ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein writes in the preface to the Investigations, ‘for more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what others are writing today’ (PI ixe-xe). One reason is that his method of grammatical investigation is rooted in a philosophical and cultural context (and tradition). This context and tradition is found in Vienna:
the Vienna of Wittgenstein, of Buber, of Schoenberg…. In philosophy, music and literature, there occurred both a ruthless analysis of language and a single-minded determination to rid that language of all its hypocrisies and evasions, its irrelevant ornamentation, its imprecision. This was also the Vienna of Karl Kraus.1
