Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.

Quotes

My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have *not* written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.

The World and Life are one. … Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

1910s

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.
- Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert, p. 104

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.
- In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31

You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
- On his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) by C. Grant Luckhard

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.
- Notes of 1919, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk

Notebooks 1914-1916

As translated by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, first edition (1961), Second edition (1984)

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
- Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
- Journal entry (13 October 1914), also in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§ 5.47)

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
- Journal entry (1 November 1914)

My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.
- Journal entry (8 March 1915) p. 40

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!!
That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts. ——
- Journal entries (12 March 1915 and 15 March 1915) p. 41e

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
- Journal entry (1 May 1915)

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
- Journal entry (14 May 1915), p. 48

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.
- p. 61

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
- p. 75

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
- Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
- Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.
I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.
A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death.
Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
- Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world.
Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.
Ethics and Aesthetics are one.
- Journal entry (24 July 1916), p. 77e

It is true: Man is the microcosm:
I am my world.
- Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
- Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.
- Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e

1920s

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus online at Wikisource

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.
- Preface

The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
- Original German: Man könnte den ganzen Sinn des Buches etwa in die Worte fassen: Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
- Introduction

The world is all that is the case. (1)
- Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)
- Original German: Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)
- Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.

The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)
- Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.

Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot. (3.0321)
- Original German: Wohl können wir einen Sachverhalt räumlich darstellen, welcher den Gesetzen der Physik, aber keinen, der den Gesetzen der Geometrie zuwiderliefe.

The thought is the significant proposition. (4)
- Original German: Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)
- Variant translation: Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions." but to make propositions clear.
- Original German: Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken. Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit. Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen. Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht „philosophische Sätze“, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen. Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.

It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)
- Original German: Ein Satz kann unmöglich von sich selbst aussagen, dass er wahr ist.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)
- Original German: Die Wahrheit der Tautologie ist gewiss, des Satzes möglich, der Kontradiktion unmöglich

Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)
- Original German: Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze

If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)
- Original German: Wenn ich die Elementarsätze nicht a priori angeben kann, dann muss es zu offenbarem Unsinn führen, sie angeben zu wollen.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6)
- Variant translations:
- The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world.
- The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
- Original German: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. (5.61)
- Original German:Die Logik erfüllt die Welt; die Grenzen der Welt sind auch ihre Grenzen. Wir können also in der Logik nicht sagen: Das und das gibt es in der Welt, jenes nicht.Das würde nämlich scheinbar voraussetzen, dass wir gewisse Möglichkeiten ausschließen, und dies kann nicht der Fall sein, da sonst die Logik über die Grenzen der Welt hinaus müsste; wenn sie nämlich diese Grenzen auch von der anderen Seite betrachten könnte. Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also auch nicht sagen, was wir nicht denken können.
This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

The world and life are one. (5.621)
- Original German: Die Welt und das Leben sind Eins.

I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)
- Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)

The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)
- Original German: Das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern es ist eine Grenze der Welt.

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy. (6.43)
- Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. (6.4311)
- Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)
- Variant translation: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
- Original German: Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (6.51)

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)
- Original German: Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)
- Original German: Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
- Translated: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (7)
- Also: About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. (7)

1930s-1951

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...
- Philosophical Remarks (1930), Part I (1)

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.
- Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
- Last words, to his doctor's wife (28 April 1951)–as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100

The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965)

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.
- p. 19

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.
- p. 25

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
- p. 26

But ordinary language is all right.
- p. 28

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
- p. 45

Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)

Edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 127

We must plow through the whole of language.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

An entire mythology is stored within our language.
- Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden.]
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy (chapters 86–93 of the so called Big Typescript), p. 161
- Corresponding to TS 213, Kapitel 86

Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen.
- Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments.
  The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 165
- Corresponding to TS 213, Kapitel 87, 409

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 175
- Variant: Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
  - Conversation of 1930, in Personal Recollections (1981) by Rush Rhees, Ch. 6

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 187

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"
- Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 193

Attributed from posthumous publications

This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.
- C 1920, expressing displeasure at a village that had a park with a fountain.
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
- Remarks to John Wisdom, quoted in Zen and the Work of WIttgenstein by Paul Weinpaul in The Chicago Review Vol. 12, (1958), p. 70

Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work.
- Wittgenstein in conversation with Maurice O'Connor Drury, cited in Rush Rhees (eds.) Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein--Fania Pascal--F.R. Leavis--John King--M. O'C. Drury, Oxford University Press, 1984; p. xvi, and p. 168.

