My rule of thumb summary of Wittgenstein: If you can spend an entire book on the meaning of a concept (IE Truth-with-a-capital-T, The meaning of life) then you may be confusing an artifact of grammar and language with something that exists in actual reality.<p>In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.<p>I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "<i>On Certainty</i>".<p>It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.<p>It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.<p>Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: <i>Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty"</i>: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/wittgenstein-a-summary-41631.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...</a>
This short article is by Ray Monk, who in 1990 published a biography of Wittgenstein, which I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the guy's life and thought. Monk also wrote an excellent 2-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This article seems to contain nothing not in his 1990 book. I found it a little depressing for him that the <i>New Statesman</i> is apparently paying him for an article that's a very condensed summary of part of what he wrote 30+ years ago..
As an aside, if you like graphic novels and philoshopy then I highly recommend Logicomix [1]. This work heavily features Ludwig Wittgenstein. I can't claim it is historically accurate but I do think it is quite an interesting read.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix</a>
I read the first 100 pages or so of <i>Philisophical Investigations</i> before giving up since I had lost track of the lines of reasoning. Here's what I got out of what I did read though:<p>Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?<p>There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).<p>There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.
To me the most intriguing ideas that have been explored by Wittgenstein are related to his notion of a "private language" (and the question of whether it is simply possible or meaningful). You can ask for instance what is the difference between your body pain, which seems to be a kind of "internal object", that only you can possess and access, and the blue of the sky, when you look at it, which doesn't feel like an internal sensation (rather like an external fact), even though it can be construed as one, if needed.
I know Wittgenstein repudiated the Tractatus, but did he ever alight on another vision of the world & the limits of what can be expressed? Or was 'Late Wittgenstein' primarily a more bounded project concerned with the philosophy of language?
My takeaway was that Concepts have Contexts. The problem is that the Context may vary from person to person. Kinda like an n-gram, where n can vary between people.<p>Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.<p>Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.
<i>The Gospel in Brief</i> seems to be somewhat obscure nowadays, but is available here: <a href="https://archive.org/details/cu31924029339078/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/cu31924029339078/</a><p>Does anyone who has read it have any insight as to what it was about it that was so captivating to Wittgenstein?
Philosophical Investigations has a lot of bug fixes that was in Tractus, when people want to discuss Wittgenstein they only want to discuss his early and not his more mature later work
Wittgenstein was a tortured soul in a garbage world, much like a lot of other people who did not have the means or will to organize all of their thoughts in writing. I do wonder how many "great philosophers" were and are out there, not writing down their thoughts.