Wittgenstein (Blackwell Great Minds Book 35) 1st Edition by Hans Sluga (PDF)

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wittgenstein“Sluga draws a fascinating picture of Wittgenstein as a situated thinker: brilliant insights into the cultural background mesh with an often original and always profound understanding of Wittgenstein’s work, yielding an accessible and illuminating account of his thought.”Joachim Schulte, University of Zurich “Concise, clear, and accessible, this sophisticated introduction covers an unusually wide range of central topics, including Wittgenstein’s historical and intellectual context, his philosophical development, and the ethical and political implications of his work.”David Stern, University of Iowa For his radical questioning, original thinking, and determination to reshape the philosophical landscape, Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely hailed as a giant in twentieth-century philosophy. Wittgenstein presents a concise, comprehensive, and systematic treatment of the Austrian-born philosopher’s thought from his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the posthumous publication of On Certainty, notes written just prior to his death. Renowned Wittgenstein scholar Hans Sluga first recounts events in Wittgenstein’s life in order to illuminate the historical, political, and personal conditions from which his philosophical work emerged. After identifying some of the philosopher’s key concepts and ideas in subsequent chapters, Sluga then reveals how the cultural and political changes that Wittgenstein and his contemporaries lived through mirror many of the dramatic events now happening in the twenty-first century. Sluga’s original analysis goes on to illustrate vividly how Wittgenstein’s thought may help us to face the peculiar problems of our own contemporary social and political existence. Illuminating and thought provoking, Wittgenstein offers ground-breaking new insights into the mind of one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a long awaited book from Hans Sluga. Sluga has been teaching and studying Wittgenstein’s work for decades, inspiring countless students (including me). Sluga is himself an historicist, and the historicism is out front here, both on the scale of Wittgenstein’s own development from the Tractatus through to On Certainty, and also on the broader scale, pointing to the influences of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mauthner, and others.The first three chapters of the book trace the first period of Wittgenstein’s thought, the Tractatus and Notebooks. Sluga weaves biographical details into his analysis, treating his subject from the beginning as someone haunted by questions rather than by answers. Wittgenstein’s recurring retreats from philosophical activity now paint a picture of someone drawing back and rethinking, returning to the same questions with fresh thoughts fed by the limitations he now sees in his previous approaches.Sluga’s treatment of the Tractatus reads as a test, for Wittgenstein, of the very idea of logical atomism. Logical atomism succeeds on its own terms (“Logic takes care of itself. . . “), but it fails as a metaphysics. In other words, in the end, there simply is no bridge between logic, the logical structure of language and thought, and the structure of reality. Logical structure cannot be said to mirror reality, and the primitives of logic cannot be mapped to the primitives of reality. Logic isn’t part of reality — it is “transcendental.”At the same time, the Tractatus sets up, by its exclusion of the “transcendental” from theoretical treatment, the questions of the relation of self to world, self to other, self to language and language to world, the themes that will provoke Wittgenstein’s thinking throughout his life.The second period of Wittgenstein’s thought, in Sluga’s treatment, is that of the Blue and Brown Books. Here the limitations of the Tractatus become clear to Wittgenstein, and the diversity of language and fluidity of meaning become apparent. Sluga ties Wittgenstein’s realizations during this period to Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”, breaking down the basis of concepts into simile, a likening of what is distinct through similarities rather than a discovery of an underlying essential sameness. This notion of simile flows forward into Wittgenstein’s own notion of “family resemblance” that ties instances into concepts, thus abandoning the fixity of essentialism for a potential perspectivism, in which different resemblances can be featured in order to provide a fluid sorting and resorting of conceptual structure.The third and final period in Sluga’s Wittgenstein is the “late Wittgenstein” from the late 1930s on to Wittgenstein’s death in 1951. As Sluga concedes, this last period contains some diverse strains of thought. The Philosophical Investigations could arguably be called the “mature” philosophy of Wittgenstein. The Investigations provide what seems to be Wittgenstein’s most complete removal from philosophy as theory for the sake of philosophy as therapy. We get the definitive exposure of how our language may mislead us when we take it for more than it is (e.g., when we take its structure for that same “mirror of reality” rejected earlier in the test of logical atomism).Then On Certainty takes up more explicitly than any other of Wittgenstein’s writings questions of how practices of language really do compose or permit a structure of knowledge about the world. G.E. Moore’s “Proof of an External World” provides a perfect starting point to examine and dismantle any notion of straight-forward epistemological foundationalism, in which complex knowledge is built on the basis of more primitive knowledge, like a Cartesian game of blocks.The one slightly odd aspect of the book is Sluga’s insertion of questions of social and political philosophy into each of the larger discussions in the book. Wittgenstein was even more silent about such questions than he was about ethics — at least he did deliver the one “Lecture on Ethics” and the provocative remarks on ethics and “the problem of life” in the closing propositions of the Tractatus. I think the explanation for Sluga’s interest is that we are in effect reading the preface to a future work of his own on social and political philosophy, with a grounding in themes from Wittgenstein — in particular, Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical philosophical stance, what Sluga calls the “unsurveyability of our condition.” I’m looking forward to it.

