Word: wittgensteins
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...WITTGENSTEIN'S VIENNA by ALLAN JANIK and STEPHEN TOULMIN 314 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...Ludwig Wittgenstein is not a household word and not likely to become one. He was one of the most demanding philosophers of the 20th century, a man who spent most of his life thinking and writing about what he concluded could not be thought or written about. His style was forbiddingly compact and aphoristic. In addition, there were his disconcerting remarks about his work being mainly a cleaning of the intellectual stables, and his ironic suggestion that what he had not written about was most valuable...
...Wittgenstein was obsessed with the relationship between words and reality and the question of whether language clouds rather than defines what is actual. To the question, "What is your aim in philosophy?", he answered, "To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle." He was the fly, and words the sticky trap. In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he used a rigorous logic to enclose the boundaries of language. What lay outside, he concluded, was a reality that could not be named, let alone explained. He became the patron saint of logical positivism, that dry, scrupulous wing...
Logic. If one aim of philosophy is to show a path to ethical behavior, Wittgenstein seems to have paved the way to a dead end. His own painful solution was to accept ethics as an act of faith, not logic. A bit like going around the world to get across the street. Why Wittgenstein devoted his life to pursuing the ineffable may not be explainable either, but at least it can be talked about. With caution and discrimination and color, Authors Janik and Toulmin attempt to show how Wittgenstein's theories grew out of the fertile decay...
...mirrors the relations drawn in literature between our own experience and its intelligible representation. That Sir Thomas Browne is now studied in universities as a specimen of English 17th century prose doesn't concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before the landscape we inhabit: these are all sensations which, like the reader's bookshelves, belong to some...