On Certainty is the first Wittgenstein text I read cover to cover – in fact, I seem to remember reading it twice feverishly over one weekend. It’s more a collection of notes than a worked-up text and it is slightly infuriating – you keep thinking he has got the issue sorted and then he starts at it again and the solution goes out of focus. Wittgenstein seems to have had a similar feeling – using a not very politically correct metaphor, he noted: “I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again; now her spectacles, now her keys” (OC para 532). [Read more...]