Introduction: Seeing Aspects in Wittgenstein

Summary

To see and describe aspects in Wittgenstein (aspects of insight, of perspicuity, of profundity, etc.) is what any discussion of his writings, and in particular of the enigmatic Philosophical Investigations, attempts to do. It would be a cute pun, but a sad excuse for a book, if this volume of new essays offered simply the promise of “seeing” and describing “aspects” in Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect-seeing. Having invited and then discussed the essays in the present volume with our contributors over a handful of years, we find that they offer more than that simple promise. At a minimum, they bring out a range of connections between Parts I and II of the Investigations that should interest Wittgensteinian scholars whose central concerns would otherwise seem untouched by the discussions of aspect-seeing in the Investigations and elsewhere. More than occasionally these essays open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought to anyone for whom, for example, the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, or the nature of human consciousness remain live issues. But a recurring discovery in the chapters that follow is that there is something to be found in his remarks on aspect-seeing that is crucial to, yet all but overlooked in, the reception of the later Wittgenstein.