This volume brings together four essays written by James Conant, one of the most diligent and profound scholars of Wittgenstein's thought, over a period of just over two decades. In the texts, for the first time collected in this volume, Conant traces and reconstructs with acuity the origin of the central concerns and conceptions of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work, among which the possibility of illogical thinking, nonsense and the philosophical work of elucidation stand out. The author's purpose, in the work as a whole, is to improve upon existing explanations of the discontinuity and opposition of philosophical work between the first Wittgenstein and the second Wittgenstein, and thus to place the reader in a position to understand the connection between the early and later work of the Australian philosophical genius.
James Conant is a professor at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig and director of the Center for German Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 2016, Conant received Germany's most important international research award, the Alexander von Humboldt Professors Research Award, and held the Ludwig Wittgenstein Chair of Excellence at the University of Veracruz the same year.