ABSTRACT
This book is a treatment, by a philosopher of genius, of a number of intricate problems, intricately connected. It also presents in itself an intricate problem: that of seeing clearly what the author’s views are on the topics he discusses, and how these views are connected. The difficulty of doing this arises partly from the structure and style of the book. Wittgenstein himself describes the former accurately in the preface: ‘The best I could write could never be more than philosophical remarks’; ‘Thus this book is really only an album.’ It would, however, be a very strong prejudice against this disregard of the ordinary conventions of exposition, which could survive a careful reading of the whole book. Wittgenstein did not gloss his thoughts; but he arranged them. And the gains in power and concentration are great. It might even be thought that there were good reasons why no attempt at all should be made to present his views in a more conventional form. But this could be true only on a very specialized view of the nature of philosophical understanding. In what follows, I try to trace and connect the main lines of his thought; conscious that, at best, the result must involve a great
impoverishment of his rich and complex thinking. I refer to passages in Part I of the book simply by paragraph number (e.g. 500); to passages in Part II by section and/or page number (e.g. II. xi, p. 200). Comment and criticism will be interspersed with exposition.
