By dispensing with certain remarks in 1945 Wittgenstein ratified his abandonment of the idea that philosophy has a peculiar method of its own which can be highlighted by comparisons with certain other kinds of intellectual achievement of a particular sort. He had, as he told Bouwsma, arrived at the insight that indeed philosophy was "in certain ways like psychoanalysis, but in the same way in which he might say that it was like a hundred other things". Dropping the reference to his method from the 1945 preface to the Investigations simply was the final act of Wittgenstein's shedding a conception of philosophical method that could be regarded as ambitious in any sense of that word. What remained was his skill at doing philosophy.
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