The Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Commentary on Wittgenstein's
by Lois Shawver
The source of the text of the Philosophical Investigations is listed as http://hermes.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Wittgenstein/pi/ or http://www.dnai.com/~rathbone/. According to this website, the electronic text of the Philosophical
Investigations was developed by Hsiu-hwang Ho and Tze-wan Kwan
with the assistance of programming assistant Ting-yat Chui and
technical assistant Hei-yin Lau, and made available on the
World Wide Web, August 10, 1998. The website states that this
page was constructed for private use within the Chinese University of Hong
One of the most difficult or misleading aspects of Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations is the way in which he uses multiple voices
to converse with himself. To have a sense of understanding
Wittgenstein, you need to be able to hear these different voices.The
Philosophical Investigations is written in aphorisms, short numbered
passages that are loosely tied together in terms of theme. He often
begins an aphorism with a quoted passage. For example, he begins the
first aphorism with a quotation from Augustine.
Most quoted passages are not actual quotes, however, but rather
Wittgenstein's construction of a kind of interlocutor. This
interlocutor might be thought of in terms of Augustine, Plato, characters
in Plato's dialogues, Bertrand Russell or even early Wittgenstein, or
perhaps just a vague composite of these various figures. At any
rate, this voice (and it is not always in quotes) represents the problem
that Wittgenstein tries to think through. I will call this voice
whatever seems most appropriate to the passage, such as the voice of
Augustine, early Wittgenstein, but the label I use is somewhat arbitrary,
in most instances. What is important is that you notice that this is
the voice that provides the context for Wittgenstein's response.
In addition to the interlocutor, it is useful to think of there being
two additional voices. One is the voice that discovers perplexities
or aporia. This voice is often, but not always, introduced with a
dash and it often, but again not always, begins with the word "But".
I will often call this the voice of aporia.
Then, there is a third voice in which Wittgenstein makes an incisive
point in the face of the tradition and aporia. You might think of
this as the "voice of clarity."
The basic format then is:
|voice of the interlocutor
||Everything has an essence."|
|voice of aporia
||But is this true?|
|voice of clarity
||It seems that this notion has been a
Of course, this greatly simplifies the content of what Wittgenstein is
saying, and, not every passage has quite this form. But if you look for
these different voices, it should assist you making sense of what you find
in these pages.
I suggest that you never presume that these voices are all there in any
given passage. He sometimes introduces, for example, a thought
experiment that he calls language games, and in those cases it does not
make much sense to speak of these three voices. But, you might
examine a passage to see if thinking of it in terms of these voices helps
that passage make sense to you. If it does, then you're probably
right in presuming that the passage in question adopts this standard
And, for my part, when I see this format being used, I will often call
your attention to it, referring to it at times as "LW's standard
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