The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein

by Hans D. Sluga (Editor), David G. Stern (Editor)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, but he is also one of the least accessible. This volume provides a comprehensible guide to his work by a wide range of experts who are actively engaged in new work on Wittgenstein. The essays, which are both expository and original, address central themes in his philosophy of mind, language, logic, and mathematics and clarify the connections among the different stages in the development of his work.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Reference, History, Language, Anthologies

526 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 1993

Reviews

[David Katzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading On Certainty , I wanted to quickly gather an overview of Wittgenstein without reading all of his works. Why? I like to cheat. On homework, I mean on homework. Like…well…can my high-school diploma be revoked if I tell a story about cheating in high school? Just to play it safe, I’m going to call this a fiction. I’ll change my own name to keep it on the QT. (Don’t tell anyone.) For the remainder of this review, I shall refer to myself as Raymondo.

So, Raymondo was a straight-A student. In fact, he was practically a straight-A-plus student. His GPA was 11.6333 out of 12 (12=A+, 11=A, 10=A-, etc.) But even so, in his senior year, it was a tight race for Valedictorian. Raymondo’s sometime friend (whom we’ll call Belvedere) had somewhere around an 11.7 GPA. Last semester of “Senior Year,” Raymondo rather suicidally decided to take four advanced placement classes (Physics, Math, English and Chemistry) and all were pretty easy…except Chemistry. Oooh, AP Chemistry was taught by…we’ll call her Mrs. Tangerine. Mrs. Tangerine was just about the meanest, toughest teacher in the school. (Suddenly, this is a Hardy Boys novel). And Raymondo didn’t much like Chemistry.

The situation, my friends, was grim. But then, out of nowhere, a caper that would have been worthy of the Pink Panther himself fell into Raymondo’s lap. It seems that one evening when Raymondo was prepping for the Chemistry final exam with his best friend “Craig” they got a call from this jerk-face-popular-kid we’ll call “Béchamel.” Béchamel, turns out, might know how to acquire a key to the High School. Yes, for Béchamel’s uncle happened to be a janitor at said High School, and he had a master. (To be honest—or dishonest, as the case may be--“Craig” and Raymondo probably would have done just fine on the exam. Béchamel is the one who would’ve crapped out. But given the opportunity to pull a fast one and get an edge on Belvedere, Raymondo had no desire to resist.)

Quickly, “Craig” and Raymondo formulated a plan.* They knew that Mrs. Tangerine always kept the exams in her left hand top drawer because they had always seen her removing each exam from that drawer. (A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of the easily duped.) And they also knew that she made the exact number of copies as there were students in the class. So an exam could not go missing without her notice, either. And we’re talking about a 20 page complex-organic-molecule-type exam that you couldn’t just scribble down.

To the point: “Craig” (who later in life apparently did learn enough chemistry because he became a nuclear engineer) and Raymondo (who later in life took a lot of drugs, so he apparently also learned enough chemistry) drove to the school in the dark of night. 2am-on-a-school-night dark. “Craig” pulled all the way in behind the school and hid the car as best as he could. He would be designated as the getaway driver, keeping the car running. Raymondo took the key and sure enough, was able to enter the school. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness and--with judicious use of a flashlight--made his way to Mrs. Tangerine’s classroom. Lo and behold, the key also worked on that room. Heart in mouth, he checked the drawer and there was a very neat short stack of exams. At this point he heard a sound. Freaking out, he crouched down, fearing the worst. Eventually, he peeped out into the hallway. No sign of anyone. He quickly exited the building with the exam. He jumped in the car and “Craig” drove them to a 24-hour Kinko’s. They carefully removed the staple by bending it open and then pulling it delicately through the holes. They copied each page and replaced the staple so that the exam appeared good as new.

They drove back to the school. Raymondo returned to the classroom, replaced the exam and CRASSSHHHH!--on his way out knocked over a desk. He set it back upright and ran like fucking hell. Made it to the car, and they were gone. Free with no retribution whatsoever and a perfect copy of the exam.

In the end, Raymondo was Salutatorian instead of Valedictorian anyway so the moral of this story is that doing stupid things in High School is a lot more interesting than getting a good grade on an exam. And that’s what I thought of The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein.

*Formulated…get it?

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

So what could an esoteric collection of essays about Ludwig Wittgenstein have to do with Donald Trump and modern politics?

Quite a bit, actually, and I'll answer that first before delving more into the book itself.

One of Wittgenstein's main points, elaborated in several of these essays by prominent Wittgenstein scholars, is that language consists of many subsets, which he calls "language games." These games all have different "rules" -- that is, the words actually can have different meanings depending the game. (For example, in some youth subcultures, the word "sick" means "excellent" in a particular language game; obviously, the word means something quite different when you're telling your boss you won't be coming in.)

There's also an issue of being "wrong," and what it means to say something that's incorrect, or breaks a rule. Donald Trump, as is well known, has a slippery relationship with many call "truth," but it's important to note that "truth" varies from language game to language game. For example, traditionally political speeches that refer to facts and statistics are supposed to have a direct correlation to the "truth" of those facts and statistics, and in that language game, Trump breaks the rules on a regular basis.

But consider a different language game, one that Trump has mastered, one in which feelings are more important than facts. This language game is as legitimate as the political language game (which is why Trump was elected), and it ignores political correctness and fact-checking and is often filled with stereotypical generalizations that we all make at one point or another. Those generalizations could be as harmless as "Maids never clean behind couches" to as misleading as "Crime rates would be way lower if there weren't any immigrants." It is true, however, that people talk this way, participate in this kind of language game, and that's the one that Trump uses to deliver his populist message.

Those who do not understand the rules of these wildly different language games cannot understand why Trump's support remains steady despite the cascade of what many would call "lies" that he spoken in public because they miss the sense in which saying things like "The Chinese have stolen all our jobs" rings true to many listeners.

In short, philosophy, even at its most esoteric, can sometimes illuminate the world around us, and though most of "The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein" is demanding, the majority of the essays shine a light on the nooks and crannies of our language, and how our conception of what our language really is misses important aspects of the underlying structure.

Of course, we can't really get too far in our grasp of what language really is because we swim in that sea, and we literally cannot even think without using language -- which means there is really nowhere outside language we can stand in order to look at it objectively.

But better understanding is something to strive for, as the Trump example illustrates, and this book not only helped me understand Wittgenstein's philosophy and way of thinking more clearly, it also did the same for my understanding of the world around me.

[Al Maki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to meet an in-law at family gatherings who would start the conversation, to my annoyance, with "So what do you know for sure?" I suspect LW had a little man living in his head who was constantly asking him that, who never allowed him to pretend to himself he knew something for sure, unless he really did. I'm drawn to him because he seemed to go after really big questions; over a nearly forty year period he seems to have constantly reworked his own thinking and he seems to have been painfully scrupulous. His thinking is not easy to get at and I think that's the value of a book like this. A collection of fourteen papers taking different approaches to LW's thinking and writing. All the authors teach or taught philosophy at some institute of higher learning. I found some of the papers very helpful and some impenetrable - I assume that's my weakness rather than the authors'. It comes at his work, primarily his notebooks, from many different, not even necessarily consistent, angles and sheds some light on the difficult thinking of a difficult man.

[Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein" was not as helpful of a book as I was anticipating. I was anticipating the book to go into depth surrounding Wittgenstein's most famous acclamation's and instead every article was short and chipped of major details.

[Abbas Zubir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been enamored with Wittgenstein's philosophy ever since the first time I knew about his works. I did tried my best to understand it, and I do have a much better understanding of it now but I couldn't possibly proclaim I knew with confidence every aspect of it. Just as I couldn't possibly understand any other philosophical works as a layman.

Notwithstanding that disclaimer, this Cambridge's companion and Marie McGinn books have been absolutely illuminating. I feel my world has became larger even though this has culminated me in finally nailing that final spike on the coffin. Burying metaphysics and the old world classical philosophy that had paint part of my worldview prior so to speak. Granted, I'm not metaphysics-phile to begin with (I love Nietzsche's philosophical idea) but I do have some affinity to Kantian thought process.

Nevertheless, in some aspect, there's a Kantian-esque nature in Wittgenstein's philosophy but it isn't quite a full blown idealism so to speak. One could read Wittgenstein and gather there's a mysticism to it, there's a transcedental idealism to it. While another could read it and proclaim it is absolutely sterile, mechanical, analytically centric thought behind it. Being as flaky as I am, I do see both of these point being quite valid. In short, there's no easy way to read Wittgenstein.

