ABSTRACT
It is Wittgenstein's unique way of treating the topics he deals with that makes the Investigations so difficult to understand. It is not that his style is technical or abstract, rather that it is just not possible to see, in the style of the book, what Wittgenstein's method is or how it is supposed to work. Yet understanding Wittgenstein's method and its connection with the form of the text is the key to understanding the Investigations. This is so not merely because it is only by means of such understanding that we can know how to read the remarks that make up the work, but because Wittgenstein himself emphasizes over and over again that it is a method or a style of thought, rather than doctrines, that characterizes his later philosophy. It is, moreover, his insistence that his philosophical aims do not involve him in putting forward 'any kind of theory' (PI 109) that makes the question of method, and of how to read his remarks, such a difficult one, for it suggests that we cannot approach the book in the usual way, with a view to finding and extracting the views which are expressed in it.
