Philosophical Investigations

Introduction

Wittgenstein worked on the book from the mid-1930s but did not publish it; it appeared in 1953, two years after his death, in a bilingual edition with Elizabeth Anscombe’s English translation. The main part consists of 693 numbered remarks; in his preface Wittgenstein called it an album of sketches of landscapes. Instead of building a theory, he works through examples: builders calling out “slab”, a beetle in a box that no one else can see, the duck-rabbit picture. For a large class of cases, he writes, the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and philosophy should show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The second, shorter part was renamed in the 2009 edition.

Connections

Criticizes

• Confessionsc. 400 · Augustine
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus1921 · Ludwig Wittgenstein

Taken up in

• Intention1957 · G. E. M. Anscombe
• Logic, Language-Games and Information1973 · Jaakko Hintikka
• The Postmodern Condition1979 · Jean-François Lyotard
• Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language1982 · Saul Kripke
• The Differend1983 · Jean-François Lyotard

More works by Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 1921Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• 1969On Certainty

Appears in

• Journey ‘The Linguistic Turn’ · Stop 5 of 10