Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)

Open it anywhere and you find no treatise, only a voice thinking aloud and breaking off to argue with itself: short numbered remarks, many of them questions, a second unnamed voice forever objecting until the knot finally loosens. This is what made Wittgenstein extraordinary. The young man who wrote the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ had once believed language was a picture of the world, every sentence a fact laid alongside reality, and here, decades later, he returns with a quiet hammer and pulls the whole cathedral down, his own work most of all. Meaning is not a jewel hidden inside a word, he shows; it is what we do with the word, the way builders call for a slab, the games we play on the rough ground of a shared life. "If a lion could talk," he writes, "we could not understand him." Philosophy, for him, was a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language, and reading him you feel a lifetime of tangles come loose, one by one.