Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

"Wittgenstein was cryptic in the extreme. This has been mistaken for wisdom."


"This book is deliberately obscure pretentious drivel. If anyone tells you how profound it is--run quickly in the opposite direction. It is simply behaviorism (Ryle's concept of mind is a much better book embodying similar ideas) with a pseudo-hip patina of bad coffee-house poetry pasted on.

Academic philosophy is only now beginning to recover from this wooly-headed bit of nonsense.

Buy it for the laughs you can get by contemplating how much academic ink was spilled over the latter half of the twentieth century trying to make sense out of this peurile idiocy.

Fear that they were somehow missing the 'awesomely profound truths' buried (who knows where) in this pablum, had otherwise intelligent philosophers actually afraid to talk about consciousness FOR ALMOST THIRTY YEARS out of fear that Dan Dennett or some other pseudo-intellectual-Wittgensteinian would start jabbering on about beetle boxes to them.

Along with BEING AND TIME, and the complete works J. Derrida, this book was the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20th century."


"Exceeding the gold standard he set in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein outreaches every expectation in Philosophical Investigations to produce what amounts to the second worst poem ever written. The first was the original manuscript of the same , which, I am told, contained two additional aphorisms.

If we were so fortunate that Wittgenstein was, in fact not real but a figment of Douglas Adams' imagination, he would have been the hero of the Vogon art scene.

This book is crap. It is NOT philosophy. It's what happens when a German engineer reads fifteen pages of Theatetus and suddenly thinks himself a philosopher."