Reader's Digest: April 4, 2026

I’m taking a pause from taking a pause to report on a book that may be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Not all of them, for sure. But if you were excited to read about Wittgenstein’s wartime diaries, his struggle with solipsism, new translations of the Tractatus—including one I criticized—Wittgenstein’s failures as a mentor, or his poetry about socks, you will be interested in Anscombe on Wittgenstein, the first appearance in print of G. E. M. Anscombe’s extensive anecdotes about her teacher, together with a substantial introduction documenting their relationship.

Perhaps the most well-known stretch of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is the so-called “rule-following considerations” in Philosophical Investigations. What they come to is contested, but they revolve around the fact that no finite number of applications seems to fix which rule is being applied—there are always infinitely many rules consistent with the data. The problem here could be epistemic: How do we ever learn to follow a rule? How do we justify its application? How do we know which rule someone else is following? Or it could be metaphysical: What makes it the case that we are following one rule rather than another?

Or it could be something else entirely. Wittgenstein himself puts the point as follows:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

I mention this because it provides context for the most delightful anecdote in Anscombe’s compendium:

[On] February 8th 1951 we set off for Cambridge. Wittgenstein was very frail then. We took a 1st class carriage so that he could lie on the seat, and there was some complication about paying extra for a ticket I already had. The inspector came to alter the charge that had been made, and explained that it was a matter of interpretation of rules. With rules, he said, the thing was, there was always more than one way you could take them.

Wittgenstein said that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.” Which sounds conservative, almost reactionary, until you recognize that everything is already philosophical.