--- product_id: 122814208 title: "Philosophical Investigations" brand: "ludwig wittgenstein, p. m. s. hacker, joachim schulte" price: "AED 260" currency: AED in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.ae/products/122814208-philosophical-investigations store_origin: AE region: United Arab Emirates --- # 4.7/5 rating from 345 reviews Dual-language edition 20+ pages of expert footnotes Philosophical Investigations **Brand:** ludwig wittgenstein, p. m. s. hacker, joachim schulte **Price:** AED 260 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 📖 Unlock the language of thought with Wittgenstein’s masterpiece — don’t miss the conversation everyone’s revisiting! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Philosophical Investigations by ludwig wittgenstein, p. m. s. hacker, joachim schulte - **How much does it cost?** AED 260 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ae](https://www.desertcart.ae/products/122814208-philosophical-investigations) ## Best For - ludwig wittgenstein, p. m. s. hacker, joachim schulte enthusiasts ## Why This Product - Trusted ludwig wittgenstein, p. m. s. hacker, joachim schulte brand quality - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Scholarly Edge:** Enhanced with over 20 pages of expert footnotes and critical commentary for a richer reading experience. - • **Collector’s Gem:** Used book in good condition with free shipping—perfect for philosophy enthusiasts eager to own a classic. - • **Timeless Relevance:** Revised translation modernizes Wittgenstein’s language, making complex ideas more accessible to today’s thinkers. - • **Bilingual Brilliance:** Original German text and updated English translation on facing pages for deep linguistic insight. - • **Philosophical Powerhouse:** One of the 20th century’s most influential philosophical works, ranked top 200 in Modern Western Philosophy. ## Overview Philosophical Investigations is a landmark 20th-century philosophical text by Ludwig Wittgenstein, presented here in a critically revised bilingual edition with original German and updated English translations side-by-side. This edition includes over 20 pages of scholarly footnotes by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, enhancing understanding of Wittgenstein’s complex ideas on language, mind, and philosophy. Highly rated and essential for serious students and enthusiasts of modern philosophy, this used copy in good condition offers a rare chance to engage deeply with one of philosophy’s most influential works. ## Description Philosophical Investigations New editions of the Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations from Wiley-Blackwell Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Volume 1 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations Part I: Essays G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker Second, extensively revised edition by P. M. S. Hacker Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Volume 1 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations Part II: Exegesis §§1–184 G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker Second, extensively revised edition by P. M. S. Hacker Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, Volume 2 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations Essays and Exegesis of §§185–242 G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker Second, extensively revised edition by P. M. S. Hacker Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century. In this definitive new en face German-English edition, Wittgenstein experts Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte have incorporated significant editorial changes to earlier editions of Philosophical Investigations in order to reflect more closely Wittgenstein’s original intentions. Notable revisions include the placement of Wittgenstein’s notes – Randbemerkungen – into their designated positions in the text, some corrections to the originally published German text, and the numbering of all the remarks in what was called Part 2 and is now named Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment . Extensive modifications and corrections have also been made to G. E. M. Anscombe’s original English translation. Detailed editorial endnotes have been added to illuminate difficult translation decisions and to identify references and allusions in Wittgenstein’s original text. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Dimensions | 6 x 1.39 x 9 inches | | Edition | 4th | | Isbn 10 | 1405159294 | | Isbn 13 | 978-1405159296 | | Item Weight | 1.91 pounds | | Language | English | | Print Length | 592 pages | | Publication Date | January 12, 2010 | | Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell | ## Images ![Philosophical Investigations - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61bfzvHWSvL.jpg) ![Philosophical Investigations - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/810N7Oxo3aL.jpg) ![Philosophical Investigations - Image 3](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/317pgeeVFgL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Good Excuse for Reading the Investigations Again *by on Reviewed in the United States July 29, 2012* It's more than a little presumptuous to attempt a short review of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. After all, it's one of the few most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. This edition is sorely awaited by some, after years of close examination and criticism of the Anscombe translation.First, the geeky stuff on the translation and editing. Like the Anscombe translation, this one with Hacker and Schulte joining their efforts to Anscombe's, presents the original German and the English translation on facing pages. As a reader with a spotty knowledge of German, this gives me the opportunity to refer to the original where the English seems obscure, ambiguous, or just plain impenetrable. If