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
- Comment to Maurice O'Connor Drury, as quoted in Wittgenstein Reads Freud : The Myth of the Unconscious (1996) by Jacques Bouveresse, as translated by Carol Cosman, p. 14

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.
- Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
- In reaction to statements by Maurice O'Connor Drury who expressed disapproval of depictions of an ancient Egyptian god with an erect phallus, in "Conversations with Wittgenstein" as quoted in Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (1997) by Richard Thomas Eldridge, p. 130

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
- As quoted in "A View from the Asylum" in Philosophical Investigations from the Sanctity of the Press (2004), by Henry Dribble, p. 87

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
- As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109
- Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.
- As quoted in "Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious" by Roe Fremstedal in Ideas in History Vol. 1 (2006)

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.
- As quoted in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information (2008) edited by Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec, p. 140

Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
- § 6

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
- § 18

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
- § 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Don't say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!
- § 66

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.
- Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
  - § 109

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
- § 112

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
- § 116

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.
- § 118

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.
You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.
- § 120

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.
- § 124

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
- § 129

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
- § 133

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)
- § 199

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."
- § 217

When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.
- § 219

So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
- § 261

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.
- § 454

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
- § 464

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"
- § 504

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays?
Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?
- § 467

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
- § 470

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
- Pt II, p. 162

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
- Pt II, p. 178

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
- Pt II, p. 189

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
- Pt II, p. 217

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
- Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition

What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.
- Pt II, p. 226 of the 1968 English edition

On Certainty (1969)

On Certainty (Über Gewissheit), J. & J. Harper Editions, New York, 1969

1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

387. [I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

Culture and Value (1980)

Vermischte Bemerkungen (1977), as translated by Peter Winch

Personal Recollections (1981)

Quotes of Wittgenstein found in Personal Recollections (1981) by Rush Rhees, Ch. 6

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
- Conversation of 1930
- Similar to Wittgenstein's written notes of the "Big Typescript" published in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, p. 175: Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
- Conversation of 1930

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
- Conversation of 1930

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
- Conversation of 1930

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
- Conversation of 1934

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.
- Conversation of 1947 or 1948

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
- p. 96

Disputed

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
- Though this has been quoted extensively as if it were a statement of Wittgenstein, it was apparently first published in A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking, p. 175, where it is presented in quotation marks and thus easily interpreted to be a quotation, but could conceivably be Hawking paraphrasing or giving his own particular summation of Wittgenstein's ideas, as there seem to be no published sources of such a statement prior to this one. The full remark by Hawking reads:

Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

I can well understand why children love sand.
- Although this quote has been attributed to Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, there is no verifiable source from Wittgenstein that it can be traced back to.

There is a a verifiable source: Rush Rhees (ed), Recollections of Wittgenstein (OUP, 1984) p. 125

Misattributed

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
- This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:

If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.

Quotes about Wittgenstein

It was Wittgenstein who evacuated time from language, and thereby converted it into an ahistorical absolute. He was able to do this because he lacked any notion of contradiction. The idea that linguistic change proceeds by an internal dialectic generated by incompatibilities between different rule-systems within it, which give rose to radically new concepts at determinate historical moments, was beyond his horizon. It presupposed an idea of language as neither a monist unity (Tractatus) nor a heteroclite plurality (Investigations), but as a complex totality, necessarily inhabited by different contradictions. It is striking that today, French philosophy is largely concentrated on the problem of the conditions of appearance of new concepts—precisely the problem that English philosophy is designed to avert. The work of Canguilhem and Bachelard is a close study of the historical emergence in the west of the scientific concepts which revolutionized biology and physics. Such an inquiry is a diametric opposite of the whole drift of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and indicates its parochialism. To emphasise the social nature of language, as he did, is not enough: language is a structure with a history, and it has a history because its contradictions and discrepancies themselves are determined by other levels of social practice. The magical harmony of language affirmed by English philosophy was itself merely the transcript of a historically becalmed society.
- Perry Anderson, "Components of the National Culture", New Left Review I/50, July-August 1968

