I was directed to this book by a Wittgenstein aficionado who assured me that Stroll offers a unique and particularly enlightening explication of Wittgenstein's somewhat abstruse thought. Since my familiarity with Wittgenstein was mostly from the sixties, before many of his works saw the light of publication, my informant suggested that I would find a whole new way of seeing Wittgenstein's last work, On Certainty, through Stroll's efforts.

Indeed, Stroll's point seems largely to be that, contrary to generally received opinion, Wittgenstein was not a thinker of two distinct periods (characterised by his work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations) but, rather, three. He claims, in essence, that Wittgenstein's thought was characterized by three great ideas which, he assures us, is three times the amount most great contributors to human thought can lay claim to.

I found the book interesting though not entirely clear as to the three distinctly different ideas Stroll asserts will be found, respectively, in the Tractatus, the Investigations and On Certainty. In fact, I did not come away with a clear picture of these at all, though I gather that Stroll is asserting that the Tractatus Wittgenstein is concerned with what can be said and what can't (meaning as significance), while the Investigations Wittgenstein concerns himself with how what we can say controls what we can know (meaning as use vs. the logical atomist view found in the Tractatus which asserted a logical framework for picturing what is), and that the On Certainty Wittgenstein focuses on what can be held to be certain in the various manifestations of the use of that word, "certainty."

Perhaps it is only my own inadequacy that kept me from grasping the essential difference Stroll sees between the last two Wittgensteins (I actually see On Certainty as very much in the tradition and mindset of the Investigations). But whatever the cause, I did not end up with a clear and convincing picture of the divergences Stroll asserts are there.

Nevertheless the book has great value if for no other reason than Stroll's admirable exposition of the Fregean-Russellian logicism that antedated Wittgenstein's own work and formed the ground, in fact, for the young Wittgenstein's philosophical education. I have never found a better presentation of this logically rooted approach of ideal language development which initially influenced the early Wittgenstein and played such a major part in his first and only published (in his lifetime, that is) book of philosophy, the Tractatus.

As Stroll notes, Russell's philosophy of logical atomism, a metaphysical precursor to logical positivism which rocked early twentieth century philosophy, seems to have arisen from Russell's exposure to Wittgenstein's thinking while Wittgenstein was his student. Beyond that, logical atomism, per Stroll, took its most definitive form in Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

The individual who directed me to Stroll's book, by the way, did so in response to my own criticisms of Wittgenstein since I had asserted that Wittgenstein had failed to make a dent in the area of moral philosophy (though throughout his life he had continued to assert that he was attending to this, even though he seems to have had little explicit to say on the subject). My informant suggested that Stroll's insights concerning On Certainty would put these concerns of mine to rest.

What I found instead, though, was very little that was helpful concerning what I take to be the core moral questions. On the other hand Stroll did note two strands in On Certainty concerning what we can speak about with assurance that I hadn't differentiated before. According to Stroll, for Wittgenstein there is that kind of certainty that involves statements which sometimes must be unquestioned, because of the role they play (Wittgenstein's so-called "hinge statements"), while sometimes the same statements may play a role for us in which it is perfectly acceptable to question them. And then, Stroll tells us, Wittgenstein also holds that there is another kind of certainty (and the statements that express this), that is that sense of assuredness we have of things which is just rooted in our reality (either of the institutional variety or the physical/biological sort).

How the two types of statements interrelate and overlap in actual language, however, remains to be explicated more fully though Stroll does suggest that Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, touched on, and had in mind, both types when he laid out his case for disregarding the old philosophical conundrums of how we could be sure of what we know.

So the book was useful and enjoyable. But it left a great deal still fuzzy in my thinking. This may, however, be no less due to my own inabilities to grasp certain subtleties as to the failure of the explicator (Stroll) or the original thinker (Wittgenstein) to convey what they wanted to convey. Perhaps at some point I'll give it another read, just to see if I missed more than I should have.

SWM