In my 20th Century Analytic class, I’m up to the stage of the _Investigations_ where Wittgenstein makes some hard to interpret claims about the role of philosophy, leading up to the (in)famous claim that if anyone put forward philosophical theses no one would disagree with them. (I’m taking the relevant section to be paragraphs 109 to 133.) For a while I had no idea what he was meaning, but eventually I came up with some some batch of views that, if you attribute them to Wittgenstein, make decent sense of the passage. I wrote up a “handout on this interpretation”:http://brian.weatherson.org/wop.pdf that I’d be interested in knowing what people think.

The short version is that if you read Wittgenstein as believing a lot of the things that my colleague to be “Matti Eklund”:http://spot.colorado.edu/~eklundm/home.htm believes, but thinks that it is only the business of philosophy to raise paradoxes not to solve them, then the passage makes tolerable sense. More details on “the handout”:http://brian.weatherson.org/wop.pdf.

Two quick disclaimers. First, I’m not a Wittgenstein scholar, so for all I know there are very good reasons to not say what I say. (Or it is thought to be trivially correct as an interpretation.) Second, although I use free will as my example of a philosophical dispute to illustrate Wittgenstein’s views on disputes, I don’t mean to commit to anything about free will. What I say about free will is pretty clearly too simplistic to be true, though I think it’s on the right track.