Edward Minar

Brenner labels his book a “companion”. It provides a workbook or roadmap that can used to guide one’s reading of Philosophical Investigations. Its first half follows the progression of Wittgenstein’s text. Rather than providing a traditional commentary, Brenner proceeds by testing paraphrases of key sections, juxtaposing well-traveled with less familiar passages, and constructing ongoing dialogues with various Wittgensteinian interlocutors. The book’s second half presents interpretative essays on Wittgenstein’s treatment of the mental, the grammar of color and number talk, and the idea of “theology as grammar.” Brenner skillfully navigates the difficult paths of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of traditional philosophy. While emphasizing that Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity systematically opposes itself to reductionism and to attempts to think beyond the limits of thought and language, he avoids the pitfalls of ascribing to Wittgenstein a dogmatic standard by which to deem traditional metaphysical theorizing nonsensical. He appreciates that to understand how Wittgenstein puts the nature of philosophy in question, we must work through the ways his methods force our attention onto particulars and dampen our “craving for generality.” Wittgenstein tries to impress on us the need to reexamine the details of our lives as language users, and to lead us to the “real discovery” that affords a “complete clarity” on which “the philosophical problems should completely disappear”. In this call for attentiveness, Brenner finds the essential spirit of Wittgenstein’s thinking. Here “the true value of philosophy lies in this clarificatory activity”, and “life ceases to seem essentially problematic”.

Brenner labels his book a “companion”. It provides a workbook or roadmap that can used to guide one’s reading of Philosophical Investigations. Its first half follows the progression of Wittgenstein’s text. Rather than providing a traditional commentary, Brenner proceeds by testing paraphrases of key sections, juxtaposing well-traveled with less familiar passages, and constructing ongoing dialogues with various Wittgensteinian interlocutors. The book’s second half presents interpretative essays on Wittgenstein’s treatment of the mental, the grammar of color and number talk, and the idea of “theology as grammar.” Brenner skillfully navigates the difficult paths of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of traditional philosophy. While emphasizing that Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity systematically opposes itself to reductionism and to attempts to think beyond the limits of thought and language, he avoids the pitfalls of ascribing to Wittgenstein a dogmatic standard by which to deem traditional metaphysical theorizing nonsensical. He appreciates that to understand how Wittgenstein puts the nature of philosophy in question, we must work through the ways his methods force our attention onto particulars and dampen our “craving for generality.” Wittgenstein tries to impress on us the need to reexamine the details of our lives as language users, and to lead us to the “real discovery” that affords a “complete clarity” on which “the philosophical problems should completely disappear”. In this call for attentiveness, Brenner finds the essential spirit of Wittgenstein’s thinking. Here “the true value of philosophy lies in this clarificatory activity”, and “life ceases to seem essentially problematic”.

In his discussion of rule-following at 185-202 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein attempts to put the urge to seek an overarching justification of the way we follow rules to rest. Crucial to his effort is his challenge to the capacity of the words he supplies his imaginary interlocutor--who represents the voice of philosophy as it begins--to express a need for a foundation of language that yields standards of correctness independent of what we actually do in following rules. The force of Wittgenstein's criticism of the philosophical "pictures" behind this need depends on how effectively he applies pressure to the interlocutor's questioning at each point. The thesis attempts to give a reading of Investigations 185-202 in light of this view of Wittgenstein's method. Chapter 1 sets the background for these sections and argues for the view of Wittgenstein's procedures that underpins the demand for close reading. Chapters 2 through 4 trace, by means of detailed commentary on 185-190 and 197-202, Wittgenstein's efforts to stop philosophical questioning about the foundation of rule-following before it gets off the ground. ;The interlocutor is inclined to take the possibility of a rule's being misinterpreted to fund a need for something beneath our practices and "beyond interpretation" that would ground our way of following rules. In Wittgenstein's eyes, this need is not produced by the interpretability of rules alone; it involves a "picture" of what must underlie the capacity of rules to determine what really accords with them. But, he points out, the inexorability with which rules determine actions is a matter of how we use rules in particular circumstances, not of some underlying structure or mechanism that explains this use. At every stage, Wittgenstein challenges whether the interlocutor succeeds in conveying a contrast between "what we do" and a notion of correctness or objectivity he needs to voice a demand for a general justificatory account of language use. Seen in this light, the role of "community agreement" in Wittgenstein's treatment is to question the interlocutor's requirement that rule-following be grounded in something that operates prior to or in isolation from our practices, not to suggest an alternative grounding for them

What do we learn about language from reading Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations? This question gains urgency from Wittgenstein's alleged animus against philosophical theorizing and his indirectness. Section 1 argues that Wittgenstein's goal is to prevent philosophical questioning about the foundations of language from the beginning. This conception of his aim is not in tension with Wittgenstein's use of the notion of community; community interpretations of his views betray a misguided commitment to the coherence of the idea that language might need grounding. Wittgenstein's goal is not to enjoin us not to step outside of language-games, but to show that we have insufficiently clear grasp of the terms we try to use to express the limits of intelligibility. Section 2 suggests that appreciating Wittgenstein's moral concerning the relation between language and philosophizing about it involves allowing him to teach us how to read his book. What makes readingPhilosophical Investigations possible is openness to learning how not to forget our lives in language.

Wittgenstein's later efforts to exorcise the attractions of solipsism involve descriptions of the uses of 'I' which may be taken to show that 'I' does not refer in its philosophically most salient uses. This point of "grammar," however, would not by itself provide a direct refutation of solipsism; _Philosophical Investigations, Sections 398-410, of which this paper is a reading, traces a complex dialectic by which Wittgenstein elicits and questions the solipsist's commitments. In challenging the intelligibility of the solipsist's starting points, Wittgenstein raises a forceful demand for an explanation of the motivations behind metaphysical inquiry into the nature of the self

An ambitious, rich, and challenging work, Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense attempts to trace the path of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the world, to its threatened loss by way of failed and ultimately nonsensical efforts to account for our relation to it, to its recovery as a significant whole, a meaningful habitation for human beings, in the uses we make of everyday language. Aiming to account for nothing less than the purpose of the Tractatus, its overall effects on its readers, Friedlander has provocative things to say about two centrally important issues—the role of the nonsense that the Tractatus itself produces and the relation between the ostensibly logical and ethical facets of Wittgenstein’s text. Part 1 works through the text of the Tractatus more or less in order and in relative isolation from interpretative controversy. Here Friedlander lays out the ontological distinctions that occupy Wittgenstein at the outset; examines the identity of form between language and world that makes representation possible; deepens our understanding of Wittgenstein’s “fundamental idea … that ‘logical constants’ are not representatives”; proposes an original reading of the Tractarian treatment of solipsism and the sense in which “what the solipsist means is quite correct”; and finally, tries to demonstrate the ethical significance of the movement of the Tractatus as a whole and its culmination in apparent self-annihilation. Part 2 helps to fix our understanding of the intricate and subtle reading offered in part 1: chapter 11, by situating it with respect to major interpretative issues, and chapter 12, by giving an interesting account of Wittgenstein’s initial moves away from the Tractatus in the 1929 “Remarks on Logical Form.”