Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

This book offers a lucid and highly readable account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, framed against the background of his extraordinary life and character.Woven together with a biographical narrative, the chapters explain the key ideas of Wittgenstein's work, from his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to his mature masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. Severin Schroeder shows that at the core of Wittgenstein's later work lies a startlingly original and subversive conception of the nature of philosophy.In accordance with this conception, Wittgenstein offers no new philosophical doctrines to replace his earlier ones, but seeks to demonstrate how all philosophical theorizing is the result of conceptual misunderstanding.He first diagnoses such misunderstanding at the core of his own earlier philosophy of language and then subjects philosophical views and problems about various mental phenomena understanding, sensations, the will to a similar therapeutic analysis.Schroe