Abstract

Although Stroll’s title is from the Preface to Philosophical Investigations, his sketches differ widely from Wittgenstein’s. Where the latter’s inability to “weld” the results of his wide-ranging investigations into a whole leaves us with strings of “remarks,” Stroll’s work is a compilation of full-length essays in, as one would expect, conventionally discursive form. What connects them is “a particular methodological approach,” the “philosophy by example” of the subtitle. The exact nature of the method, and how it relates to examples, is left largely to readers to find out in the execution. A clue provided en route is that for Stroll the example-oriented approach provides a “compelling reading” of Wittgenstein’s comment that doing philosophy is “not to theorize about things but to describe them as we find them.”