ABSTRACT
More than any other single work, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has held out for me the promise of philosophy as a distinct, present activity to which I felt I had something to contribute. My encounter with it (which was at first fruitless – it took the intervention of the work of my teacher J. L. Austin, and a certain dissatisfaction with that intervention, in particular with Austin’s dismissal of the significance of skepticism, to overcome my sense of the Investigations as a kind of unsystematic pragmatism) came at a time when many young readers of Wittgenstein’s text believed Wittgenstein’s apparent claim (more apparently unequivocal in the Tractatus than in the Investigations) that he had solved all the problems of philosophy that were open to solution, and accordingly abandoned the subject, sometimes intellectual life altogether. The effect upon me, when it came, was rather the opposite. The problems of philosophy – above all the problem of philosophy, philosophy as a problem – became live for me as if for the first time. Suppose it were true, as Wittgenstein early and late has been taken to assert, that the problems of philosophy arise from a misunderstanding of our language. What could be a more intimate study of human self-defeat – humanity distinguished, for many, from the rest of creation by its possession of language – than to seek to learn how, and why, for millennia mankind has engaged in tormenting itself in the creation of false systems of reason; how and why, as Kant puts the matter at the opening of The Critique of Pure Reason, human reason suffers the fate of asking itself questions that it can neither ignore nor answer?
