) things that cannot be said but only shown. Also I found it funny that he supposedly said that there are more profound insights to be found in the crime stories he read than in the philosophical journal "Mind". (I think that's mentioned in Malcom's book).
yarrel 8y ago
Yes philosophical admiration of Wittgenstein indicates a failure to take him seriously. If he was right, people should stop philosophising. But they don't. Wittgenstein failing to end philosophy not once but twice in the Twentieth Century marks him out as a doubly spectacular failure on his own terms. The problem may be that neither logic nor philology exhausts philosophy in ways simpler than philosophy itself. Wittgenstein's domineering charisma and conceptual purity make his attempts to do so dazzling in ways that the flounders of the analytic tradition don't have access to.
- brownbat 8y ago
  > If he was right, people should stop philosophising. Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology. > But they don't. Ha, I don't know-- which way is "philosophers per capita" actually trending?
  - sramsay 8y ago
    > Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology. That's right. And that is exactly what Rorty came to believe.
woodandsteel 8y ago
There are other ways of doing philosophy than the type that Wittgenstein was rejecting. And in fact they are the basis of things like modern science, technology, and liberal democracy.

mrleiter 8y ago

Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life" [0]https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...

mbrock 8y ago
I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted." "The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'." "When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together." "Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."
- vertline3 8y ago
  I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.
  - contravariant 8y ago
    Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey. At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.
    - vertline3 8y ago
      Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.
whatshisface 8y ago
>What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. Some would argue that philosophy has never helped with any ordinary question (only purporting to), but has made contributions to society through logic's support of math.

ofrzeta 8y ago

Maybe it's worth mentioning that he didn't write most of "his" books apart from the Tractatus and Philosophische Untersuchungen. The others might still be worth reading but they are mostly notes from his students. Having studied analytical philosophy in university I also find it interesting that Wittgenstein is seen as a founding father of the analytical movement while his later philosophy can be understood as a refutation of analytical philosophy. You have some valid points about the transcendence of philosophy in stopping the pursuit of pseudo-problems. In relation to that there's also a hint in the end of the Tractatus about (the most important?) things that cannot be said but only shown. Also I found it funny that he supposedly said that there are more profound insights to be found in the crime stories he read than in the philosophical journal "Mind". (I think that's mentioned in Malcom's book).

yarrel 8y ago

Yes philosophical admiration of Wittgenstein indicates a failure to take him seriously. If he was right, people should stop philosophising. But they don't. Wittgenstein failing to end philosophy not once but twice in the Twentieth Century marks him out as a doubly spectacular failure on his own terms. The problem may be that neither logic nor philology exhausts philosophy in ways simpler than philosophy itself. Wittgenstein's domineering charisma and conceptual purity make his attempts to do so dazzling in ways that the flounders of the analytic tradition don't have access to.

brownbat 8y ago
> If he was right, people should stop philosophising. Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology. > But they don't. Ha, I don't know-- which way is "philosophers per capita" actually trending?
- sramsay 8y ago
  > Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology. That's right. And that is exactly what Rorty came to believe.

woodandsteel 8y ago

There are other ways of doing philosophy than the type that Wittgenstein was rejecting. And in fact they are the basis of things like modern science, technology, and liberal democracy.