1 Draft: to appear in The Philosophical Quarterly Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. By Paul Horwich. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 225. Price 17.99 paperback, 46.00 hardback.) In this provocative and very well‐written book, Paul Horwich argues that Wittgenstein’s most important insight is that expressed by his famous remark that ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (Philosophical Investigations §109) 1 . According to Wittgenstein’s anti‐theoretical, deflationary view of philosophy, traditional or theoretical philosophy (‘T‐philosophy’) – the attempt to provide by a priori methods fundamental insights ‘into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe’ (p.2) – is a fruitless exercise that is a result of muddled thinking. It is an attempt to answer questions that are in fact ‘pseudo questions’, ‘questions’ whose apparent force stems from confusions and false presuppositions engendered by an inclination to exaggerate analogies between different regions of language. This fruitless exercise should be replaced by ‘a painstaking identification of [T‐philosophy’s] tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate’ (p.2), and, in particular, by therapeutic reminders of ‘the highly idiosyncratic character and function’(p.16) of the regions of discourse about which philosophical perplexity arises. According to Horwich, it is this metaphilosophical view that underlies Wittgenstein’s approach to specific philosophical issues, including those concerning understanding, rule‐following and meaning, rather than vice versa. Although Horwich believes that this assignment of a foundational role to a deflationary metaphilosophy makes for good interpretation of Wittgenstein’s texts, his main concern is philosophical: regardless of its pedigree, the deflationary metaphilosophy is ‘worth taking seriously’ (p.xiii) and possesses ‘rough correctness’ (p.61). In Chapter 2, Horwich delineates the nature of T‐philosophy and exposes what he takes to be its shortcomings, both in general terms and via a series of brief case studies (number, time, truth and good). Chapter 3 focusses on Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, highlighting the continuity between the metaphilosophy of the Tractatus and that of the Investigations: according to both, ‘traditional philosophical perplexities [are] pseudo‐problems stemming from features of language’ (p.73). Horwich suggests that we can view the philosophy of the Investigations as having evolved from that of the Tractatus. Chapter 4 is perhaps the most provocative part of the book. Whereas Wittgenstein is standardly held to view meaning as normative in a way that rules out reductive dispositionalist accounts of linguistic understanding, in the context of an application of the deflationary metaphilosophy, Horwich takes Wittgenstein to reject the idea that meaning is normative and to be defending a form of reductive dispositionalism! Chapter 5 develops this view of meaning further, in the context of responding to the arguments of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. In Chapter 6, Horwich illustrates Wittgenstein’s deflationary metaphilosophy further, applying it in an attempted dissolution of ‘the “mystery” 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, R. Rhees and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 3 rd edition 1973).