you're a student of Wittgenstein, Hacker and Schulte have helpfully addressed numerous, controversial aspects of Anscombe's translation -- many of these, such as the difficulty with the German "Satz" (translated relative to context by "sentence" or "proposition", two very different English words) and "Seele" ("soul" sometimes but "mind" others by context in English), are discussed in their Preface.If you are a quasi-casual reader, many of these points of translation are probably less important than overall readability. And I think Hacker and Schulte have improved readability, updating the feel of Wittgenstein's writing, which is often colloquial, to something more modern.They've also added over 20 pages of sometimes helpful footnotes, where additional information about the translation or about Wittgenstein's thoughts are enlightening. And they've recast "Part II" of the Investigations itself as "Philosophy of Psychology -- A Fragment" -- their reasoning for that is given in their Preface.Like most great philosophical texts, no matter how many times I read the Investigations, it's different each time, and I feel foolish for having understood so little the previous time. The new translation offers a great excuse to give it another read.There are many themes to pick up, including the great variety of linguistic behavior (as contrasted with naive views of language as representing or naming, or with Wittgenstein's own view in the Tractatus), the illusions of distinctive mental activities (such as "meaning" a word while uttering it, or translating the inner to the outer or public), and the general theme of philosophical problems arising when "language goes on holiday".It's the last that continues to grab my attention, persistently through readings, with different remarks jumping out of the text each time. The simple view is that Wittgenstein thinks ordinary language (what we all say and do in practical contexts every day) is fine as it is, but that it's when we detach ordinary language from those practical contexts that we get in trouble. We fall into perplexing philosophical quandaries, supposing ourselves to really wonder whether the external world or other minds exist, or whether objects are material or ideal.But philosophical exercises of language are exercises of language, after all. It's not as though we can simply say, "Don't do that" when philosophers speak, and point out that they've left the "ordinary" behind. It's not a simple mistake, and the line between the "ordinary" and the "philosophical" is crossed sometimes without special notice. And it's not even the exclusive province of professional philosophers (amateurs seem even more impressed than the professionals sometimes by their own metaphysical musings).Certainly, there is more to say about the mistake that philosophers, amateur and professional, make. In particular, there is Wittgenstein's distinction between empirical remarks (remarks about facts in the world) and grammatical remarks (by contrast, remarks about how we speak or are to speak about those facts in the world). The philosopher mistakes the one for the other, thinking that, for example, by adopting what we call an idealist grammatical position (when we talk of objects in the world, we are really talking of mental or ideal objects) we have really discovered something about the objects and not just made a statement about how we should speak of them. Much more to say on this, of course -- which is why a short review is so presumptuous. In fact, it's Wittgenstein's thoughts on why we fall victim to such a misunderstanding that I puzzle most about. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Philosophic Monument *by on Reviewed in the United States October 5, 2016* It is hard for me to imagine anything more presumptuous than my doing a review of LW’s Philosophical Investigations. As a general reader who lacks the background in Russell/Frege/Moore, et al. to contextualize LW’s thought, I can hopefully speak for the interested amateurs out there who are considering buying the book.First, this is a scholarly edition. It presents the German text and the English translation on facing pages. The copy text, if you will, for the translation is that of G.E.M. Anscombe, but it is revised by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Wittgensteinians study LW’s writings word by word, and some of the translation choices have been disputed. The book also contains endnotes and a substantial index. Considering the accumulated elements of apparatus and the density of the text, the price is a bargain. This is, after all, one of the most important books of 20thc philosophy.It is, of course, quite skeptical of the philosophic enterprise. LW believed that the ‘problems’ of philosophy were essentially self-created and result from the constraints posed by language. That which we cannot speak of, LW argued, was what was truly important. The rest was a series of muddles. The book consists of two parts, the second renamed “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment.” The first consists (crudely speaking) of an extensive set of observations on language and communication, the second on perception and behavior. These observations are stated with great lucidity though we can feel the weight of reflection that stands behind them. We can also feel the weight of previous philosophic opinion, though LW is very sparing in his mention of other philosophers. His immediate predecessors are mentioned and he cites both Plato and Augustine (quoting the latter in Latin). He mentions William James, but on his predecessors he tends to remain silent. When he reflects on causality, e.g., he does not engage directly with Hume, though it is clear that Hume is in his thoughts. He anticipates much contemporary neuroscience, in, e.g., his discussion of the problems of ‘consciousness’, but he does not provide extensive references.At a number of points (a very small number of points) he states his aims and his conclusions with great specificity:“Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (#109).