The notion of the riddle plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. By examining the comparisons he draws between philosophical problems and riddles, this paper offers a reassessment of the aims and methods of the book. Solving an ordinary riddle does not consist in learning a new fact; what it requires is that we transform the way we use words. Similarly, Wittgenstein proposes to transform the way philosophers understand the nature of their problems. But since he holds that these problems are ultimately unsolvable, rather than attempting to solve the riddles of philosophy, he aims to dissolve them.

Forthcoming in Intercultural Understanding: Wittgensteinian Approaches, ed. by Carla Carmona, David Pérez Chico and Chon Tejedor, Anthem Press (2023) Penultimate Draft. Please do not cite without permission.Wittgenstein seeks to throw light on our concept of understanding by looking at how misunderstandings arise and what kinds of failure they involve. He discerns a peculiar kind of misunderstanding in the writings of the social anthropologist James Frazer. 2 In Frazer's hands, the anthropological project of enabling us to understand human behaviour seems to yield the paradoxical result that there are certain forms of human behaviour that simply cannot be understood. The source of Frazer's misunderstanding, according to Wittgenstein, is that he places narrow requirements on what could count as meaningful, prior to, and independently of, his encounter with the subjects of his interpretation. Frazer, similar to some of the philosophers who Wittgenstein addresses in his other works, succumbs to nonsense in his very attempt to draw the limits of sense.My aim in this paper is to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein's criticism of Frazer and his criticism of his fellow philosophers, in particular of Frege. The materials I draw on stem from various periods in Wittgenstein's career, and they reveal, in my mind, an important 1 Work on this paper was supported by a Minerva Fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung mbH. 2 Wittgenstein (1993a). Henceforth abbreviated as RFGB.

Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein consider the possibility of a philosophical inquiry of an absolutely universal scope—an inquiry into the being of all beings, in Heidegger’s case, and into the logical form of everything that can be meaningfully said, in Wittgenstein’s. Moreover, they both raise the worry that the theoretical language by means of which we speak of particular beings and assert particular facts is not suitable for this task. And yet their own philosophical work seems to include many assertions of ordinary, theoretical language. Are they being inconsistent? Or are they hoping to use theoretical language in a way that conveys what cannot be said in that language? Much of the scholarship on each of these thinkers takes the form of one of the two horns of this dilemma. In the context of Wittgenstein scholarship, however, a third alternative has been proposed: the “resolute” reading of the Tractatus. My aim is to establish the availability of a similar solution to Heidegger’s predicament. It will emerge that Heidegger rejects the possibility of a theoretical account of being and pursues a project of a radically different sort, the goal of which is to bring about a transformation of our fundamental relation to being.

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