Is it necessary to read the Tractatus to understand Wittgenstein's

>>8453118
Just be autistic

>>8453127
t-thanks

>>8453118
It's useful to read the tract in that W provides you with a crystalline and perfectly distilled articulation of the predominant theory of language that guided philosophers since Augustine, maybe even Plato. So if you want a snapshot of the edifice philosophers of language built up over millennia, read the tract. It was momentously influential and it sets you up to understand the tradition that later W will be at pains to reveal as calcified, and insufficiently rich to explain the nature of language.

In the PI, W basically shits on the pretty picture he painted in the T, and starts from scratch, looking to the phenomena, looking to actual uses of language, instead of to detached philosophical theories, to explain language.

You need a fair bit of logic to really get a handle on the tract. Not so much with the PI. The PI, more than anything, takes commitment, though, like reading kant and heidegger. Because of how subversive Ws project is, you can't understand him by placing him somewhere else in the philosophical tradition, relative to previous thinkers. You need to learn to play by his rules to see what he sees about language in the PI.

>>8453118
>Is it necessary to read Wittgenstein's ideas to understand Wittgenstein's ideas?

>>8453378
I've certainly read his books. But how does one read ideas?

>>8453118
>I heard that he refutes a lot of his previous arguments in the Philosophical Investigations
That's a meme. It's way more nuanced than that. You have to read both to fully understand him.

>>8453341
What about B&BB?

>>8453504
This.

A lot of allegedly smart academics read TLP and will know if asked that throwing the ladder away is something akin to "the way of thinking that got me here doesn't make sense/isn't consistent with itself but the important thing is that it got me here", but will then go "PI has very different and incompatible with parts of TLP and is therefore refuting TLP". But TLP is entirely self inconsistent!

>Is it necessary to read the Tractatus to understand Wittgenstein's ideas? I heard that he refutes a lot of his previous arguments in the Philosophical Investigations.
that's a determinate negation and you would know it if you had done your duty, start with Hegel's phenomenology (or the greeks)