[...] in a late interview about the philosophical preoccupations of his work, Wallace responded: if some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be," echoing Wittgenstein, who argued that philosophy should involve more than abstract phenomena, asking: "what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life." [...] In other words, the end of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not simply the pursuit of academic study, but the better ability to live in and consider the world. [...]