While readers have long recognized the innovative styles of Wittgenstein’s writings, this chapter considers the philosophical significance of the concept, perception, and attribution of style in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and other works. Contrary to some interpreters, I argue in the first section that the later Wittgenstein continued to see philosophy as logic, but expanded his conception of what constituted “the logical” to include “forms of life,” “life,” “living,” and so on. In the second section, I draw on recent work on the logical form of judgment about living organisms to describe distinctive logical features of such judgment including necessity, unity, generality and its relation to particularity, and temporality, and in the third section, I show that this logical form and its distinctive features can elucidate claims made about forms of life in Philosophical Investigations. In the final section, I show how Wittgenstein’s concept of style exhibits the same logical features and thereby serves as a guiding metaphor for recognizing “the logical” in our everyday life-activities.

This chapter highlights how Cavell’s pioneering interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” bears on literary studies. It traces an influential misreading of the Investigations deriving from Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) whose understanding of “language-games” has become foundational to the conception of postmodern literature put forth by leading literary scholars, even as it relies on an unacknowledged simplification of how Wittgenstein understands the linked concepts of “language-games” and “rules” in the Investigations.

Cavell’s “Availability” essay exposes the problems with this postmodern reading of Wittgenstein. As Cavell makes clear, Wittgenstein compares the “rules” of language to “moves in a game” in part because he wishes to emphasize the differences between these two cases: unlike those of, say, a board game, the rules of “everyday language” cannot be exhaustively listed or written down, and yet, “the absence of such a structure in no way impairs its [i.e., language’s] functioning.” For this reason, as the “Availability” essay shows, “rules” turn out to be a concept of only secondary importance within the Investigations; rather, language-games emerge against the backdrop of what Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” or, elsewhere, “the natural history of human beings.”