Wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.11070673]

How do I ensure that I completely understand his philosophy and his book philosophical investigations?

1. can i start straight with philosophical investigations or should I familiarize myself with any other material first?

2. which translation should I read?

Please help anons.

[Anonymous No.11070764]

Get the recent edition, the 4th revised edition by Anscombe and Hacker/Schulte, with the side-by-side German and English.

Yes, you can and should start with the Philosophical Investigations. After that you should read On Certainty, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Remarks on Colour, and his short talk on Religion, and whatever else you like (Golden Bough, notebooks, etc.).

There was a thread about this recently where people (including me) argued about whether you should read his earlier work, especially the Tractatus, before reading Philosophical Investigations. I'm sure that will happen again here, but in any case, I would strongly advise against reading the Tractatus first. For full disclosure, I study analytic and continental philosophy comparatively, and I am inclined toward reading later Wittgenstein more or less with the New Wittgensteinian school, i.e., as a thinker who talks very well to the continental schools of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and to certain forms of neo-pragmatism.

Fundamentally, I read Wittgenstein as a way of "bracketing" (to borrow a phrase from phenomenology) metaphysical assumptions about what language and thought "are" and how they "work." Some people, though this may be an unfair characterisation, instead read Wittgenstein as suggesting a sort of new metaphysics of thought-as-language, which I think is badly mistaken, or as an excessively quietist project aimed at debunking "metaphysics," with the same spirit as a Vienna positivist (just with better methods) . I think most of the people who fall into this trap are analytic philosophers who have been disciplined by their academic training to think in certain systematic categories and terminologies about language, thought, and reality, and who THEN use Wittgenstein as a "corrective" to that system, without ever actually dismantling its faulty initial premises, which (IMHO) was his real intention. Whenever I see someone using a Wittgensteinianly-flexibilised version of some ugly analytic typology of "speech acts," my ballbag retracts in primal animal fear, because it's like watching a 15th century plague doctor putting on a suit of modern medical scrubs and getting ready to perform heart surgery. Something has gone fundamentally wrong there.

All in all, until you can make up your own mind about Wittgenstein, I would be very careful about which interpreters and interpretive you take as gospel.

Stay the FUCK away from "Kripkenstein," whatever you do. And most other interpreters as well, frankly. Hacker & Baker are good, but then you have to read 5 fucking doorstopper volumes for every 50 pages of Wittgenstein you're reading, which to me seems excessive, and only contributes to the mistaken myth that Wittgenstein is some kind of impenetrable mountaintop koan-spouter.

One interesting figure who "got" late Wittgenstein (IMHO) is Peter Winch.

[Anonymous No.11070772]

>>11070764
Addendum: Reading Winch's _Idea of a Social Science_, for instance the critique of various misunderstandings of the "private language" argument in Wittgenstein, was really enlightening for me. Both for elucidating the argument itself and for showing just how badly some VERY smart people, with brains overloaded with raw processing power, can read Wittgenstein and completely miss the point. It's a short book too, but challenging. I would highly recommend it.

[Anonymous No.11070810]

>>11070764
>There was a thread about this recently where people (including me) argued about whether you should read his earlier work, especially the Tractatus, before reading Philosophical Investigations. I'm sure that will happen again here, but in any case, I would strongly advise against reading the Tractatus first.
Why in particular?

[Anonymous No.11071213]

>>11070764
>>11070772

holy fuck. Thank you! Thank you so damn much. I unironically and sincerely love you for such detailed and helpful advice.
This is exactly what I wanted and exactly why I keep returning to this board. Because of anons like you.

>I think most of the people who fall into this trap are analytic philosophers who have been disciplined by their academic training to think in certain systematic categories and terminologies about language, thought, and reality, and who THEN use Wittgenstein as a "corrective" to that system, without ever actually dismantling its faulty initial premises, which (IMHO) was his real intention.
I know a bit about wittgenstein and sort of agree with this.

I will keep away from kripkenstein and definitely read idea of social science by winch.

Thanks again anon. You are pretty cool.