That being said, I am partial to several ways of reading Wittgenstein. For Tractatus, McGinn elucidatory purposes of philosophy argument is quite an engaging idea. Whilst for overall philosophical framework, Anscombe's Linguistic Idealism argument is interesting. However, one compelling framework that has won me over is the one proposed by Micheal Kober in his thesis "The epistemological investigations of On Certainty" in the Companion. In this article, Kober argued that Wittgenstein framework is that off Collective-External Idealism. This to me encapsulate Wittgenstein philosophy reductively but beautifully.

This tug of war, between collective and external, between language in reality is beautifully summed up in an allegory by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigation that I wanted to re-wrote here. This is for us to remember this constant pull and the why of it, the nature of life and men in a society;

"We have got onto a slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!" - PI § 107

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my opinion fairly dull and not very helpful. HJ Glock's and Cora Diamond's essays are pretty illuminating and fascinating (respectively!) but the rest either summarize what are in the books, sometimes making explicit what '-ism's his assertions align with, or else attempt to make inferences that are either obvious or dubious. I would instead recommend attentively reading Wittgenstein's books, and Max Black's and GEM Anscombe's commentaries instead of reading these essays, if you have any interest at all. It's not clear what sort of reader would benefit from these essays which are too technical for someone who hasn't/won't read TLP or PI, and redundant (at times bafflingly so) for anyone who has.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

FOURTEEN ESSAYS BY NOTEWORTHY PHILOSOPHERS ON WITTGENSTEIN

Co-editor Hans Sluga wrote in the Introduction to this 1996 book, “He postulated… that the world must itself have a definite logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language Wittgenstein did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like, thus producing a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among his interpreters.” (Pg. 10)

Newton Garver begins his essay with the statement, “It is one of the wonderful paradoxes of our time that the greatest and most stimulating philosopher of the century should identify his work with the stodgiest and dullest of school subjects. It is nonetheless the case that for the last twenty years of his life Wittgenstein identified what he was doing, and what other philosophers really have been doing and should be doing, with grammar.” (Pg. 139)

Later, he adds, “In his later work Wittgenstein is often thought to have totally rejected his earlier views, but this is not the whole story. He certainly did reject exclusive reliance on truth-functional form, on rigid correlation of names and objects, on hidden essences, and on there one and only one use of language. Nonetheless he retains virtually the same view about the relation of the forms of language … That Wittgenstein realigned the crux of philosophy from logic to grammar is widely acknowledged. Two questions must be answered if we are to understand this change. One is what quality or character we should assign to the change: restriction to a narrow domain? Or complete abandonment of the Tractatus view? Or generalization of the insights of the Tractatus?” (Pg. 142-143)

In another essay, Hans Sluga observes, “Wittgenstein reflected on questions concerning the mind, mental states, processes, and acts throughout his life and in that context he came regularly back to the I, self, soul, or subject as he called it more or less indiscriminately…. The scope and complexity of his writings on the mind establish that there were not by-products of other, more immediate concerns---such as an interest in language.” (Pg. 320-321)

Michael Kober states, “Due to an unhappily written preface by the editors of the text, many readers have come to believe that Wittgenstein admired G.E. Moore’s ‘Defense of Common Sense’ and ‘Proof of an External World’ and that he was commenting in his notes on these two papers with the intention of showing Moore to have been right in his philosophical attitude, but wrong in the way he had argued for it. This is, however, not the case. Norman Malcolm reports that while Wittgenstein like Moore as a decent man and felt stimulated by Moore’s ‘Paradox’ … he was not at all impressed by Moore’s attempts to refute or reject idealism and/or skepticism.” (Pg. 411)

David Stern points out, “Although Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of this century, there is very little agreement about the nature of his contribution… Philosophers in search of Wittgenstein’s theory of language or experience or practice focus on a relatively small number of much-discussed remarks in which he appears to summarize his real reasons for accepting (or rejecting) a specific view, looking for ‘evidence’ of his ‘underlying commitments’ without giving sufficient consideration to the context from which those quotations are taken.

"For such readers, Wittgenstein’s writing is a mirror which reflects ‘their own thinking’ so completely that his challenge to the ‘deformities’ of systematic philosophy is regarded as incidental. Much of what passes for interpretation of Wittgenstein is really a discussion of other interpreters’ readings, so that a forbidding and intricate secondary literature has taken on a life of its own.” (Pg. 442-443)

This is a really excellent collection, of pieces written by scholars who have themselves often written entire BOOKS on Wittgenstein. It will be nearly “must reading” for anyone seriously studying Wittgenstein and the development of his thought.