For all of the continuities that may be traced in Wittgenstein's thinking over his lifetime, there is a shift that, as I believe it can be fairly said, changes everything. The shift I have in mind has two faces. It could be characterised in terms of the place occupied in the later thought by the idea of a human being: understood as a living being of, amongst other significant features, a distinctive bodily form. It could be characterised also in terms of the place occupied in the later thought by the idea of ‘conversation’: understood in the broad sense of people talking with each other. My point here is not one about the number of times these expressions appear in the Philosophical Investigations. My point is, rather, that one cannot read that book without being reminded in more or less every paragraph that Wittgenstein is speaking about human beings, and without being reminded in more or less every paragraph in which the topic is explicitly ‘language’ that Wittgenstein is speaking about human beings talking with each other. In these respects, the contrast with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus could hardly be sharper. We are in an utterly different philosophical landscape: to a degree such that almost nothing said within the one could be said within the other without a radical change in its force and significance.

The two aspects of the shift from his early thinking are, of course, closely connected. Indeed, one of the central themes of the chapters in this volume is that what we have here is best understood as a single shift. Perhaps the most obvious connection lies in the central place occupied by language – by the fact that we are creatures that speak – in our understanding of what a human being is. That connection, however, acquires a distinctive force in a way of taking up Wittgenstein for which I owe a great debt to the work of Peter Winch.