ŷ������

My first step in reading a challenging text is to figure out what kind of text it is. Obviously we don’t want to read a telephone directory as though it were a recipe book. But it’s not so obvious that we may need to read different “philosophy�� books in quite different ways.

Actually, I ask myself how the book wants to be read. This may seem an odd way to state the question, but let’s go down this path. How do we tell how a book wants to be read? There are many ways. One is to see if it tells us. Philosophical Investigations starts out with a preface written by its author. What does the preface tell us about how the book wants to be read?

Well, Wittgenstein tells us the book consists of philosophical remarks: “The thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. �� The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. �� [I]f you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album.��

So Wittgenstein tells us that the text is not analogous to, say, a cartographer’s steady progress incrementally across a region, the result of which is a complete map of the region. Another way to say the same obvious thing is that this work is not like, say, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which has a grand, unified structure deemed to be more or less dictated by the subject matter, with clear, logical relationships among the chunks of text. Instead, Wittgenstein tells us that the text is like the journals of a traveler through complex and varied terrain. The traveler and we do not really know the boundaries of the area being explored, nor do he and we know precisely how what we have seen is related to what else we have seen or what we have not seen.

So how are we to read the text? Another way to ask the question is, “How does the text tell us to evaluate it?�� With the Aquinas text we would ask whether the chains of reasoning follow and whether the whole of the subject is covered, etc. But what are the appropriate ways (according to the text) to assess the individual philosophical remarks and the entire collection of them?

The text tells us that the text is “only an album.�� Further, we are told “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.��

So my question is: According to the preface and reflections 1-17, how does the text tell us how it should be read? To fill in “should be read�� one might ask: What does the text tell me would be valid criticisms of it? What usual criticisms of philosophical texts would *not* be valid (according to the text). What might I do or say to show that I had read the text well enough (according to the standard defined by the text). According to the text, how can I tell when I am done reading it?

Again, the "shared inquiry" method relies exclusively on the text. See the description of the approach in the separate folder here.