Philosophical investigations
Philosophische Untersuchungen is, with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of two major works by 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In it, he discusses numerous problems & puzzles in fields of semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics & the philosophy of mind. He asserts that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems, contradicting & discarding much the argument of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book is often considered one of the most important works of the 20th century, continuing to influence contemporary philosophers studying mind & language. The book wasn't ready for publication when Wittgenstein died in 1951. G.E.M. Anscombe translated the ms & it was published in 1953. It's now in a 3rd edition incorporating Anscombe's final revisions & is repaginated. There are two popular editions of Philosophical Investigations: Prentice Hall, 1999 (ISBN 0024288101) Blackwell Publishers, 2001 (ISBN 0631231277)--bilingual. The text is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgenstein calls, in the preface, Bemerkungen, translated by Anscombe as "remarks". In the 1st part, these remarks are rarely more than a paragraph long & are numbered sequentially. In the 2nd part, the remarks are longer & numbered using Roman numerals. In the index, remarks from the 1st part are referenced by their number rather than page; however, references from the 2nd part are cited by page number.
Stats for nerds
42recommend
154mentions
114people
2010–2026years
31% recommend65% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > short, there are some big concepts like Christianity or Islam that people refer to as if it's the same thing but almost nobody has a shared meaning when they refer to such big things. Even so there can be concrete dialogues about these topics from different frames and with different underlying meanings.
See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for a deeper treatment of that topic.
- I've been reading and rereading the Philosophical Investigations this summer. Later Wittgenstein is such a gift for keeping your head clear in the era of LLMs.
Anyway, delightful site. More people in tech should read LW, both the Tractatus and PI.
- It would be generally beneficial for people engaging in this sort of discussion to read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”. Not a summary. Read the actual book, stew on it a bit, have some thoughts.
- Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), A Theory of Justice (Rawls), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) have all been pretty influential.
- >In this person's communication culture, they are saying
Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.
With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.
Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.
- Just read Wittgenstein (The Blue+Brown Books / Philosophical investigations), and this confusion will go away. The difference between translation, definition, and explanation needs to be understood.
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