On certainty =

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1. cess11Jul 2026
   If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... .

   Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community.

   Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background.

   As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life.

   One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.

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2. belfalasAug 2023
   At university I had an acquaintance who was a philosophy major. His comment on Wittgenstein was: "it feels like the Tractatus is what he believes, and the Philosophical Investigations is what he can prove."

   Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.

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3. gizajobNov 2022
   Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" helped me finally grok some major problems in philosophy. Needs a good tutor to go through it with though.
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4. belfalasJan 2022
   "If you agree that there is a hand, we will grant you all the rest..."

   From the tiny book "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein. Really interesting and thought-provoking.

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5. yamrzouSep 2021
   One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty".

   It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.

   It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.

   Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...

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6. yamrzouOct 2020
   I used to spend my time on https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/ looking for.. answers. Until I read "Philosophical Investigations" and "On Certainty" by Ludwig Wittgenstein. They depict the nature of language and the nature of doubt, and allowed me to frame philosophical questions differently, from language perspective and a psychological one.

   "It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to." — Philosophical Investigations.

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