In Fat Wednesday John Verdi considers how our experience of seeing aspects helps us imagine possible meanings for philosophy’s opening question: “What is there?”  He tries to illuminate Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas on language and perception while challenging readers to think through for themselves the different ways in which we see. He begins with Wittgenstein’s claim that experiencing a change of aspect is characterized by our recognition that when we experience a change of aspect, we recognize that something has altered while nothing has altered. For example, a representational painting is essentially ambiguous: it is both paint on canvas and a representation of people and objects. We are not fooled by the painting; we see that it is both paint and picture. We take an interest in it because we take an interest in aspects. At its heart the book probes how the inexplicable connections of words can help us understand the ever-changing connections of what we see every day. Verdi does this by developing Wittgenstein’s suggestion that aspect-seeing is related to experiencing the meaning of a word.