About This Site

What this is

The Wittgenstein Bookshelf (book.themodel.be/wittgenstein/) is a book guide for people who want to read the thinker who remade twentieth-century philosophy twice — and for those who have already been thrown by the masterworks. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you — a short introduction for the map, then the early Tractatus and the late Philosophical Investigations, with the transitional lectures and a biography to see it whole. A Japanese edition is also maintained, alongside sister shops such as the general Philosophy Bookshelf and the Nietzsche Bookshelf.

The editorial room's consistent rule of thumb is that people who pick the wrong first book leave philosophy for good. Wittgenstein is a special hazard: because the early and late positions are opposites, opening a primary text without that map means getting lost before you reach anything. That is why we treat the design of the reading order, and the sketch of the reversal, as the most important thing we do.

The one honesty note that shapes this site

There are, in effect, two Wittgensteins. The early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus held that language pictures the world through a shared logical form, and drew a hard limit around what can be said. The late Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations tore that up: meaning is use, and language is a family of "games" woven into ways of living. The same philosopher took opposite positions, and we flag the difference throughout rather than blurring the two into one doctrine — mistaking early for late (or the reverse) is the most common way to misread him.

A note on English-language substitutions

Wittgenstein wrote in German, and this shelf mirrors a Japanese original whose introduction and biography are Japan-only titles. Where a Japanese pick has no English counterpart, this edition substitutes the closest respected English-language work on the same thinker and role, and says so here. Specifically: the Japanese introduction (Furuta Tetsuya) is replaced by A. C. Grayling's Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford); the primary texts are given in their standard English editions — the Tractatus in the Pears & McGuinness translation (Routledge Classics) and the Philosophical Investigations in the revised Anscombe translation edited by Hacker and Schulte (Wiley-Blackwell, 4th ed.); and the Japanese critical study (Iida Takashi) is replaced by Ray Monk's biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Penguin). The Blue and Brown Books are the same primary text in both editions.

How books are chosen and rated

• Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
• Difficulty ratings are our own. Each review states plainly what a book is — introduction, primary text, lectures, or biography — and what role it can honestly play. In particular, wherever the early Tractatus and the late Investigations meet, we mark that Wittgenstein's own position has reversed, to prevent the two from being confused.
• All descriptions and reviews are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
• We avoid verbatim quotation of the primary texts. Where we touch a famous line, we mark it as an editorial gloss or paraphrase and do not present it as a reproduction of any published translation.
• Bibliographic details (author, translator, editor, publisher) are given as far as they can be confirmed; where a detail cannot be pinned down, we do not assert it. Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
• Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.

Amazon link disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Wittgenstein Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.

Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.

Privacy policy

This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.

Contact

For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.