Witt Understanding Meaning, Vol. 1

This new edition of the definitive reference work on Wittgenstein's essays on language and exegesis includes material not available for the four-volume edition published between 1980 and 1996. This edition also makes extensive use of the Nachlass to interpret Wittgenstein's remarks and research subsequent to the previous edition. In addition, Hacker (philosophy, Oxford U.) has revised his commentary considerably. Hacker includes Wittgenstein's work on the Augustinian conception of language, explanation, the language-game method, descriptions and the use of sentences, ostensive definition, indexicals, proper names and logically proper names, meaning and use, contextual dicta and principles, the standard meter, "family resemblance," metaphysics, philosophy, surveyability and surveyable representations, truth and the general propositional form, and understanding and ability. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

G.P. Baker was a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford from 1967 until his death in 2002. He is the co-author with P.M.S. Hacker of the first two volumes of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1980–96), and with Katherine Morris of Descartes’ Dualism (1996). He also wrote numerous articles on Wittgenstein, Frege, Russell, Waismann and Descartes.

P.M.S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is author of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the first two volumes co-authored with G.P. Baker, (Blackwell, 1980–96) and of Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996). He has also written extensively on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, most recently The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), co-authored with M.R. Bennett.