Prologue

Disclaimer: I have never been on safari with Professor Glock. His work on Wittgenstein, however, is the main reason I made the journey from the parklands of Oxford to the habitat of the Reading floodplains. I spent many – on some accounts, too many – happy years there as a graduate student in the University's philosophy department. Ever since those salad days, I have learned more from Hanjo than I could possibly express here; my gratitude to him is immense. Whatever criticism follows is intended to honour him, both as the author of some of my favourite philosophical texts and as the spirited conversationalist who can pull an argument apart while simultaneously scanning the restaurant table for any untouched desserts.

In 1996, my undergraduate self stepped into the basement of Blackwell's flagship bookshop on Broad St in Oxford and came out with a copy of Glock's A Wittgenstein Dictionary (1996a), priced at £10.99. It was within its pages that I first encountered the ideas I discuss in this essay. Towards the end of his entry for ‘form of life (Lebensform)’, Glock offers a brief exegesis of Wittgenstein's ‘puzzling remark’ that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (PI, 223). At the time, I assumed that Glock's treatment of it was an undisputable orthodoxy. This was a dictionary after all, and I intended to use it to get through my final examinations. Some years later, I read his masterful paper ‘On Safari with Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson’ (1996b), which was published around the same time as the Dictionary. The paper is a model of what philosophical writing can and should be: learned yet original, resolute but judicious, significant while light-hearted, its insights always perspicuous and its reprovals constructive. Upon reading it, I also realized that far from being standard, Glock's account of Wittgenstein was novel and important, both as an act of Wittgensteinian exegesis and as a piece of contemporary philosophical criticism.