Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction Book

Who is the ideal reader of a book like this?  Picture yourself as an undergraduate (or graduate) student of philosophy, who for some reason known to no one else and half-forgotten by you yourself, took a course that required you to read and attempt to interpret Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.  If that applies to you, this is a book you would likely enjoy and appreciate and may even find as a lifesaver when it comes to one's efforts to maintain a high GPA.  Alternatively, one could be interested in philosophy in general but not know Wittgenstein's writings very well and so not be able to get a grip on what he has to say.  To be honest, though, it is unlikely that Wittgenstein had a grip on what he said, considering his view that all valid philosophical statements were tautologies, and that he could not even manage to stay silent about what was not, and thus violated his own ethical maxims.  It stands to reason that it would take a great deal of effort for someone to translate Wittgenstein's investigations into something that was comprehensible by mere mortals and this book certainly does the trick nicely and deserves appreciation accordingly.

This relatively short book of 150 pages or so is divided into five chapters of very unequal size and complexity.  The book opens with a preface that is extremely short and then moves into a discussion of the context in which Wittgenstein wrote his philosophical investigations, namely as an attack on his previous work of philosophy that had come out of his experiences in World War I (1).  After that the author briefly discusses the themes of the Philosophical Investigations (2), namely various thoughts about language and nominalism, precision, and the independence of the internal world from the external one.  The author then spends the vast majority of the book engaged in the task of reading and summarizing Wittgenstein's text (3), which is divided into four sections that look at the Augustinian picture of understanding language and communication, expressing the philosopher's ideal of precision in language as well as the issue of family resemblance, using various means to attempt to grasp meaning and understanding, and finally dealing with the question of the inner and outer as it relates to understanding.  The author then completes this book with a brief discussion of the reception and influence of this work (4), even if it impoverished philosophical studies from later thinkers, as well as a brief guide to further reading (5) as well as notes, references, and an index.

Is this a worthwhile book?  If you want to understand some of what is wrong with contemporary philosophy, and why it is that some of the self-professed greatest thinkers of our times waste so much time in word games and obvious fallacies and solipsism, this book is certainly a worthwhile one to read.  I do not know if this book has a large intended audience, but it does not present too much difficulty and makes it possible to understand Wittgenstein's later thinking, even if one does not agree with it.  As someone who believes that it is worthwhile to understand that which one does not agree with, I found much to appreciate about this book.  Not only did this book help explain what it is that Wittgenstein was (not very successfully) attempting to relate when it comes to language and perspective, but this book made it less likely that I would want to read wha Wittgenstein had to offer, and that is probably for the best as far as it goes.  Sometimes it is good to read a little bit so that one does not see it as worthwhile to read a lot more, and that is definitely the case here.