Abstract

Not too long ago I came across a notebook from my first year in college. The course was Philosophy 101, and the first author we read was Plato. Reading my own scribbles 25 years later, I was surprised to see that my dutifully recorded lecture notes remained fairly accurate in their portrayal of the Meno. But in the middle of a page on Plato I found the following comment: "Vittgenstein ‹ private language argument." Here was my first encounter with the great Wittgenstein, as I now call him, a philosopher I now know to approximately the same depth as Plato. My professor had probably mentioned Wittgenstein in an aside, and I had done my best with a phonetic spelling.