Abstract

This book deals with some large tracts of Wittgenstein’s writings concerning representation and the mental. Its defining characteristic, and one of its main strengths, is an extensive use of material in the background of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Investigations. Stern quotes from and discusses remarks from unpublished manuscripts, including the Big Typescript, little-studied published writings such as the Tractatus notebooks, “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Philosophical Remarks, Philosophical Grammar, as well as lecture notes by Moore, King and Lee, and others. How much of these writings the book reproduces is suggested by the fact that its appendix, giving the original German of the previously unpublished matter translated in the main text, is eleven small-print pages long; and there are far more quotations from the published part of the corpus. The result is a work in which, for a run of pages, the ratio of quoted material to comment can be as high as one to one ; and in which most pages contain a significant amount of indented quotation. The main justification offered for the wholesale inclusion of this material is that it provides a context that can help determine what problem Wittgenstein was addressing in a given passage from his two main works. Stern’s mastery of that material is impressive, as shown for example in his pellucid outline of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development after 1920.