⭐The book by Sluga is excellent but the reader is the worst I’ve come across. He constantly mispronounces common philosophical terms, names of various philosophers (including Wittgenstein), common German and Latin expressions in a way that sometimes makes the text unintelligible. The worst case is his constant reading of ‘causal’ as ‘casual’.

⭐One of the best introductions to W:s philosophy. Direct on target, still multifaceted.Understandable in disposition and language. Highly recommendable.

⭐Ungodly bad narration in the audio book. The cadence is peculiar and SO MANY MISPRONOUNCED WORDS!!!Han Sluga, you need to step in and record your book, you have been emasculated by Ken Maxon.

⭐a good introuduction to Wittgenstein ,from Slug’s own particular ,individual angle

⭐whilst Wittgenstein broke through the clouds of most of our wrong perceptions, he was too harsh on himself and, of course, just about every one around him. Problems are never outside of ourselves.

⭐I began reading this Vine offering with great expectations, because I have never been able to properly get to grips with Wittgenstein or his philosophy, and I hoped this would clear the cobwebs and shine a light on what all the ‘experts’ have been discussing about him for the last several decades. Alas, I was disappointed.One of his main tenets, that his ideas are generally misunderstood, still holds for me; I still don’t understand them, the language is too self-referencing, too technical, too much depending on prior familiarity with other theories and ideas. Sluga seems to be perpetuating the fog surrounding him, and while the Introduction and the first Chapter drew me in, I was soon bogged down thereafter, and it has taken me since November last year to work my way through what is actually quite a short book.Sluga assumes the reader has so much prior knowledge of the subject, Wittgenstein and his works, that the book almost seems redundant, except as a means for refreshing the arguments, and working over the old ground again. It is refreshingly clear that Wittgenstein was brilliant, eccentric, generous, and difficult, but I did not discover any fresh insight, and by the time I finished the book my mind was numb. Perhaps a scholar well versed in the topic might gain some benefit, but the rest of us might do better to give it a miss, and look for something more populist.I hope to give it another read in a year or so when the details have had time to permeate and, more importantly, when I’ve also been able to read more on his contemporaries and their thinking. I really still do wish to find out more about Wittgenstein.Addendum 23rd May 2012I’ve just been lent a copy of

⭐Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary by Marjorie Perloff

⭐, and on a first glance through it seems to be much more accessible.And also, belatedly, I’ve just read the excellent Wiki article on Wittgenstein; I should have read it first as a proper introduction, it helps a lot.

⭐Sluga has approached Wittgenstein chronologically tracking the changes in his thinking from Tractatus through Investigations and beyond. I found the delineation of the core of Wittgenstein’s thoughts being separated from the critical appraisal extremely helpful and finished wanting to go and reread Philosophical Investigations.My only criticism was that I would have liked some much longer excerpts from the source material rather than the fairly succinct if frequent quotes – the book relies (perhaps?) overly on your having a reasonable knowledge of the text and mine is rusty.

⭐Sluga has written an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein for the academic/knowledgeable reader. The book includes a summary of Wittgenstein’s life and the influences on him, invaluable for understanding his philosophical approaches. Although a specialist in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Sluga isn’t afraid to point out weaknesses or contradictions in the philosopher’s thought.The language used in the book is such that you need to have studied some philosophy to understand it – I studied undergraduate philosophy a few years ago and still struggled to follow some parts of Wittgenstein’s (or Sluga’s) reasoning. This is hardly surprising, though – Wittgenstein is known as a notoriously opaque thinker.Yet what is more surprising, in my view, is that the book relies so heavily on the reader having intimate knowledge of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries’ thought. To understand Wittgenstein’s approach from this book, you need to know quite a bit about, for example, the thought of Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, Immanuel Kant and others. As an introduction to Wittgenstein that apparently assumes no prior knowledge of the man, this to me is a failing of the book, and hence only giving it three stars.

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