Although aesthetics was a subject of deep and lifelong importance to Ludwig Wittgenstein, he wrote very little directly on the topic. He did, however, write remarks on the visual arts, literature and poetry, architecture, and especially music throughout his multifarious writings on the philosophies of language, mind, mathematics, psychology, and philosophical method. A number of these remarks, including some from his more personal notebooks, are collected in Culture and Value, and scholars have the collected notes from a course of lectures he gave in Cambridge in 1938. In those lectures Wittgenstein was quick to differentiate between types of questions, particularly between questions of empirical psychology and aesthetic questions (he said that, while he was interested in scientific issues, only conceptual and aesthetic issues could truly grip him).

He also looked, with at the time unprecedented detail, into the nuances of humankind's actual critically descriptive aesthetic...