Product Description

These works, as the sub–title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The ′Blue Book′ is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein′s Cambridge students in 1933–1934: the ′Brown Book′ was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein′s later work. It is indispensable therefore to students of Witgenstein′s thought and to all those who wish to study at first–hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #224296 in Books
• Published on: 1974-02-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From the Back Cover
These works, as the sub–title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The ‘Blue Book’ is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein’s Cambridge students in 1933–1934: the ‘Brown Book’ was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein’s later work. It is indispensable therefore to students of Witgenstein’s thought and to all those who wish to study at first–hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy.

Customer Reviews

Nice idea shame about the exposition
The blue and brown books mark a change in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Many people believe that his later philosophy is totally incompatible with his earlier ideas. In many cases this division is borne out of a gross misunderstanding of his work.

The problem with Wittgenstein is that he is very difficult to understand. For someone who believed philosophy should only elucidate facts and never create new problems, surely he, above all other philosophers', is the one most guilty of this charge!

He originally set out to end philosophy. Unless Wittgenstein aimed to miss, he failed his task miserably.
His legacy is the antithesis of his objective, he fuelled philosophy by raising new questions not just about what is truth? what is good? But also what is he talking about?

This LW guy
This guy certainly has a lot of words. My sense is that he is trying to get hold of an analogue process using fairly crude digital equipment, say something in the range of 8 bit 5.5K sampling rate? I can only hope he got it sorted by the time he wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But I've still got about a third of the Brown Book to go...

Show, don't tell ...
Familiar advice to the novice writer, but very much in keeping with philosophy as practiced by Wittgenstein, not only in the Tractatus, but in the Investigations, too. Whether 'values', in the most general sense, are to be sought in the ineffable or in language games/forms of life, 'ordinary language' is a tricky, unruly medium (read what Eliot has to say in Four Quartets), and so some sort of effort is inevitable on the part of the reader: it is nonsense -- Unsinn -- to try to 'state in plain terms' what is not 'stateable' at all.