In the essays collected here, philosophers from inside and outside of Wittgensteinian circles discuss the significance of Wittgenstein's work for the philosophy of mind and psychology.

Philosophers since Descartes have felt themselves compelled to make a choice between mind and body. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mind, first published in 1986, argues that there is no genuine epistemological problem of mind, and that the widespread philosophical scepticism with regard to our knowledge of other minds is without foundation. Ashok Vohra applies Wittgenstein’s method to show that the problem has arisen through a tendency to over-philosophise our simple experiences. Vohra presents a positive account of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, arguing that to consider his philosophy entirely destructive is misleading. He shows that knowledge of mind is gained through a large complex of intersubjectively identifiable factors such as the linguistic and non-linguistic past, present and future behaviour of the person concerned. He thus justifies the belief, on which psychology and psychoanalysis are based, that mind is not a mystery to which only the owner has privileged access.

Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind is the third volume of a four-volume analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, consisting of two parts. Part 1 is a sequence of fifteen essays that examine in detail all the major topics discussed in Philosophical Investigations §§243-427. These include the private language arguments, privacy, private ostensive definition, the nature of the mind, the inner and the outer, behaviour and behaviourism, thought, imagination, the self, consciousness, and criteria. Published in 1990 to widespread acclaim as a scholarly tour de force, the first edition of this volume of essays provides a comprehensive survey of these themes, the history of their treatment in early modern and modern philosophy, the development of Wittgenstein's ideas on these subjects from 1929 onwards, and an elaborate analysis of his definitive arguments in the Investigations. The new second edition has been thoroughly revised by the author and features four new essays. These include a survey of the evolution of the private language arguments in Wittgenstein's oeuvre and their role within the developing argument of the Investigations, a comprehensive essay on private ownership of experience and its pitfalls, a detailed examination and defence of Wittgenstein's repudiation of subjective knowledge of one's experience, and an overview of the achievement and importance of the private language arguments. Revised essays examine new objections to Wittgenstein's arguments – which are found wanting– and incorporate new materials from the Nachlass that were not known to exist in 1990. All references have been adjusted to the revised fourth edition of the Investigations, but previous pagination in the first and second editions has been retained in parentheses. These revisions bring the book up to the high standard of the extensively revised editions of Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Blackwell, 2005) and Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Wiley Blackwell, 2009). They ensure that this survey of Wittgenstein's private language arguments and of his accounts of thought, imagination, consciousness, the self, and criteria will remain the essential reference work on the Investigations for the foreseeable future.

Wittgenstein's aphoristic style holds great charm, but also a great danger: the reader is apt to glean too much from a single fragment and too little from the fragments as a whole. In my first confron tations with the Philosophical Investigations I was such a reader, and so, it turned out, were most of the writers on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Wittgenstein's remarkable ability to bring together many facets of his thought in one fragment is fully exploited in the critical literature; but hardly any attention is paid to the connection with other fragments, let alone to the many hitherto unpublished manuscripts of which the Philosophical Investigations is the final product. The result of this fragmentary and ahistorical approach to Wittgenstein's later work is a host of contradictory interpretations. What Wittgenstein really wanted to say remains insufficiently clear. Opinions are also strongly divided about the value of his work. Some authors have been encouraged by his aphorisms and rhetorical questions to dismiss the whole Cartesian tradition or to halt new movements in linguistics or psychology; others, exasperated, reject his philo sophy as anti-scientific conceptual conservatism. After consulting unpublished notebooks and manuscripts which Wittgenstein wrote between 1929 and 1951, I became a very different reader. Wittgenstein turned out to be a kind of Leonardo da Vinci, who pursued a form from which every sign of chisel ling, every attempt at improvement, had been effaced.

WITTGENSTEIN MEANING AND MIND Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind, Part II – Exegesis §§243-427 explores and clarifies the patterns, developments, and conclusions of Wittgenstein’s arguments in §§243-427 of Philosophical Investigations. Each numbered remark in Wittgenstein’s text is systematically analysed. Hacker’s thoughtful, rigorous commentary clarifies problematic expressions, phrases, and sentences, and elaborates source remarks in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass that shed light on the text, illustrating their bearing on deep philosophical problems. This volume of exegesis of §§243-427 has been extensively revised, incorporating numerous references to original and secondary texts of Wittgenstein that were not known to exist in 1990.The second edition features new comprehensive tables of correlation between the remarks of the Investigations and the source of the remarks in the Nachlass, and addresses a variety of controversies from the last quarter of a century concerning the private language arguments, the nature of thought and imagination, consciousness, and the self, settling them explicitly or implicitly in the new exegesis. All references to Wittgenstein’s text have been adjusted to the revised fourth edition, although page references to the first and second editions have been retained in parentheses. These revisions bring the book up to the high standard of the extensively revised editions of Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Blackwell 2005) and Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Wiley Blackwell, 2009). They ensure that this survey of Investigations §§243-427 will remain the essential reference work on Wittgenstein’s masterpiece for the foreseeable future.

Wittgenstein: Mind and Language brings together a collection of previously unpublished essays which offer a systematic account of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind and contribute in an absolutely new and original way to illuminating his later conception of human perceptive, emotional and cognitive language from both a theoretical and an historical point of view. The focus is on the fundamental categories of philosophical grammar, on the analysis of intentionality, of belief and Moore's paradox, on certainty and doubt, on will, memory, sensations and emotions, as well as on the theory of aspects and private language and the relationship with relativism and psychologism. In the recent literature there are undoubtedly numerous qualified publications dedicated to the themes of philosophical psychology as they emerge from Wittgenstein's Nachlaß and from his writings on this subject published in the last decade. This book, however, provides the essential points of reference of Wittgenstein's late treatment of psychological concepts in the context of the general features of his early philosophy of science and language and in the framework of the trends of his time. The book is of special interest to scholars and students, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, logicians, historians of contemporary philosophy and science.

This fourth and final volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations covers pp 428-693 of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis.

The volume takes on the much-needed task of describing and explaining the nature of the relations and interactions between mind, language and action in defining mentality. Papers by renowned philosophers unravel what is increasingly acknowledged to be the enacted nature of the mind, memory and language-acquisition, whilst also calling attention to Wittgenstein's contribution. The volume offers unprecedented insight, clarity, scope, and currency.

Wittgenstein scholarship has continued to grow at a pace few could have anticipated - a testament both to the fertility of his thought and to the thriving state of contemporary philosophy. In response to this ever-growing interest in the field, we are delighted to announce the publication of a second series of critical assessments on Wittgenstein, emphasising both the breadth and depth of contemporary Wittgenstein research.As well as papers on the nature and method of Wittgenstein's philosophy, this second collection also relates to a broader range of topics, including psychology, politics, art, music and culture.