The New Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most famous philosopher of modern times but very few understand his pioneering work and there has been a collective amnesia regarding him in recent decades. Most of the essays are new but some date as far back as 1979 and whether they give a new view of his ideas depends on one's understanding of what he said. For me, the interpretations are not new and mostly just as confused as nearly all the other commentary on W and on human behavior throughout the behavioral sciences and by the general public. As usual, nobody seems to grasp that philosophy is armchair psychology, and that W was (in my view) the greatest natural psychologist of all time. He laid out the general structure of how the mind works, which is often referred to as intentionality and is roughly equivalent to cognition or personality or thinking and willing or higher order thought (HOT). He can thus be regarded as a pioneer in evolutionary psychology, although hardly anyone but me seems to realize it. W was thus nearly 50 years ahead of his time as the first to reject (though not entirely consistently) the blank slate or cultural view of human nature, though this has gone unrecognized and he has generally been interpreted as supporting a communal consensus view of psychology--exactly the opposite of his overall thrust (eg., see Short's comment on p 115).
As always in philosophical writing, it is quite striking that nobody (in my view) fully grasps what W was doing and noone to this day has succeeded (and few even try) to follow his Socratic method with constant recourse to perspicuous examples of our psychological functioning.
His wholly novel ideas and unique style and telegraphic writing, coupled with his often solitary, almost solipsistic lifestyle, and premature death in 1951, resulted in a failure to publish anything of his later thought during his lifetime and only slowly has his huge nachlass of some 20,000 pages been published- a project which continues to this day