Wittgenstein’s Wayward Student: The Unauthorized Autobiography

Our hero has been confined until now to the space allotted him by other writers who only want to bounce their own ideas off of him because of their interest in the resulting trajectories. Quite reasonably he feels that he’s never been given a fair shake. His efforts to understand his critics turn up points where their arguments strike him as unconvincing or altogether absent. He delights in these discoveries, but his readers will see them instead as evidence of his own confusion and as clues to the sort of positions his critics adopt. When he meets another idealized character in Penelope Maddy’s Second Philosopher, he is intrigued by the difference in the treatment he receives. She raises many of the same questions that haunt him, the very considerations that others dismissed. But her reaction only further alienates him. Struggling to fathom how she can carry on without the answers he seeks, he unwittingly reveals what sets the Second Philosopher’s position apart from related naturalistic accounts by chronicling how it leads him to confront the idleness of his demands.