Hi John In fact, surprisingly I (JG) managed to finish my PhD in linguistics without ever reading Wittgenstein. Both of us (in fact, together) have read him since and find him at least obscure. It is interesting to me such characters as LW - it seems that if an academician receives the blessings of some intellectual giant(s) (in this case, Bertand Russell, and the Vienna circle), he or she may subsequently remain as obscure as desired (or perhaps it is the clearest expression of their thinking that they are able to muster) and everyone will exercise their supreme efforts to glean from (or equivalently, hallucinate about) the "real" meaning that the obscure one is presenting. One signal that this is occurring is the non-overlapping hallucinations of various schools of intrepretation - witness the wildly differing official interpretations of LW. Thus, above a certain threshold of obscurity, the major contribution of such a person seems to be to provide a gigantic verbal Rorschack onto which generations of subsequent "researchers" will paint their projected pictures of the world. If philososphy had concrete applications with explicit objectives, it would sort out a lot of nonsense that academicians spend lots of time with. John