Wittgenstein's Method

For the last 15 years of his distinguished career, Gordon Baker was developing an original and radical vision of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method in the later philosophy, one which constitutes a significant departure from his celebrated period of collaboration with P.M.S. Hacker and which shares affinities with the ‘New Wittgensteinians’ but is developed in much greater depth. Following his death in 2002, Baker’s collaborator and partner Katherine Morris has collected together and edited the key articles he wrote on Wittgenstein’s method during this period, and they are published here for the first time in one volume. Of the thirteen articles contained in this book, three were previously only available in French, one was published in a Brazilian journal and one was previously unpublished.

This volume covers a range of topics central to Wittgenstein’s later work, from the private language argument, ‘grammar’ and ‘use’, to the conception of philosophy itself and its relation to psychoanalysis. Characteristically rooted in a fidelity to the text, these essays combine to provide a powerful revaluation of Wittgenstein’s aims and methods in his mature work, from one his foremost interpreters.