Philosophical Sweep: to understand the fiction of David Foster Wallace, it helps to have a little Wittgenstein.
posted by Lutoslawski on Dec 23, 2010 - 29 comments

"The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera" - Peter Hacker on philosophy
posted by Gyan on Oct 25, 2010 - 145 comments

§7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is such a contradictory figure that there are, in professional philosophical usage, two of him. Wittgenstein I had solved every philosophical problem in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921); having nothing else to do, he went home to Austria and became, unsuccessfully, a schoolteacher. In 1929, Wittgenstein I returned to Cambridge, where he began his transformation into Wittgenstein II. He was no longer confident in the Tractatus, his certainty in any answers less firm. Wittgenstein II's great, posthumous, work was the Philosophical Investigations. But Wittgenstein the living man was one, not two: musician and architect, reader of mysteries and engineer. "If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom," he once wrote, "there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories."
posted by nasreddin on Sep 7, 2007 - 52 comments

Wittgenstein's Nachlass (literary remains) are now available in an electronic format, courtesy of the University of Bergen Wittgenstein Archive. The 20th century's greatest philosopher never could find a way to publish the 20,000 manuscript pages, that constituted his most important work, in sequential book form; the Philosophical Investigations were pieced together after his death by his trustees. He probably would have appreciated the potential of electronic publishing. There's an excellent Wittgenstein portal, too.
posted by liam on Jan 7, 2002 - 17 comments