Wittgenstein 1st Edition by Anthony Kenny (PDF)

Description

This revised edition of Sir Anthony Kenny’s classic work on Wittgenstein contains a new introduction which covers developments in Wittgenstein scholarship since the book was first published. Widely praised for providing a lucid and historically informed account of Wittgenstein’s core philosophical concerns. Demonstrates the continuity between Wittgenstein’s early and later writings. Provides a persuasive argument for the unity of Wittgenstein’s thought. Kenny also assesses Wittgenstein’s influence in the latter part of the twentieth century.

User’s Reviews

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

⭐I’ve read four brief introductions to Wittgenstein’s life and thought (in addition to attempting to understand both the TRACTATUS and the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS).The four I’ve read are Grayling, Monk, Pears, and the book under review.I would say that Kenny’s is the most helpful. The others are less so, in this order: Grayling, Monk, and Pears.Pears monograph was first published in the “Modern Masters” series, and not to seem captious, but I’ve found other books in this series to be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. Monk is also the author of a full-dress critical biography of Wittgenstein, and though this is quite an interesting read, I don’t think he does a thorough job in his “How to Read Wittgenstein”, especially in regard to the later philosophy. Grayling is the closest to Kenny for beginners in W., but I think the latter has the slight edge.I thought I’d say all this to help anyone who’s considering buying one of the four books. The only one I think you can wrong with is Pears, although it’s interesting to note that F.R. Lewis, the famous literary critic (and colleague of Wittgenstein at Cambridge) owned a copy of Pears book and Queenie, his wife, said she had never seen a book of F.R.’s that was so heavily marked as it.

⭐Excellent!

⭐I don’t know why anyone would think that this book is “clear” or good for beginners. I’m taking a class on Wittgenstein where we’ve had to read a couple of chapters of this, and every page is a struggle. Maybe I’m just dense, but Kenny chooses to focus on all the wrong things in setting up the background to Wittgenstein’s thought in the work of Frege and Russell… he spends an unnecessary amount of time on how Frege tried to reduce arithmetic to logic (which is not really Wittgenstein’s focus), but meanwhile spends only a paragraph or two on Russell’s theory of types. For another example, the explanation of of the critical concept of the distinction between “saying” and “showing” in chapter 3 is incredibly difficult to understand in Kenny’s account of it, when really, once one figures it out, it is straightforward in my opinion. But I had to consult a number of other sources to figure it out, because Kenny’s explanation was so garbled.If you need an introductory book on Wittgenstein, I recommend instead “Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction” by A.C. Grayling, which does a much better job of telling you in clear language the philosophical background you need to know to understand Wittgenstein.

⭐This is the best introduction to Wittgenstein, still (the revised edition has an illuminating new introduction). The first couple of chapters are hard going, but clear — without an understanding of the impulse towards Frege and Russell, the later Wittgenstein makes little sense. Whenever I get stuck in W, which is a lot, I always head for this book first. Then Hacker and co. Kenny does note that more recent Wittgenstein scholarship has focussed on “On Certainty” and the late remarks on Colour.Kenny is masterful. His other book on Descartes is also worth reading.

⭐This book started with some bio and then some basic logic (!), which I felt was condescending, but I quickly changed my mind when it became clear how important this was to understanding the Tractatus and W.’s later works. There are real insights in this book, i.e., it isn’t just a basic introduction.Furthermore, Kenny does an outstanding job of making it all clear in straightforward prose. He doesn’t latch on to catch phrases or assume you are already a Wittgensteinian. He simply spells out the evolution of W.’s thought in a clear and precise way.This is just good scholarship, whatever you may think of his interpretation at the end of reading it.

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