“What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense” (#464).“A whole cloud of philosophy condenses into a drop of grammar” (#315).And quintessentially:“What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (#309).He is (expectedly) hard on psychology:“The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by its being a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings . . . . For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. . . . The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by” (II, #371).There are other memorable passages which I will allow the reader to discover for him- or herself.I would describe this book as a necessary read for anyone interested in the history of philosophy and the course of modern thought. Even if one is not prepared to dissect it in detail, it is a pleasure to watch a brilliant mind at work, tracing an outline of thought that has been immensely influential. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ An Important Re-do of an Essential Text *by on Reviewed in the United States February 23, 2013* It was time for a complete re-think of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and an opportunity to incorporate the fruit of a lot of scholarly discussion on the text that has accumulated since its original collation, which was not Wittgenstein's own doing. It is important to point out that philosophy in the Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein lineage, has moved on since Wittgenstein, and largely because of his thinking, particularly his manner of doing philosophy, starting from, and remaining in contact with palpable experience as the reference of any possible reality explanation.Since it is fairly certain Wittgenstein would have found it sad if his work were to have become uniquely a chalk-lined pitch for territorial calculatons of measurable status-honors and award citations in professional circles, it is incumbant upon us to see his work as the product of a man debating the events of his time with himself, and to take his hint that the point of doing what he was doing was to "show" us what we might well choose to do in our own time and circumstance. Is being a conscious creature post-Enlightenment-- "modern" if you must --necessarily anti-historical or science-paradigm processed in infinite circular limbo? Wittgenstein's writings and intellectual development suggests a way to wonder such matters is to develop critical apptitudes for responding responsibily to desires to find a sense of permanence (historical) while also responding to desires to take subjective first-person responsibility for believing what is rigorously factual (science). In this sense, Philosophical Investigations, is a trail of evidence left of one persons work-in-progress.Wittgenstein, it is fair to say, believed whatever sort of thought-work philosophy supposes itself to be doing, it ought to be doing it where the work demand for work leads. His life was practically bookended by the two World Wars, a surface phenomenon that had long been brewing. The spectacular failure of social authority that "was" the two World Wars announced the end of governance by genetics-selected social elites and recognition of the political importance of public opinion in the consensus building process.Wittgenstein was famously uncomfortable talking philosophy in academia, for him the mental finishing schools of moribund authority structures, but he found minds there ready and able to demand a lot of themselves in the ways his thinking would require. He was even more allergic to group-think, especially operating in the so-called 'social sciences,' under the guise of science. Wittgenstein saw well before most-- and there's his genius --that a reality deprived by historical events of a crushing nature opposed to human purposes, hopes and desires, a collective world organized sufficiently to insulate itself against the imposing necessities of material scarcity, could no longer be ordered collectively from outside the individual; if any collective order can be possible under such a changed condition, it must come as an organizing principle inside conscious thinking, from an individuals taking within his own conceptual powers the responsibility to justify whatever he might accept to believe as fact, or what is the case.Wittgenstein's brand of self-questioning, for readers prepared to go mentally active as 'authors' of their own authority, is presently continued in spirit in the work of John R. Searle, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, P.F. Strawson and G.E.M Anscombe. Philosophical Investigations is not any easy text to read because its compilation of remarks on loosely associated themes reads like reports of Wittgenstein ruminating to himself, like raw epiphanies of a moment's inspiration without the subject's mapping assumptions. Like Socrates, Wittgenstein believed he could assist at the birth of active consciousness, but could not force a passive mind into the world, or mystify it into existence with mind-candy-- or, even less, to 'sell it.'Books that disturb our complacency, that change us because we are aware of something at point B we weren't aware of at point A, are perhaps not for everyone, but they are about all that some of us may want to bother to read. ## Frequently Bought Together - Philosophical Investigations - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - On Certainty (Harper Perennial Modern Thought) (English and German Edition) --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.ae/products/122814208-philosophical-investigations](https://www.desertcart.ae/products/122814208-philosophical-investigations) --- *Product available on Desertcart United Arab Emirates* *Store origin: AE* *Last updated: 2026-06-05*