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PREFACEI In 1922, Wittgenstein believed he had eliminated all philosophical problems. The explanation of meaning advanced in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus excludes traditional philosophical questions and answers as nonsensical. There was nothing more to do but withdraw in silence from meaningless philosophical speculation, as the final sentence of his treatise recommends. By 1929, after a period of philosophical inactivity, Wittgenstein began to doubt the adequacy of his early semantic philosophy , and tried to repair the analysis in response to a particular logical difficulty. When the theory proved unable to deliver a satisfactory solution within the general framework ofthe Tractatus, Wittgenstein concluded that his early account of meaning was deeply flawed. By 1933, he had gone back to the drawing board to rethink the semantics of language and its implications for the right method of philosophy. The misgivings he had at this time can conjecturally be inferred from the argument of his 1929 essay , "Some Remarks on Logical Form," and from the historical circumstances surrounding his rejection and disowning of the work, including his decision not to read the paper at the philosophical meeting for which it was intended. Wittgenstein thereafter until the time of his death in 1951 develops a radically new philosophy. He criticizes his early work, and offers a different approach to the same cluster of questions that had motivated his first reflections on language, the self, moral and aesthetic value, and the proper aim and practice of philosophy. Wittgenstein's reconsideration of these problems in light of the failure of the Tractatus first appears in the Blue and Brown Books, as lecture notes from his seminars at Cambridge University in 1933 and 1934, and culminates in the posthumous I xi xii I PRE F ACE Philosophical Investigations, most of which was completed by 1945, with additions written between 1946 and 1949. These essential works are but the tip of an iceberg of unpublished manuscripts on a wide range of topics. As in his early philosophy, Wittgenstein in the later period seeks to eliminate philosophical problems from the standpoint of a correct understanding of the meaning of language. The puzzles and paradoxes of philosophy are no longer dismissed as meaningless in one fell swoop, because Wittgenstein now sees the legitimate use of language as more complicated and multidimensional than the Tractatus had allowed . Wittgenstein maintains that the proper practice of philosophy amounts to a therapy from the intellectual anxiety produced by improper philosophical questioning. Philosophical problems melt away in the course of arriving at a correct understanding of the meanings of innocent-appearing terms like 'know', 'pain', 'believe', 'free', that give rise to conceptual confusions . The meanings of these terms are determined by the rules of a philosophical grammar, discovered in the therapeutic exercise of specifying what Wittgenstein calls a perspicuous representation of their nonphilosophical pragmatic uses as ordinary language tools in the diverse linguistic transactions of everyday human activity. Considered by many today as among the greatest twentiethcentury philosophers, Wittgenstein is so admired even by those who vehemently disagree with both his early and later thought as to rank him in company with Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Yet Wittgenstein 's achievement is of quite a different kind than any of these historical comparisons would suggest. Had the project ofthe Tractatus succeeded, Wittgenstein would have overturned all of past traditionally conceived philosophy as literal nonsense. Even in the later period of the Philosophical Investigations, when he has rejected nearly all ofthe content ofhis early philosophy, Wittgenstein finds himselfthoroughly opposed to philosophy as a system of propositions modeled on mathematics or the sciences to be accepted as doctrine about a special subject matter. The difficulty in understanding Wittgenstein's thought in the early, transition, or later periods is not merely one of grasping its imposing technicalities , but its revolutionary purpose and direction, as an antiphilosophical philosophy. It is the challenge of coming to terms with a philosophy in which there are finally no real philosophical problems, no substantive philosophical theses, and no philosophical work to be done beyond the clarification of meaning in language , by which the need for philosophy evaporates. [3.81.222.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:35 GMT) xiii I PRE F ACE This is a book about Wittgenstein's (anti-) philosophy in all three major periods, with an emphasis on the transition between his early and later work. The main purpose is to situate Wittgenstein 's ideas in the broader context ofthe evolution ofhis thought in its two major phases, represented by the...