Mulhall reads each of his authors—Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard—in Inheritance and Originality in multiple works, permitting in each case some recognition of a moment of continuation or renewal, subtending a view of thinking 'as at once both new and renewed', or of 'the necessary situatedness of any philosophical originality'. But this recognition's dependence, in each case, on the existence of multiple, separate works (sometimes not even finished ones, as in Wittgenstein's case)—on books—suggests that 'thought's renewal' is itself a philosophical narrative or myth laid over a more material, practical fact: that it is in, around, with, through, reading in its relation to everyday life that philosophy is fundamentally being situated. 'Go on', 'next', 'new', 'renew', 'continue', are categories to be understood relative to books and their individuation.

'Wie weiß er aber…' (§1): the two points the interlocutor focuses on in Wittgenstein's example, about which Wittgenstein says that he just assumes the shopkeeper acts as described, also seem to lend themselves to construal in terms of an idea of rules (cf. the use of a table as a rule in §86, and the effort to establish rules for actions or names' meanings in §§82–3).

—As if readers became skeptics through reading too much.

If Descartes' Meditations were a longer book, it wouldn't be believable.

One of those nights where you remember every lover. Not by trying, nor not trying, just one, then another, and another.

Celan the aphorist

Showing up

'… and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 'We have no thoughts.''

'Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The studious classes are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption, —pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain, —they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.'