Yet these assumptions and expectations inevitably reflect our own hermeneutic time and place, and even then they may be variable. They're likely to look for a memorable, deeply researched, and significant 'portrait' of a biographical subject a sense of how the life in question relates to and reflects its historical-cultural environment insight into the 'private' as well as the 'public' dimensions of the life an enriched-and perhaps revised- understanding of the subject's deeds, work, importance a rewarding and apposite sense of narrative design and so on.

So what sorts of assumptions and expectations do-or should-we bring to biographies of philosophers? Many readers' expectations of a biography of a philosopher will reflect their expectations of biography in general. But implicit or not, these prior readerly dispositions will condition the kinds of readings that are made of such books, the sorts of judgments we make about them, and the registers of understanding we seek to derive from them. This is not to say of course that people don't come to biographies of philosophers with significant assumptions and expectations it's rather that the assumptions and expectations in question tend to be heavily implicit.

However, I do want to set what I have to say about Monk's book in the context of a general account, not least because, with the exception of James Klagge's recent edited volume on Wittgenstein and biography, so little of a general kind has been written about this sub-genre. In this paper, one that pays particular attention to Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, I don't seek to produce or to deploy anything amounting to a fully developed theory of biography, nor of the sub-genre about which I will be talking: the biography of the philosopher. The later Wittgenstein often cautioned, indeed railed, against what he called 'the craving for generality' (Monk, Wittgenstein 338)-a craving that in his view resulted in the formulation of theories instead of the requisite precise description of particulars. THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE PHILOSOPHER AS SUB-GENRE Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations IIxi, 223e 78-80 One human being can be a complete enigma to another. to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Ludwig wittgenstein the duty of genius