Philosophical Investigations

⚖The case for it

Nothing here is easy to carry away in a sentence, and readers who want a doctrine will finish empty-handed. What you get instead is the strangest prose in modern philosophy: builders shouting one word at each other, a child being taught to count, a man trying to point at a color. The examples stay ordinary, the sentences stay plain, and both keep catching you doing something with words you never noticed you were doing. Read a page a night for a year and it works on you the way poetry does. Very few books change your ear. This one does.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Wittgenstein refuses to state his conclusions; he leaves 693 numbered remarks, an interlocutor who may be him, and a method that dissolves questions rather than answering them. Whether the private language argument even is an argument remains a scholarly career path. Part Two was stapled on by literary executors. Reading it cold mostly produces confident misreading.

— the honest librarian