On certainty =
ÜberGewissheit
by Ludwig Wittgenstein · first published 1969
10mentions
5recommended by
7HN commenters
2014–2026first – last mentioned
71% recommend14% neutral14% critical
Why HN recommends it
Dense late-period work on doubt, knowledge and language. It reframes philosophical questions and clears up confusions, and is best read with a tutor or alongside the author's other writings.
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One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty". It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life. It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me. Edit:…
on “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire” ↗"If you agree that there is a hand, we will grant you all the rest..." From the tiny book "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein. Really interesting and thought-provoking.
on “All of Wittgenstein is now public domain” ↗…others do about - for example - philosophical realism. It seems to "defeat the point" only because your "point" is drastically different from that of those people. I recommend reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty [1] for a much more sophisticated treatment of similar ideas. [1] - http://www.amazon.com/On-Certainty-English-German-Edition/dp...
on “How Possibilities of Life Elsewhere Might Alter Held Notions of Faith” ↗I used to spend my time on https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/ looking for.. answers. Until I read "Philosophical Investigations" and "On Certainty" by Ludwig Wittgenstein. They depict the nature of language and the nature of doubt, and allowed me to frame philosophical questions differently, from language perspective and a psychological one. "It…
on “What Is Philosophy? A survey of some answers” ↗Ludwig Wittgenstein - mainly Philosophical Investigations, Blue and Brown Books, and On Certainty. It gradually changed how I view the entire world around me, and dissolved my interest in philosophy, as well as in many other "sciency" things that - I realized - I was only interested in because of…
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" helped me finally grok some major problems in philosophy. Needs a good tutor to go through it with though.
on “Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?” ↗…acquaintance who was a philosophy major. His comment on Wittgenstein was: "it feels like the Tractatus is what he believes, and the Philosophical Investigations is what he can prove." Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.
on “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” ↗If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... . Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics…
on “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors” ↗As Wittgenstein notes in On Certainty ‘A doubt without an end is not even a doubt.’ Bad faith scepticism is of this order, no amount of evidence will convince such sceptics. Science doesn't become 'harder' in the face of the this kind of…
on “Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated” ↗I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement…
on “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire” ↗