During his lifetime, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) only published one significant philosophical work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Nevertheless, some 60 years after his death many regard him as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. A fairly comprehensive bibliography covering the period up to 1995 has in excess of 9,000 entries (Philipp 1996), and the stream of publications has not abated since then. In a poll of professional philosophers in North America, the Philosophical Investigations was ranked as the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century, while the Tractatus came in fourth (Lackey 1999, 331–32). Wittgenstein has also become a cult figure outside academic philosophy. He is the subject of at least five biographies (Bartley 1985; McGuinness 1988; Monk 1990; Schulte 2005; Kanterian 2007), as well as of a film and of several documentaries. He has inspired numerous novels, plays, poems, works of pictorial art and musical compositions (see Toopeekoff and Kiel 2022). Finally, he is the only philosopher to have made it onto the Times list of the ‘100 most important people of the [twentieth] century’ <http://www.time.com/time100/scientist>.

Wittgenstein's immense and diverse impact is due at least partly to the fact that he was one of the most fascinating and multifaceted personalities in the history of Western thought. As a result, the very nature of his legacy has been contested. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as a central force behind the emergence and development of analytic philosophy. On the other hand, prominent interpreters place him closer to so-called ‘continental philosophers’, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Yet other readers adopt a perspective on his life and work that is motivated predominantly by concerns extrinsic to philosophy of any kind, for example, biographical psychopathological, sociological-cum-political or cultural and historical (see Glock 2007, 63; Biletzki 2003, Ch. 11).

The essays assembled in this book disregard Wittgenstein's impact outside philosophy. They have appeared in diverse places, some of them prominent, others less so, between 1996 and 2019. Essays that have already been reprinted elsewhere have been omitted. The last chapter is novel. It vindicates the interpretative idea which unites the collection, namely that for Wittgenstein necessity, meaning and philosophy are intimately linked to normativity.