Recommended further reading

David G. Stern

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139167185.011

Frongia, Guido 1989 Wittgenstein: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Blackwell. Selective, but provides informative abstracts of many of the items listed

Shanker, S. G. (ed.) 1986 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments, vol. V. London: Croom Helm

Coope, C., P. T. Geach, T. Potts, and R. White 1970 A Wittgenstein Workbook. Berkeley: University of California Press. Helpful exercises on a range of topics in the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. Very useful for students looking for help in beginning research on specific topics

Fogelin, Robert 1987 Wittgenstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Revised 2nd edn; 1st edn 1976. Critical but sympathetic interpretation of both Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations

Glock, Hans-Johann 1996 A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Encyclopedic and analytic coverage of dozens of key topics, in the form of short essays; copious references to key passages throughout the Wittgenstein papers. Hacker's approach to Wittgenstein is taken for granted; little attention given to other interpretations

Kenny, Anthony 1973 Wittgenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's thought and many of his central concerns; elementary and accessible interpretation of key passages and their implications

Kripke, Saul 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Short, clearly written, and extremely influential. A powerful reconstruction of a line of argument Kripke finds in Wittgenstein, but misunderstands Wittgenstein's use of that argument

Malcolm, Norman 1994 Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? ed. with a response by Peter Winch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Malcolm's short essay provides a very accessible introduction to his reading of Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole; Winch's response is also very valuable

McGinn, Marie 1997 Wittgenstein and the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. London: Routledge. Lucid exposition of leading topics, with chapters on style and method, Wittgenstein's critique of Augustine, rule-following, private language, the inner and outer, and seeing aspects

Pears, David 1986 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2nd edn with a new preface by the author; 1st edn 1969. Closely focused on a few key issues, yet succeeds in covering a lot of ground; emphasizes Wittgenstein's Kantianism. More demanding than most other short introductions, however

Schulte, Joachim 1992 Wittgenstein: An Introduction, trans. William H. Brenner and John Foley. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Elementary and accessible, but also sophisticated and judicious

Cavell, Stanley 1979 The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A classic and controversial book. Generates strong reactions, both for and against

Diamond, Cora 1991 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Difficult, but important and influential, especially on Wittgenstein's conception of nonsense and philosophical method

Eldridge, Richard 1997 Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, Romanticism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. The second half of the book is a refreshingly accessible exposition of a Cavellian reading of the first half of Part I of Philosophical Investigations; the first half argues that the book should be seen as a development of themes in post-Kantian German idealism and romanticism

Garver, Newton 1994 This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein. Chicago: Open Court. Highlights the Kantian and Aristotelian aspects of Wittgenstein's work, and the relationship between grammar and metaphysics

Hacker, P. M. S. 1986 Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised 2nd edn; 1st edn 1972. Focuses on the development of Wittgenstein's views on philosophy and the mind. The interpretations in the two editions are very different; the first is strongly Kantian, but this is greatly modified in the second, which is an excellent introduction to Hacker's interpretation

Hintikka, M. B. and J. Hintikka 1986 Investigating Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell. Controversial and provocative reading of the early Wittgenstein as a phenomenalist and the later Wittgenstein as a physicalist

Mulhall, Stephen 1990 On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects. London: Routledge. An insightful comparison of Being and Time and the Philosophical Investigations

Pears, David 1987 The False Prison, vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. The first sixty pages provide an excellent introduction to Pears' approach to Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole; the remainder is devoted to the Tractatus, with particular attention to solipsism and the picture theory

Pears, David 1988 The False Prison, vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Concentrates on the private language argument and rule-following; intricate but masterful

Wilson, Brendan 1998 Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’: A Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A concise discussion of some of the leading interpretations of the principal arguments in the book, with special attention to the private language argument

Biletzki, Anat 2003 (Over) Interpreting Wittgenstein. Dordrecht: Kluwer. A short history of Wittgenstein reception. The survey is wide-ranging and well chosen, nearly always focusing on the most significant figures. Helpful guide to the literature for beginners

Flowers, F. A. (ed.) 1999 Portraits of Wittgenstein. 4 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes. A convenient and extensive anthology, mostly assembled from previously published material

Hacker, P. M. S. 1996 Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Magisterial, but one-sided

Janik, Allan and Stephen Toulmin 1996 Wittgenstein's Vienna. Reprint, with minor corrections. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. First published New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. The first book-length account of the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy and the cultural and intellectual history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and an excellent introduction to that milieu

Klagge, James (ed.) 2001 Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Malcolm, Norman 1984 Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Revised 2nd edn, with a biographical essay by G. H. von Wright and Wittgenstein's letters to Malcolm; 1st edn 1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The best short book-length biography

McGuinness, Brian 1988 Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig (1889–1921). London: Duckworth. More detailed discussion of the early philosophy and its intellectual background than Monk

Monk, Ray 1990 Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: The Free Press. Very readable; an excellent philosophical biography

Nedo, M. and M. Ranchetti 1983 Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. A beautifully illustrated and well-documented collection of memorabilia, both photographs and documents; despite the German title, the book is, for the most part, bilingual

Passmore, J. 1996 A Hundred Years of Philosophy. London: Duckworth

Rhees, R. (ed.) 1984 Recollections of Wittgenstein. New York: Oxford University Press. Revised edn; previously published in 1981 as Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections. Oxford: Blackwell

