I usually decline, if on grounds of incompetence, requests to offer generalizations about the current condition of Anglo-American philosophy. However, I feel fairly confident in saying that the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein are not the favorite reading of most contemporary philosophical professionals. And that one of the many reasons for my surprise at finding myself here today, since I suppose that those who so flatteringly elected me must have had some inkling of my philosophical predilections. There indeed an immense gulf, which hardly anyone can fail to see, between Wittgenstein's conception of the subject and that of the mainstream. Indeed, his method of argument diverges from what familiar so drastically, that some fail to see that there any argument there at all. He himself, in his bleak Preface to Philosophical Investigations, says his is really an album and laments that he has been unable to produce the good book that he would have liked. There no reason to doubt that he was sincerely dissatisfied with the work as it stood; but I think there overwhelming reason not to accept at its face value his description of it as only an album. Even the paragraph of the Preface that ostensibly to justify that designation hardly does so in fact. In fact in the previous sentence he speaks of it as picture of a landscape and one constructed according to definite principles. In any case, anyone who reads the with care-and it a waste of time to read it in any other way-will soon realize that the structure of argument very tight. It is, to be sure, a structure of a different sort from that commonly met with in philosophical argument, but the difference certainly not a matter of lower degree of rigor or connectedness. Rather, the discussion introduces new conceptions of what these argumentative virtues can amount to. The divergence from the mainstream nowhere more evident than in Wittgenstein's treatment of the concept of 'belief,' both in Tractatus (Propositions 5.54-5.5423) and in Philosophical Investigations, Part II, Sections x and xi. His discussion not focussed on the kind of question we meet in most of the literature: 'What belief? Is it a state, a process, an activity, a disposition, or what? Is it something psychological or something physiological, or does it partake of both? How are different kinds of belief to be classified?'-etc. Where he does touch on such questions, he does so as it were glancingly; and this one reason why little notice has been taken of his discussions by those interested in the concept of belief. But even amongst those who do take a serious interest in Wittgenstein's work, his treatment of belief seldom given a central place. I myself think that what he writes about this both of great importance in itself and also absolutely