A stellar collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein and sheds light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical positions and areas of human concern.

Introduction PART I Wittgenstein’s later writings: the illusory comfort of an external standpoint 1 Excursus on Wittgenstein’s vision of language 2 Non-cognitivism and rule-following 3 Wittgenstein on rules and platonism 4 What ‘There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word’ could possibly mean 5 Wittgenstein on deconstruction 6 Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to political thought PART II The Tractatus as forerunner of Wittgenstein’s later writings 7 Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 8 Elucidation and nonsense in Frege and early Wittgenstein 9 Rethinking mathematical necessity 10 Wittgenstein, mathematics and philosophy 11 Does Bismarck have a beetle in his box? The private language argument in the Tractatus 12 How to do things with wood: Wittgenstein, Frege and the problem of illogical thought 13 Conceptions of nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein A dissenting voice 14 Was he trying to whistle it?