Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction

I don't have too much to add to Taylor's review. Reading Wittgenstein is notoriously difficult. As with Wittgenstein, and so much of philosophy, the more you reread Stern's book the more you will get out of it. There is a lot of really good guidance on how to approach the Philosophical Investigations. I would modify Taylor's review a bit by saying that Stern emphasizes the tension in Wittgenstein between the Pyrrhonian and non-Pyrrhonian. That is, while Wittgenstein seems to be driven to understand and remove philosophical confusion, etc., he is also continually being seduced by philosophy and its problems. Philosophy is very much a struggle for Wittgenstein and Stern addresses this issue directly. Another helpful thing that Stern does is to distinguish between three different voices in the Investigations as opposed to the usual two, namely, Wittgenstein and his interlocutor. Stern argues that there is Wittgenstein's narrator, an interlocutory voice, and a third voice, a commentator, who "provides an ironic commentary on [the exchanges of the narrator and interlocutory voice], a commentary consisting partly of objections to assumptions the debaters take for granted, and partly of platitudes about language and everyday life they have both overlooked" (Stern, 2004, p22). According to Stern, none of the voices can unproblematically be taken as Wittgenstein's own, though what he calls the narrator and the commentator voices are typically taken by other writers to express Wittgenstein's own views (by contrast, Stern understands the commentator to come closest to Wittgenstein's own views) (Stern, 2004, pp.22-23). While I have certain disagreements with Stern, he is very much on top of Wittgenstein's material and brings much needed clarity and insight to a literature filled with many one-sided Wittgensteins. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.