ABSTRACT
The second half of the Philosophical Investigations gives a more fragmentary and diffuse impression than the first. The remarks we’ve looked at so far, although they involve striking shifts of focus and important diversions and asides, can be seen to present a sustained discussion of a restricted number of topics: meaning, understanding, rule-following, sensations and privacy. Moreover, the remarks have a clear order and there is much to be gained from working through them systematically. This pattern appears to break down in the second half of book, where there is a much greater sense of brief, disconnected – and maddeningly inconclusive – discussions of a very wide range of topics: thinking, imagining, expecting, hoping, intending, willing, and so on. I want to show that these wide ranging remarks do have important underlying themes, which emerge through the exploration of this broad conceptual landscape, rather than by focusing on a few key notions.
