This Introduction provides summaries of the chapters of the book and briefly discusses some of the main obstacles we encounter when we attempt to engage with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Chapter 4 explores Kant’s theory of genius. The chapter avoids the well-discussed question about whether or why Kant denied that scientific activity requires or displays genius. It instead asks whether, in Kant’s view, genius can produce original nonsense. Is taste a component of genius, or does taste impose constraints on genius as if from the outside? The chapter maintains that Kant takes up two distinct conceptions of genius, the thin and the thick. Both conceptions can be found in Kant’s early thoughts about genius. When the two notions are retained in the third Critique, it creates internal tensions.

This chapter examines Heidegger’s use of seemingly nonsensical sentences in his 1926 Logic lectures to illustrate the primacy of a kind of practical sense, which serves as a basis for a derivative logical-propositional sense. It contrasts Heidegger’s approach with a conception of nonsense emerging out of an “austere” reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which nonsense is never a function of what words mean but only a result of a failure to assign a meaning to one or more elements of a would-be proposition; according to this austere reading, there are thus no nonsensical propositions, but only strings of meaningless signs. Although Heidegger in certain respects hews to this austere conception, viz. in recognizing the interplay between bipolarity and something’s being a proposition at all, his use of nonsense nonetheless departs from the specifics of the austere reading. Doing so, the chapter argues, allows Heidegger to do a kind of phenomenological-ontological work, whose possibility the austere reading renders obscure (at best).

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has a recognizable approach that he regularly pursues in his philosophical investigations. There is a problem that he often presses, a form of criticism that he often develops, against traditional pursuits of philosophy. It is surprisingly difficult to say clearly what this problem is. But it is worthwhile to try, for this criticism is not only a hallmark of his thought but is also closely connected to other central features of it, for instance, to his conceptions of language and of the nature of philosophical investigation. These features can be properly understood only in concert with a correct view of his terms of criticism of traditional philosophy. In this essay, Alexander George articulates a problem Wittgenstein sees with philosophy, shows how it illuminates otherwise peculiar features of Wittgenstein’s investigations, and finally considers an interesting situation in which Wittgenstein’s goals might be thwarted.