What could Wittgenstein's work contribute to the rapidly growing literature on life's meaning? This book not only examines Wittgenstein's scattered remarks about value and 'sense of life' but also argues that his philosophy and 'way of seeing' has far reaching implications for the ways theorists approach an ancient question: 'How shall one live?'.

Wittgenstein's Form of Life reveals the intricate relationship between language and life throughout Ludwig Wittgenstein's work. Drawing on the entire corpus of his writings, David Kishik offers a synoptic view of Wittgenstein's evolving thought by considering the notion of form of life as its vanishing center. The book takes its cue from the idea that 'to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life', in order to present the first holistic account of Wittgenstein's philosophy in the spirit of a new wave of interpretations, pioneered by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and James Conant. It is also an enticing contribution to the rising discourse revolving around the subject of life, led by the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Standing on the threshold between the Analytic and the Continental philosophical traditions, Kishik shows how Wittgenstein's philosophy of language points toward a new philosophy of life, thereby making a unique contribution to our ethical and political thought.

The essays collected in this volume explore some of the themes that have been at the centre of recent debates within Wittgensteinian scholarship. In opposition to what we are tentatively inclined to think, the articles of this volume invite us to understand that our need to grasp the essence of ethical and religious thought and language will not be achieved by metaphysical theories expounded from such a point of view, but by focusing on our everyday forms of expression.

In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.

Wittgenstein's notebooks included reflections on all kinds of topics alongside the more strictly philosophical work - on the nature of art, religion, culture, and the nature of philosophical activity.Culture and Value is a selection from these reflections. The new edition contains supplementary material which enhances the intelligibility of some of the entries in the original edition. It also includes all the variant versions to be found in the original manuscript sources (which are now given in detail). The original English translation has been extensively revised to suit the different editorial principles on which the revised edition has been produced.

Essays by leading scholars that take as their point of departure Cora Diamond's work on the unity of Wittgenstein's thought and her writings on moral philosophy.

In this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida. Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy’s philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy’s encounter with Schopenhauer’s thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy did not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein’s critical appreciation of Tolstoy’s thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression.