Talk:On Certainty

message: As the posts above state, this article is wrong in many respects and needs a major rewrite.  If I have the time, soon I will undertake this task. Enigma00 (talk) 05:03, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  This Article 

message: Yes, but nobody should underestimate the challenge of saying much about this work without contravening Wikipedia's 'Pillars'. Meeting that challenge will require impeccable referencing, so I will record some sources right here. For a start, I am working from the Harper Torchbook edition, the preface to which states clearly enough the first difficulty: "It is all first-draft material, which he did not live to excerpt and polish." Avrum Stroll goes further: "Wittgenstein, as all exegetes know, is a notoriously obscure writer, and On Certainty is especially difficult to understand."
 (Ironically, when drafting the short foreword to the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein had written: "Clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. So, I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs." But in what became Culture and Value he had advised "Anything your reader can do for himself, leave to him" (p.77)
. Arguably, On Certainty leaves it all to do.)
Italian philosopher Annalisa Coliva is convinced of On Certainty's importance: "This ‘text’ is, arguably, Wittgenstein’s third and last masterpiece. It has been defined as a ‘gem in the rough’. That it is a philosophical gem is clear at first encounter, for it contains a wealth of extraordinarily rich observations on G. E. Moore, idealism and scepticism, the nature of knowledge, belief, doubt, certainty and the role of reasons or justifications with respect to them. Yet it is clear, upon second encounter with it, that it is also ‘in the rough’ because different threads emerge, often in tension with one another."
As well as the dozen or so perspectives in Moyal-Sharrock/Brenner (grouped into 'Framework', 'Transcendental', 'Epistemic' and 'Therapeutic' readings), A C Grayling contributes an essay on OC to Hanjo Glock's Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader. There are also book-length treatments by Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and, more recently, Andy Hamilton.
Finally, about the man himself, Norman Malcolm's 'A Memoir' reprints 57 letters from LW and includes a 18-page biographical sketch by G. H. von Wright that describes "an incomparable, but demanding, friend. I believe that most of those who loved him and had his friendship also feared him. [..] Wittgenstein's most characteristic features were his great and pure seriousness and powerful intelligence. I have never met a man who impressed me so strongly in either respect."
 -Soap 92.29.23.91 (talk) 14:45, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: Happy 50th birthday, OC. I wrote you a present. It's a C program that reads your widely circulated e-text and extracts about a fifth of you: my selection of your most penetrating insights, chosen to create a representative summary version because, sadly, your author didn't live long enough to "excerpt and polish" you. I hope you like it. And happy new year. -Soap 92.11.153.12 (talk) 18:49, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Certainty is fifty