ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein begins his Preface by telling us that the remarks of the Investigations are the result of inquiries in which he has been engaged for the ‘last sixteen years’ (p. ix).1 By this he means that the ideas of the book began to take shape after he returned to philosophy in the late 1920s. He had studied philosophy with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge between 1911 and 1913 and had written the Tractatus during the First World War while serving in the Austrian army. After his release from a prisoner-ofwar camp in 1919 he taught in an elementary school in Austria and worked on the design and construction of a mansion for one of his sisters. Although not completely cut off from philosophy during the 1920s, he was not, as he had been for most of the previous decade, preoccupied by it. It was not until 1929, when he returned to Cambridge, that he again dedicated himself fully to philosophical work. Only then did he seriously rethink his earlier views and begin the inquiries that led to the Investigations.
