Robert J. Fogelin is professor of philosophy and the Sherman Fairchild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Dartmouth College. His many books include Wittgenstein, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, and A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton). Taking Wittgenstein at His Word is an experiment in reading organized around a central question: What kind of interpretation of Wittgenstein's later...

La formation à la fois de psychologue, de juriste et de criminologue de l'auteur et une pratique dans de nombreux milieux de « transgresseurs de la loi » (prison, juridictions pour jeunes, etc.) l'ont amené à trouver dans Wittgenstein un prolongement de ses expériences ou une nouvelle manière de les interpréter. Ce fut au départ et principalement à traversle concept de jeu de langage qu'il a introduit et qui soulève dans son prolongement...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an extraordinarily original thinker, whose influence on twentieth-century thinking far outside the bounds of philosophy alone. In this engaging Introduction, A. C. Grayling makes Wittgenstein's thoughts accessible to the general listener by explaining the nature and impact of Wittgenstein's views. He describes both his early and later philosophy, the differences, and connections between them, and gives a fresh assessment...

“If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it,” Paul Strathern writes, “he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.” Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else—metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself—was excluded. They were all wrong, he argued. “What we cannot speak...

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that ""philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry, "" Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the ""poet."" What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything...

Jacques Bouveresse is Professor of Philosophy at the Collège de France and the author of numerous works on Wittgenstein. Vincent Descombes is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Did Freud present a scientific hypothesis about the unconscious, as he always maintained and as many of his disciples keep repeating? This question has long prompted debates concerning the legitimacy and usefulness of psychoanalysis,...

Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. His recent books include On Film and Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Did post-Enlightenment philosophers reject the idea of original sin and hence the view that life is a quest for redemption from it? In Philosophical Myths of the Fall, Stephen Mulhall identifies and evaluates a surprising ethical-religious dimension in the work of three...

Is the point of philosophy to transmit beliefs about the world, or can it sometimes have higher ambitions? In this bold study, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a critical contribution to the "resolute" program of Wittgenstein scholarship, revealing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a complex, mock-theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic self-clarification Wittgenstein saw as the true work of philosophy. Seen in this light,...