ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein compared his treatment of philosophical questions to the cure of an illness, his philosophical methods to different therapies. In this paper, I try to spell out the point of these comparisons. To this end, I analyse Wittgenstein’s problems and proceeding in sections 138-97 with the help of some new concepts, in part adapted from clinical psychology, namely, Aaron Beck’s ‘cognitive therapy’. I first use them to conceptualise the problems at issue in such a way as to bring out why anything worth calling a ‘therapy’ is required, in the first place. I then employ the model of cognitive therapy to clarify what Wittgenstein is doing in response. This will familiarise us with a little noted but highly important kind of philosophical predicament, and with a straightforward approach to it that is in many ways revolutionary.
In section 138 Wittgenstein turns to a problem about sudden understanding, which he apparently comes to terms with in section 197, the last section of the Investigations that was contained already in the early version of the work (the Frühfassung of 1937-8, TSS 220-1, henceforward: FF). In between, Wittgenstein repeatedly returns to the theme of the problem, while moving criss-cross through a bewildering range of topics: he discusses first apparently sudden understanding of the word ‘cube’ (139-42), then understanding – not of another expression but – of the system of a number series (143-50) and, in particular, its sudden understanding (151-5). He digresses into a discussion of reading, conceived of in a rather unusual manner as the transformation of written signs into sounds or vice versa (!), with or without understanding (sic) (156-78), then returns to his previous topic (179-84), considers next how the way in which a formula is meant determines a number series (185-90) and,
