Reading Philosophical Investigations Resolutely Kelly Dean Jolley February 20, 2015 On Kierkegaard: I represent a life for you & now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other relation to it you attain. Through this representation I would like to as it were loosen up your life. —Wittgenstein This book, though to many this affirmation will appear strange, is really an edifying book...for one who has the predisposition to let himself be edified by a reading which is in other respects laborious. –Kierkegaard 1 Introduction Resolute reading of TLP exerts a willy-nilly but mesmeric fascination. Its pro- ponents try to materialize it; its opponents try to prevent its materialization. We all know about food fights. But this is a recipe fight. Before the cake has been baked, indeed before the batter battered, the bakers fall on each other, rending and tearing. –Well, ok, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough. Perhaps the worst of it is the peculiar character of the debate. –How is it to end? –What are the conditions of winning? –What kind of debate is it, really? In what follows, I make a suggestion about how to answer the last question, and that suggestion will in its turn yield suggestions about how to answer the others. Let me reiterate and underline: I am making suggestions and not dog- matizing about how to answer. My hope is to be helpful. To be helpful would satisfy me. Here is how I want to provide my helpful suggestions: I want to backtrack in time to a debate about PI between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. I selectively reconstruct that debate, highlighting features of it that I take to be interesting in their own right and in relation to debates about PI, but also interesting in analogy with debates about resolute and standard readings of TLP. As will be clear, my sympathies are with Bouwsma against Ryle, and with resolute readers against standard readers. But I am not going to try to vindicate Bouwsma; I will, in fact, be critical, carefully or guardedly critical, of him, but not in ways that reflect sympathy with Ryle. (I have a certain sympathy for Ryle too, but it will not be reflected much in what follows–and at any rate, that sympathy is not for Ryle’s conclusions.) And I am not going to try to vindicate resolute reading of TLP. What I want to do is to suggest a 1