Frank Ebersole on Wittgenstein and Pictures in Philosophy

How do we get in trouble in philosophy and what do pictures have to do with it? In this article I address Frank Ebersole’s thoughts on (Wittgenstein’s remarks on) pictures in philosophy. I identify the puzzlement generated for Ebersole by what Wittgenstein says and also consider some puzzling aspects of Ebersole’s own renderings of pictures. I distinguish between the philosophical picture and the pictorial form in which it may be crystalized and show how philosophy’s reliance on situationally dis-embedded grammatical stories (pictorial or not) leads us into trouble. Accordingly, responding to such trouble does not consist in recovering the picture, in the sense of a single “object” or image we had before our mind’s eye, but in – what is better de-scribed as Ebersole’s strategy of– supplying a grammatical example (pictorial or otherwise) to go with our thinking, an example that makes what we think and say clear to ourselves.