Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition) [Paperback]

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Author)

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Written by one of the century's truly great thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is a remarkable--and surprisingly approachable--collection of insights, statements, and nearly displayed thinking habits of the philosopher's work on language, symbols, categories, and a host of other topics. Organized into nearly 700 short observations, this book is a treasure trove for anyone who needs to think carefully about objects, categories, and symbols, especially in relation to structured logic applications in computer programming.

The short (and sometimes aphoristic) observations in Philosophical Investigations allow the reader to ponder basic questions on what describes a category, how language works in everyday situations, and how symbols function to represent our world.

Originally a series of notes to himself as he lectured on philosophy, the book is a brilliant grab bag of thought and example. Often framed as a question ("How do I recognize that this is red?"), the philosopher provides short answers in a sentence or two, never more than a paragraph. (The second part of the book uses longer answers of several pages to develop its arguments.) An index lets the reader browse on topics of interest--such as language, concept, games, or naming.

Any artificial intelligence researcher looking to understand human language will be intrigued by Wittgenstein's ideas on how symbols and language operate. And for anyone who designs software with objects, this book's careful attention to thinking about what makes a good category demonstrates rigorous thinking about everyday objects and things. Philosophical Investigations is at times a strange and often wonderful book that reveals the thought processes of one of history's finest minds. It exposes the fundamental problems of using language as a means of teaching machines to think using words. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Theory of language and language games, meaning and symbols, concepts and categories, behavior, games (including chess), color, images and perception, grammar and language, sensations, theory of mind and thinking.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (March 11, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0024288101
• ISBN-13: 978-0024288103
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #86,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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89 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the two great philosophical works of the 20th century, January 18, 2002

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

The two greatest works of philosophy of the 20th century are, I believe, Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS and Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. The famous distinction between Analytical or Anglo-American Philosophy on the one hand, and European or Continental Philosophy is symbolized by these two books. I have to confess that I found the Wittgenstein absolutely fascinating, and has become one of the most important books in my life and library. I have studied the Heidegger, but perhaps because of the extraordinary moral failings in his life (he was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945, though he apparently was more of a fan of Nazism than Hitler, his great break with Hitler being that he saw the Jewish problem as being an intellectual problem, and not a biological one, i.e., he felt like traditional anti-Semites that Jews need only change their beliefs to be reintegrated into society, while Hitler felt the problem was in their blood, and the only solution was isolation of the Jews or their destruction), or perhaps because of the tortured and obscure mode of writing that he felt he had to use to express his thought, I found the Heidegger to be remote, uninteresting, and inaccessible. Ultimately, not worth the effort. But BEING AND TIMES's status as a classic is incontestable.

As a grad student in philosophy at Yale and the University of Chicago, I was subject to a growing conviction that most university professors teaching Wittgenstein should, perhaps, not. The problem is that most American professors teaching Wittgenstein teach him as an extension of Russell, Tarski, and Carnap. Their background is logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and their philosophy of language is rooted in logical and scientific issues. Although Wittgenstein was interested in these issues, there is a definitive amount of information that indicates that while he possessed a knowledge of mathematics, logic, and philosophy of language, his own philosophical background was much, much broader. His own cultural concerns ran much more broadly than most of these professors. It is not merely that they have not read Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Lichtenberg, Karl Kraus, Goethe, or the prayers of Samuel Johnson: they have no interest in doing so, and little sympathy for these writers, whom Wittgenstein himself found congenial.

One is, therefore, in a dilemma with Wittgenstein. Unless you have taken several courses in philosophy, taking up the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS can be an almost overwhelming challenge. Most of the books on Wittgenstein are either weak or very misleading because of a lack of sympathy with his wider interests.

For an ordinary individual, perhaps well read, but not especially knowledgeable of the work of philosophers like Russell and Frege and against whom he developed much of his thought, my first recommendation would be not to read the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, but to read instead Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. This is a excellent biography, and does a very good job of acquainting the casual reader with the highlights of both Wittgenstein's thought and life (and his life was a very interesting one indeed, in contrast to Heidegger, whose life, apart from his involvement with Nazism, was pretty uneventful). I would then recommend that one try reading one of Wittgenstein's other books first. I believe that either ON CERTAINTY or ZETTEL or CULTURE AND VALUE would be a much easier way into Wittgenstein's work than reading the INVESTIGATIONS.

49 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wittgenstein's great work, January 19, 2001

By 

Andreas Saugstad - See all my reviews

This review is from: Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

Philosophical Investigations is a classical work in the history of philosophy. It is a book which holds a position similar to that of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Plato's Meno and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.

Let's take a look at Wittgenstein's investigations. I have presented Wittgenstein's life in my review of Ray Monk's Wittgenstein biography, let me here focus more on his philosophy.