Whereas Wittgenstein had imagined an indefinite multiplicity of language-games, incommensurable with each other, so paving the way for the particularist doctrine that the signification of sentences could only lie in their heterogeneous usages, Frege understood that language is by its nature a system, competence in which presupposes a tacit grasp of certain general principles that are never reducible to a mere tally of local utterances. At the same time, Frege's philosophy, for all its emphasis on meaning, was not only systematic, but critical. For it retained a stringent concern with truth, where the laxity of Wittgenstein's eventual pragmatics—his notion that all language-games can find their warrant in culturally variable ‘forms of life’, as apprehended by Spengler—was inevitably to afford a franchise for intellectual relativism. Initially close to Wittgenstein's legacy, Dummett came through his prolonged work on Frege to a reaffirmation of the central importance of the assertoric dimension of language—the specificity and necessity of its claims to accurate report of the world—as against the performative functions so favoured by Austin, for whom there could be no critique of current usages. Wittgenstein's basic programme thus had to be rejected: ‘philosophy cannot be content to leave everything as it is,’ for ‘linguistic practice is not immune to, and may well stand in need of, revision.’
- Perry Anderson, "A Culture in Contraflow—II", New Left Review I/182, July-August 1990

The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question.
- G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (2nd ed., 1963), Chap. 12 : Knowledge and Certainty

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.
- Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts.
- Daniel Dennett, "Ludwig Wittgenstein," in Time Magazine, The Century's Greatest Minds, March 29, 1999, pp. 88-90; reprinted in People of the Century, pp. 145‐149, 1999.

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.
Wittgenstein's response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.
- Freeman Dyson, "What Can You Really Know?", The New York Review of Books (November 8, 2012)

What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.
- Joseph Epstein (2012), Essays in Biography, Axios Press, p. 52.

This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know.
- Peter Farb, Word Play (1974)

Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.
- Ernest Gellner‎‎, in Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)

Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft, of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every culture is vindicated. One never knew that could be done — and so quickly too! It is that above all which endows his philosophy with such a capacity to attract and to repel. His mystique of consensual custom denies that anything can sit in judgment of our concepts, that some may be more rational and others less so. So all of them are in order and have nothing to fear from philosophy, as indeed he insists. This is a fairly mild form of irrationalism, invoking no fierce dark Gods, merely a consensual community. It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.
- Ernest Gellner‎‎, in "Concepts and Community", in Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)

If you ask philosophers – those in the English speaking analytic tradition anyway – who is the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, they will most likely name Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the chances are that if you ask them exactly why he was so important, they will be unable to tell you. Moreover, in their own philosophical practice it will be rare, certainly these days, that they mention him or his work. Indeed, they may very fluently introduce positions, against which Wittgenstein launched powerful arguments: the very arguments which, by general agreement, make him such an important philosopher. Contemporary philosophers don't argue with Wittgenstein. Rather they bypass him. Wittgenstein has a deeply ambivalent status – he has authority, but not influence.
- Ian Ground, "The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein", The Times Literary supplement (October 10, 2017)

Wittgenstein was right when he said that the limits of our world are identical with the limits of our language, and, I would add, there is on an everyday level clear interaction between one's language and one's patterns of thought.
- Shulamith Hareven "The Limits of My Language Are the Limits of My World" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)

What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.
- Friedrich Hayek, "Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein", Encounter (August 1977) Page 20.

