Sublime

It’s surprising that Wittgenstein’s philosophy isn’t more well known outside of specialized circles, as it holds a very practical life lesson: we should accept going step by step, clarifying our language as we move forward, and being regularly surprised. It’s an effective antidote for paranoia.

As a young man, Wittgenstein himself started out by trying to define everything that could logically be stated—about everything else, he famously said, we should remain silent. But by the end of his life he came to conclude that there was no place to stand outside of our life, outside our language, outside our ordinary certainty about the existence

Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “nonsense.” He was apparently like that in his personal life as well.

For the Philosophy-Phobic, One Philosopher to Start With Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford. “One of the bedrocks of modern analytic philosophy is to think of [language] . . . if you’re trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you’re trying to make progress, how do you make language

Ludwig Wittgenstein,