Wittgenstein starts with a quote from St Augustine. Augustine belived that the principal function of language is to refer to external reality, he believed that all words function similar to names and according to Wittgenstein he seems to have held the view language is learned through ostensive defintions. Wittgenstein, however, rejects this referentialist view of language, believing that language is far more complex than what Augustine thought. Language is an activity, or connected to a number of activitites, which Wittgenstein called language-games. Language-games have different puprposes, not all of them are centered around refering. There are many contexts for using words and many kinds of speach acts. While the logical positivists believed that the meaning of a statement was its method of verification, and Frege believed in two different entities (Sinn and Bedeutung), Wittgenstein rejects these views. According to this thinker from Vienna, meaning is use, and to understand a linguistic expression is to master how to use it and the accompanying techniques, not mereley to understand the verification principle, grasping some Platonic/Fregian entity or have some sense impression in one's head (Locke).

Language is behaviour, practive give the words their sense according to Wittgenstein. This also relates to the private language argument, presented in paragraphs 199ff. Wittgenstein argues that the rules of language must be public and behavioral. It is not, as some like Peter Winch or Kripke have thought, an argument for the principle social nature of language, but for the behavioral aspect of rule-following. Mental terms, according to LW, cannot enter into the language without intimately being connected to overt behavioral patterns. Thus the mentalism of Hume and Locke is rejected, and Wittgenstein shows how knowledge must be more than just access to private sense data. There goes Russell, the British aristocratic sensualists and the Cartesian idea of priveleged access. Sometimes Wittgenstein may seem like a Marxist: it is the practical part of human life that provides that basis for our thoughts and rationality. Being a rational creature, according to Wittgenstein, is not what the rationalist Descartes thought or the empiricists thought; you cannot isolate the intellect or private sensations, because human rationality is based on practical and concrete, physical behavioral patterns.

Througout the investigations Wittgenstein tries to challenge many of the positions held by previous philosophers. He once said that he didn't write for philosophers, but I do think that knowledge of the history of philosophy sheds light over his investigations. he said that WHAT he said would be simple, but understanding WHY he said it, would be difficult.

But even though you are not a professional philosopher, you may receive vital inputs from Wittgenstein. If you can grasp the essence of his ideas of language-games, rule-following, form of life, anti-mentalism and conceptual therapy, you will have knowledge of some of his key ideas ideas.

If you supply your reading of Philosophical Investigations with Ray Monk's marvellous "Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius" you can understand the horizon of this great thinker. Also important, are Baker and Hacker's books on Wittgenstein.

Finally, a word on interpretation. Burton Dreben once had a seminar at the University of Oslo, where he said that if you don't know Frege and Russell, you won't understand Wittgenstein. I completely agree with Dreben that Wittgenstein was much inspired by the philosophers and logicians Frege and Russell. However, one should understand that Wittgenstein was deeply fascinated by poetry, religion and existential questions. Among his favourite writers were Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. When this is taken into account, one can understand Wittgenstein in depth. Wittgenstein was a thinker with great analytical abilities, but never forget that he had a poetic soul. "I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view" he once said to one of his friends. The ideas he had on language-games, forms of life and rule-following should be seen in light of some of the profound and important questions a religious man or an existentialist may ask himself.

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars top of the heap, March 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

This book inspires heartfelt testimony. My own experience is that it liberates. Wittgenstein introduces a method that's fitted to the questions he treats, so that anyone who is bothered by the same questions can finally get a decent grip on them. The questions I mean are the usual philosophical ones: what is value? what is a fact? what is logic? what makes a thing what it is? what is essence? what is explanation? what is thinking? and so on. But (and this is a clue to his method) the basic question among all of these is about meaning: what is it, what conditions it, and what is the relationship between meaning and world (it turns out to be intimate).

A couple of "warnings": Wittgenstein is not a philosopher who likes jargon, in fact the tendency to jargon cuts directly against his philosophical point that language is just fine the way it is. But he can be weirdly hard to read anyway and very smart people walk away from him bewildered all the time. Mostly (I think) that's because the questions are uniquely "close to us" and Wittgenstein's approach is totally unlike familiar approaches to problem-solving (in science, math, politics, car mechanics, etc.) It's as though we are used to inspecting things at arm's length but what's at issue in these questions changes at arm's length, the problem is only right at our noses. So he takes another approach which you'll have to see first-hand - what he himself called his "new method". Now every rule must have an exception, and that brings me to the second point. Actually Wittgenstein does rely on some technical vocabulary - nothing far-out, but it can present an obstacle to deeper reading. Words like "sense", "reference", "assertion", "truth-value", "concept", and "object" stem from logic and the theory of meaning as Frege developed them. To go more deeply into PI, a person would have to read - or somehow be comfortable with ideas from - at least two of Frege's articles: "On Sense and Reference" and "On Concept and Object" [collected in The Frege Reader, Beaney ed.]. These articles are practically the fountainhead of analytic philosophy and also clear, precisely written, and intensely brilliant. More to the point, they contain many of Wittgenstein's insights in germinal form, and many of Wittgenstein's most significant moves are implicit or explicit criticisms of Frege. So to really get to the bottom of PI you'll probably need to read Frege.

Anyway, the bottom line is: if you've come this far, it's for you.