He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don't appreciate that.
- W. A. Hijab, a student of Wittgenstein, as quoted in Autism and Creativity : Is there a link between autism in men and exceptional ability? (2004) by Michael Fitzgerald, p. 93

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.
- John Maynard Keynes, after meeting with Wittgenstein at his arrival in Cambridge, in a letter to his wife Lydia Lopokova (18 January 1929)

My wife gave him some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he more or less insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed "Hot Ziggety!" — a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim "Hot Ziggety!" when my wife put the bread and cheese before him.
- Norman Malcolm, in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966), p. 85

Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein's character is with the photographs that exist of his face.
- Colin McGinn, "My Wicked Heart", London Review of Books (22 November 1990)

I began by asking whether Wittgenstein was a spiritual genius. That question really has two parts: was he the spiritually sublime individual – the ‘saint’ – people often said he was? And did he know how to be such an individual, whether or not he was one himself? I think the answer must be no to both questions. His vanity, emotional solipsism and coldness put him well outside the category of the saint; and his engineering (or surgical) approach to his spiritual condition seems to me wrongly conceived, embodying as it does a deep mistake of ethical attention. But a better question might be this: given his nature, did he live a noble and ethically distinguished life? (He clearly lived an impressive and remarkable one.) Here I think we must do him the courtesy of taking him at his word and not allow our natural sentimentality about great men to get in the way of hearing what he actually says about himself. Of Moore's reputation for saintly childlike innocence, Wittgenstein remarked: ‘I can’t understand that, unless it’s also to a child’s credit. For you aren’t talking of the innocence a man has fought for, but of an innocence which comes from a natural absence of temptation.’ If we take seriously Wittgenstein's own repeated assessment of himself as ‘rotten’ and ‘indecent’, as having a ‘wicked heart’ – in whatever way these epithets were meant – then it becomes clear why he regarded his life as a mighty struggle with himself, and what he had to overcome to achieve the moral standing he did. His peculiar greatness comes from that agonising battle between his natural hubris and the humility he craved, between his compulsive devotion to himself and his willed concern for others. The singularity of his spiritual achievement consists in this strained amalgamation of aggressive megalomania and abject self-mortification. Somehow this battle brought something spiritually valuable into the world that had not been there before: an ability, we might say, to attend religiously to the face of another human being – but to do so as if this were the strangest and most impossible thing in the world to achieve.
- Colin McGinn, "My Wicked Heart", London Review of Books (22 November 1990)

Consider Wittgenstein's paradigmatic question about defining "game." The problem is that there is no property common to all games, so that the most usual kinds of definition fail. Not every game has a ball, nor two competing teams; even, sometimes, there is no notion of "winning." In my view, the explanation is that a word like "game" points to a somewhat diffuse "system" of prototype frames, among which some frame-shifts are easy, but others involve more strain.
- Marvin Minsky, in reference to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, in "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious" (1980)

The union of logic and empiricism was solemnized in the first really independent philosophical writings of the first man to combine the requisite logical and philosophical expertise, in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) of Bertrand Russell. ... Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was the first brilliant wayward child of the marriage, but the parental lineaments were more obvious in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.
- Anthony Quinton, "The Importance of Quine", The New York Review of Books (January 12, 1967)

Now, as it happens, one of the very few references to any idea in the domain of sport to be found in the most orthodox type of contemporary philosophy is what Wittgenstein has to say about the concept of a game.
- Anthony Quinton, "Locker Room Metaphysics", The New York Review of Books (August 21, 1969)

The landscape of language is-as Wittengenstein has it-like the oldest part of a city, original trails and cow paths interlacing as streets, a map determined not by preconceptions of urban order but by the intricate tracings of the human brain-and voice. A poem emerges as language, and the poems that most interest and engage me are poems in which several kinds of language impel you along a twisting path
- Adrienne Rich What Is Found There (2003)

I got a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days after the Armistice, he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately with his manuscript. It appears he had written a book in the trenches, and wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. ... It was the book which was subsequently published under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
- Bertrand Russell in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1968) Ch. 9 : Russia, p. 330

Just about at the time of the Armistice his father had died, and Wittgenstein inherited the bulk of his fortune. He came to the conclusion, however, that money is a nuisance to a philosopher, so he gave every penny of it to his brother and sisters. Consequently he was unable to pay the fare from Vienna to the Hague, and was far too proud to accept it from me. ... He must have suffered during this time hunger and considerable privation, though it was very seldom that he could be induced to say anything about it, as he had the pride of Lucifer. At last his sister decided to build a house, and employed him as an architect. This gave him enough to eat for several years, at the end of which he returned to Cambridge as a don...
- Bertrand Russell in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1968) Ch. 9 : Russia, p. 331

W. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs. He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair — he has just the sort of rage when he can't understand things as I have.
- Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's life, 1889-1921 (1988) by Brian McGuinness, p. 100

He lives in the same kind of tense excitement as I do, hardly able to sit still or read a book. He was talking about Beethoven — how a friend described going to Beethoven's door and hearing him 'cursing and howling and singing' over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and had eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage. That's the sort of man to be.
- Bertrand Russell, letter to Lady Ottoline on April 23, 1912, quoted in Brian McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's life, 1889-1921 (1988)

The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.
- Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959)

There are two great men in history with whom he [Wittgenstein] somewhat resembles. One was Pascal, other was Tolstoy. Pascal was a mathematician of genius, but abandoned mathematics for piety. Tolstoy sacrificed his genius as a writer to a kind of bogus humility which made him prefer peasants to educated men and Uncle Tom's Cabin to all other works of fiction. Wittgenstein, who could play with metaphysical intricacies as cleverly as Pascal with Hexagons or Tolstoy with emperors, threw away this talent and debased himself before the peasants — in each case from an impulse of pride. I admired Wittgenstein's Tractatus but not his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.... [M]ental torments which made him and Pascal and Tolstoy pardonable in spite of their treachery to their own greatness.
- Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959)

As far as I know, Whitehead never read Wittgenstein. He told me, however, of an encounter with Wittgenstein which was entirely characteristic of the man and may interest you.
The Whiteheads, at my suggestion, invited Wittgenstein for a social tea. Wittgenstein came and, as was his wont, began to silently pace back and forth across the room. Finally, he declared, "A proposition has two poles; they are apb." Naturally enough. Whitehead enquired, "What are a and b?" "They," replied Wittgenstein with some solemnity, "are indefinable."
- Bertrand Russell, quoted in Dear Bertrand Russell...: A Selection of His Correspondence with the General Public 1950-1968 (1969)

The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. [...] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided.
- John Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” The New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983

Wittgenstein was basically unscientific. He knew that science was partly driven by a desire to generalize, and he rejected generalization. Scientific questions were of no great interest to him; they merely addressed the working of the natural world. Wittgenstein spent much of his later life examining the way in which language may shape our reality. This is not a subject that is irrelevant to science.
- Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (1998)

The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them to scientific findings, is called naturalism. Many philosophers since Plato have scorned naturalism, arguing that science cannot provide answers to the deepest philosophical questions, especially ones that concern not just how the world is but how it ought to be. They think that philosophy should reach conclusions that are true a priori, which means that they are prior to sensory experiences and can be gained by reason alone. Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to find any undisputed a priori truths. The absence of generally accepted a priori principles shows that the distinguished Platonic philosophical tradition of looking for them has failed. Wisdom must be sought more modestly.
Sometimes, however, philosophy gets too modest. The highly influential Austrian/British philosopher Wittgenstein asserted that philosophy is unlike science in that all it should aim for is conceptual clarification. In his early writings, he looked to formal logic to provide the appropriate tools, and in his later work he emphasized attention to ordinary language. He claimed that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.” Much of twentieth-century philosophy in English devoted itself to the modest goal of merely clarifying existing concepts. But no one has learned much from analyzing the logic or the ordinary use of the words “wise” and “wisdom.” We need a theory of wisdom that can tell us what is important and why it is important. Such theorizing requires introducing new concepts and rejecting or modifying old ones.
- Paul Thagard, The Brain and the Meaning of Life (2010), Chap. 1 : We All Need Wisdom

[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.
- Sir Colin St John Wilson, as quoted in Autism and Creativity : Is there a link between autism in men and exceptional ability? (2004) by Michael Fitzgerald, p. 93

Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist ... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.
- Colin Wilson in Voyage To A Beginning, p. 160-1 (1968)

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