The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought
by John Koethe

I have been fascinated by Wittgenstein's work since encountering it as an undergraduate in a philosophy of mind course given by Alasdair MacIntyre at Princeton thirty years ago and have regularly offered seminars on it in the more than twenty years I have been teaching. In that time I have developed certain convictions about how his work ought to be approached that deserve mention. First, it is best revisited at intervals: Wittgenstein's own views about linguistic and mental representation emerge most clearly if one returns to his writings periodically, after thinking about the general issues that concerned him in their own rights, without particular reference to his work....

This conviction is related to a second one: the development of Wittgenstein's thought was not linear and consecutive; rather, he comes back to certain ideas and themes repeatedly, sometimes to embrace and sometimes to react against them....

I therefore do not believe that one can neatly divide his work into earlier, middle, and later periods.... Thus the continuity I am attributing to his thought is not so much a matter of explicit doctrine as it is of broad tendencies and metaphors ... that helped shape the way his ideas were formulated throughout his philosophical career.

An excerpt from the preface of The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (1996) 

Used with permission of the author.