Name: Blue and Brown Books
ISBN: 9780061312113

Blue and Brown Books

These works, as the subtitle makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, among the most important & influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-34. The 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination & growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It's indispensable therefore to students of Witgenstein's thought & to all those who wish to study at firsthand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. Preface The Blue Book The Brown Book Index

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pavelrubFeb 2019

Ludwig Wittgenstein - mainly Philosophical Investigations, Blue and Brown Books, and On Certainty. It gradually changed how I view the entire world around me, and dissolved my interest in philosophy, as well as in many other "sciency" things that - I realized - I was only interested in because of implicit metaphysical interpretations that ultimately stemmed out of conceptual confusion.

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sramsayJan 2019

I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations, but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part).

These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought.

I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb.

One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener.

I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it.

[edits for typos]

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kristiancJul 2016

>> Binkles have long plackerts and whipitat their snoblats when they get excited

What I was most interested by was how much of this example you could understand. A binkle is some kind of animal, a plackert is some kind of body part, i'd imagine a whipitat is some kind of action, and I'd imagine a snoblat is another kind of body part. Already I know more about binkles than I did.

You're also, however, a long way from a dog simply by describing a 'barking thing'. There are things that bark that are not dogs, and there are somewhere, dogs that do not bark. Wittgenstein demonstrated that there are an entire set of items that you could call a table than share no common features whatsoever.

I'm a fan of the dialectic method for this reason: it encourages people to go beyond the limits of their own knowledge by applying first principles to things they don't understand. This tends to take you a lot further than "here, learn this."

Further reading on this:

Wittgenstein: Blue and Brown Books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books)

Plato, Meno (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm)

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robobroMar 2015

    - Book of the Subgenius 
    - Meditations, Aurelius 
    - Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut 
    - Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein 
    - Stranger, Camus 
    - Dhammapada, Buddha
    - Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche 
    - Blue Cliff Record, Kequin
    - Trial, Kafka 
    - Labyrinths, Borges

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rxtexitMay 2025

Then you obviously didn't listen to a word Chomsky has said on the subject.

I was quite dismissive of him on LLMs until I realized the utter hubris and stupidity of dismissing Chomsky on language.

I think it was someone asking if he was familiar with the Wittgenstein Blue and Brown books and of course because he as already an assistant professor at MIT when they came out.

I still chuckle at my own intellectual arrogance and stupidity when thinking about how I was dismissive of Chomsky on language. I barely know anything and I was being dismissive of one of unquestionable titans and historic figures of a field.

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hyperpapeAug 2020

He published Some Remarks on Logical Form in 1929. It's been 10 years since I was reading Wittgenstein, but my recollection is that work was still Tractarian. The blue and brown books came in the 30s.

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