[tokyoseb]

If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.

I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.

[zwkrt]

I’ll let professional philosophers try to peel apart every nuance of the Investigations. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable—if not chaotich—book for anyone used to reading academic papers in CS, math, or linguistics. The topic is deeply scrutinizing our everyday language, especially language about mental states. He is a very persuasive and poetic writer. Some excerpts:

- To utter a word is to strike a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

359. Could a machine think? ... Well is the human body to be considered such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine.

583. ... And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.)