Skorupski, J. 1993 English-Speaking Philosophy 1750–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Despite the title, Frege, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle play as large a part as Mill and Russell in this history of ‘analytic modernism’

Baker, Gordon and Peter Hacker 1980 An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Both scholarly and argumentative, these commentaries provide a systematic and detailed interpretation of the text as a whole, as well as drawing extensive links with the source material. A 2nd edition is in preparation

Baker, Gordon and Peter Hacker 1980 Wittgenstein, Meaning and Understanding: Essays on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Baker, Gordon and Peter Hacker 1985 Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Hacker, P. M. S. 1990 Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind. An Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, vol. III. Oxford: Blackwell

Hacker, P. M. S. 1996 Wittgenstein: Mind and Will. An Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, vol. IV. Oxford: Blackwell

Hallett, Garth 1977 A Companion to Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. An encyclopedic and informative resource, but the exposition is often uncritical and reproductive

Lugg, Andrew 2000 Wittgenstein's ‘Investigations’ 1–133: A Guide and Interpretation. New York: Routledge

Arrington, R. and H. Glock (eds.) 1991 Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’: Text and Context. London: Routledge. Close readings of difficult passages

Block, Irving 1981 Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell. A valuable collection

Canfield, J. (ed.) 1986 The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. 15 vols. New York: Garland Publishing. A wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of essays; a convenient resource that provides quick access to several hundred carefully selected items from the secondary literature

Crary, Alice and Rupert Read 2000 The New Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge. Some excellent papers, but the main ideas are not new, and the claims made for them in the introduction are over-ambitious

Pitcher, George (ed.) 1966 Wittgenstein: The ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. The collection contains many of the reviews and essays written during the fifties and early sixties that set the agenda for subsequent discussion of key topics such as family resemblance, private language, and logic. Most are still standard reference points in the secondary literature. While the book is out of print, most of the essays are reprinted in Canfield 1986 and/or Shanker 1986

Shanker, Stuart (ed.) 1986 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. London: Croom Helm. Like Canfield, another wide-ranging collection of the most important essays on Wittgenstein up to the mid-1980s

Shanker, Stuart and David Kilfoyle (eds.) 2002 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, 2nd series. 4 vols. London: Routledge. A sequel to the previous Shanker anthology, containing a wide range of work, with particular attention to interdisciplinary scholarship, from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s

Sluga, Hans and David Stern (eds.) 1996 The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays on Wittgenstein

Kaal, Hans and Alastair McKinnon 1975 Concordance to Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’. Leiden: E. J. Brill. While it has been superseded by the electronic edition, it remains the most convenient way of looking up Wittgenstein's uses of a term in the Philosophical Investigations

Lange, Ernst Michael 1998 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’: Eine kommentierende Einführung. Paderborn: Schöningh

Pichler, Alois 1997 Wittgensteins ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’: Zur Textgenese von PU §§1–4. [Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’: On the Genesis of the Text of PI §§1–4.] Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen 14. A ‘polyphonic’ reading of the text, with a close study of the genesis

Raatzsch, Richard 2003 Eigentlich Seltsames: Wittgensteins ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’, vol. I: Einleitung und Kommentar PU 1–64. Paderborn: Schöningh. The first volume of a new commentary on the Philosophical Investigations

Von Savigny, Eike 1994, 1996 Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’: Ein Kommentar für Leser. 2 vols. 2nd edn. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Adopts a ‘text-immanent’ methodology: aims to interpret the text on its own terms, without appealing to other work by Wittgenstein. Close attention to details of German usage

Von Savigny, Eike (ed.) 1998 Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. A collection of essays on leading topics

1922 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. on facing pages by C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 2nd edn 1933

1953 Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. on facing pages by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. 2nd edn 1958, revised edn 2001

1958 The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. 2nd edn 1969. Oxford: Blackwell. While the subtitle is misleading, as these materials date from a somewhat earlier stage of Wittgenstein's thinking, they do provide an excellent introduction to many of the themes in the Philosophical Investigations

1961 Notebooks, 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. on facing pages by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd edn 1979. Source materials for the Tractatus

1967 Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. on facing pages by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. 2nd edn 1981

1969 On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe and D. Paul. Oxford: Blackwell

Culture and Value. First published in 1977 as Vermischte Bemerkungen (German text only), ed. G. H. von Wright. 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Revised 3rd edn, with revised translation on facing pages by P. Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; not yet available in the USA. A collection of excerpts from Wittgenstein's writing that cast light on his outlook on a wide range of topics

1993 Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Gathers and reliably edits many of the most important shorter publications in a single volume

1994 A Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell. A very convenient collection of important material, providing a one-volume survey of all of Wittgenstein's writing, but no substitute for the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations

2000 Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An invaluable resource, combining the capabilities of electronic text with transcriptions and copies of each page of Wittgenstein's philosophical papers. For further discussion, see Note on the Text, Stern (1996a), and Stern forthcoming a

2001 Philosophische Untersuchungen: Kritisch-genetische Edition [Philosophical Investigations: Critical-Genetic Edition] ed. Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. A beautifully edited collection of the principal manuscripts and typescripts of the Philosophical Investigations, from the ‘Early Investigations’, written in 1936–7, to the sources of the published text. Enables the reader to trace Wittgenstein's principal revisions and rearrangements of the text. For further discussion, see Note on the Text

2003 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Contains previously unavailable information on Wittgenstein's lectures and a translation of recently rediscovered personal diaries from the 1930s