Word: wittgensteins
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Michel Foucault is one of those rare intellectual cult figures whose impact is easier to acknowledge than to assess. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, he is highly regarded in the narrowest of academic circles. This, the sixth translated volume of Foucault's work, reaffirms his meditative brilliance-and Delphic obscurity. As always, Foucault, 51, ransacks history for prefigurations of contemporary power and knowledge. Discipline and Punish analyzes the institution of incarceration as it burgeoned in 19th century Europe and America. Why this sudden, universal appearance? Foucault's answer: to meet the needs of a new, relentlessly scrutinizing "disciplinary" society...
...rituals of late-evening milk and crackers or "gracious living" (drinking sherry by candlelight in hostess gowns) without satirically mocking them. Yet they sense a disquieting gap between themselves and a catatonic freshman (Anna M. Levine) who announces that she plans to make a film about the linguistic philosopher Wittgenstein...
After high school, the young comic did an existential somersault. He enrolled in Long Beach State and studied philosophy "like crazy." He recalls: "I got to a point where I could no longer speak." When after three years he began reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, who declared that if philosophical problems are solved, "little is achieved," Martin dropped back into show business. But he still likes to ponder philosophical problems. "I know all the important ethical questions," he tells audiences, "like is it O.K. to yell movie in a crowded firehouse...
Died. Gilbert Ryle, 76, British philosopher and editor of the journal Mind (1948-71); after a stroke; in Whitby, England. Ryle, who taught at Oxford for 44 years, was a prolific writer with a fresh, piquant style. A linguistic analyst in the tradition of Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer, he maintained that the true role of philosophy was to clarify, by closely examining the ways in which words were used. In his best-known work, The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle held that the mind should not be viewed as operating separately from the body, like a "ghost...
...less ambitious and comprehensive than Clark's biography, My Father, Bertrand Russell succeeds better in bringing the man into focus. Katharine Tait, Russell's daughter by Dora, understands what linked the brilliant young nationalist of the Principia Mathematica (who with his teacher Whitehead and his student Wittgenstein redirected modern philosophy away from German idealism) to the political and sexual provocateur of later years: "All his life he sought perfection: perfect mathematical truth, perfect philosophical clarity, a perfect formula for society, and a perfect woman to live with in a perfect human relationship...