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“... Wittgenstein predicted that his work would not be properly understood and appreciated. He said it was written in a different spirit from that of the main stream of European and American civilisation, which he found alien and uncongenial. He expressed indifference to what he saw as his fate in such a culture. How has it turned out so far? How much of what goes on in philosophy today is the result of a serious response to Wittgenstein? The question is more difficult than it looks, and not just because of its size ...”

“... and our responses to it. In resisting the metaphysical conclusions that result from this quest, Barry Stroud writes against the temper of the times, and very much in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, who was also self-consciously out of step with the times, and who remains for the most part unassimilated by contemporary philosophy, in spite of ...”

“... practical implications. Strawson’s sceptic doubts only for ‘methodological’ reasons, while Barry Stroud agrees with Descartes that Scepticism is appropriate only ‘in the philosophical investigation of human knowledge and not in everyday life’. Irrelevant to life and, except perhaps for a few Early Modern thinkers, not actually followed by ...”