2 comments about Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life, 1889-1921.

1. Professor McGuinness' Young Ludwig (1988) was the first thoroughly researched and in-depth life history of the philosopher. Over fifteen years passed and the text eventually went out of print. Oxford decided to launch a second edition, with a new preface by McGuinness, enabling the work to be read by a new generation of readers interested in the rich culture and family that contributed to Wittgenstein's thought and the creation of the Tractatus. In fact, the last chapter of the book is devoted entirely to the Tractatus, which to a large extent sheds new light on this often-misunderstood philosophical text.
   
   McGuinness spent many years researching and composing this biography. He travelled throughout Europe, Israel and America, studying countless manuscripts and correspondence, interviewing family and individuals that knew the philosopher, many of whom, unfortunately, have passed on.
   
   This is a detailed analysis of Wittgenstein, painting a rich cultural picture of pre-WW1 Vienna. Wittgenstein's father, Karl, was an extraordinary man in his own right, a capitalist of ingenious talent, creating an empire of extreme wealth and prestige. A creative and forceful personality, similar to his youngest son, along with his wife, was at the centre of the thriving music and art scene in Vienna, where Brahms, Mahler, and Klimt were frequent guests at the house for musical evenings and group discussions on literature, culture and politics. Karl Wittgenstein wrote many economic articles for major publications in Vienna and Germany that continue to be read by historians today.
   
   The family, however, experienced tragedy, with three of Karl's oldest sons committing suicide. Ludwig often considered ending his own life, but experienced a spiritual transformation after WW1, (As many young men who survived experienced after the war) was awarded medals for bravery and ended up a prisoner of war in an Italian camp. It is in this camp that Wittgenstein wrote the finishing touches, from the copious notebooks written during the war, of his only published philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The biography describes the philosopher's war experiences, his time as a prisoner of war and his eventual return to Vienna, where he gave away his massive inheritance, attempted to publish his book, attended teachers college to instruct elementary school and became a gardener for a Catholic monastery.
   
   Unfortunately, the biography ends in 1921, a year before the first publication of the English translation of the Tractutas. I believe in the "philosophical biography" as it can present the family and cultural influences on the philosopher, revealing better insight into the particular ideas and thought processes of that philosopher.
   
   This is a prize winning biography giving the reader greater insight into a unique and extraordinary human being.



2. It's good to see Brian McGuinness's biography of the first half of Ludwig Wittgenstein's life back in print. There are other worthwhile books on Wittgenstein's life and thought, but none is a substitute for this book.
   
   "Young Ludwig" is the result of years of McGuinness' own research. It draws on his personal discussions and correspondence with members of Wittgenstein's family and friends during which, he tells us in a new preface, he was "reconstructing Wittgenstein's life along with them." This biography shows that he also meticulously tracked down a wide variety of acquaintances and people who had crossed paths with Wittgenstein and Russell. He seems to have ferretted out an amazing variety of documents and other scattered scraps of evidence from unusual places as well as from the usual kinds of sources. The book is densely detailed; even people who know a lot about Wittgenstein from other sources will learn new things about him and his times from this book. (I know this because of the "Really -- I didn't know that!" reactions I often get when mentioning things I've learned from this book to fellow philosophers.)
   
   The book also benefits from McGuinness' role as a philosopher. He has authored many papers on Wittgenstein's philosophy (some recently collected in Approaches to Wittgenstein (Routledge 2002)) and edited anthologies related to it. Young Ludwig exhibits McGuinness' intimate acquaintance with Wittgenstein's intellectual interests and philosophical endeavors during his early years. Along with another Oxford philosopher (David Pears), McGuinness produced a new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In that related project, his philosophical work was accompanied by substantial historical research: he located, scrutinized, and tried to date and order such manuscripts as could be discovered of Wittgenstein's previous attempts at the work. He dug up and edited and/or translated many works related to Wittgenstein's life and work previously unavailable in English: essays on political economy by Karl Wittgenstein (Ludwig's father), popular scientific essays by Ludwig Boltzmann (whom Ludwig admired and wanted to study physics with), and many, many others. Thus, his work on Wittgenstein scholarship is monumental: writing about Wittgenstein involved establishing a whole collection of sources related to his life and work.
   
   I also happen to like this book a lot. I personally prefer the kind of biography McGuinness has written. You read it slowly, lingering over the groupings of artifacts and remembrances he has brought together and leads you through as a patient guide. You begin to realize how vast the collection is, how much there is to be put together. He does not tell you what to make of everything --- although (as he put it in the preface to the first edition) he does attempt to present Wittgenstein's life "as something capable of being seen as a unity". He pauses at times to address the reader on the significance of a certain detail, on the ambiguities involved in the craft of biography and on more general conundrums involved in making sense of another human being. He tells us not only about his subject, but how he came to know his subject, generously sharing his finds with the reader. It is somehow extremely scholarly and humbly personal at the same time. I like his style because it allows the reader some mental freedom to develop his or her own picture of things from what is known. McGuinness tells us in the new preface that his interest "is not in causes but in effects, in seeing how Wittgenstein (the young Wittgenstein, in this volume) lived out the situation he was in." You will want to have this book for the sheer amount of information it contains (it has an index, too), regardless of your taste in biographical style.
   
   When this book was out of print, I snapped up used copies to loan to students and colleagues. (I would not part with my own.) Now I can tell them what I would tell anyone interested in Wittgenstein's life or early analytic philosophy: we are very fortunate to have this labor of love available to us, and in an affordable edition, too --- how great that now anyone can go get a copy!

No comments about The Lives And Opinions Of Eminent Philosophers.

No comments about Recovering the Icon: The Life and Works of Leonid Ouspensky.

No comments about Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936.

4 comments about The Education of John Dewey.

1. Martin's book has an interesting premise, that the life experience of John Dewey was his education. That makes logical sense. Martin was privy to documents from the Dewey Center that were just made available to the public. The book is full of thought provaking information. I especially enjoyed the parts about his high school and college teaching styles. However, the author raises several unanswered questons? Why did Dewey teach high school and college classes different? What was his espistemology? Overall, the work is a good read and helped the reader gain insights into a complex philosopher. The book so inspired me that I traveled to Oil City,Pennsylvania to see if they had anything on Dewey. All they had was an historical marker where the school was, which is now a firehouse, and a file at the library. One question lingers, what happened to Dewey's dissertation on Kant? No one knows? The mystery of History.



2. It is heartening to see that this book is NOT subject to the "star inflation" that plagues much of this website! [I mean, do you really think a majority of books should receive 4 or 5 stars!]. "The Education of John Dewey" is a solid biography of an interesting man who played an important role in American intellectual history. However, the book just didn't grab me. Not like "Lincoln's Virtues: an Ethical Biography" for example. One note about Dewey's philosophy. I don't see what was so new about pragmatism/naturalism/progressivism or whatever you want to call it. Wasn't Dewey's emphasis on the importance of the continuing pursuit of truth just a modern version of the Socratic method????????



3. Martin endeavors to write a psychological portrait of John Dewey, but falls short. Ironically, the least developed aspect of Dewey's life in this volume is that of Dewey, the psychologist. Dewey was an early member (& president) of the American Psychological Assn. His observation of the reflex arc is still a staple of introductory psychology and the social psychological concepts and models he developed with George Herbert Mead and others prefigured much of the contemporary work in social cognition. Important figures in academic clinical psychology such as George Kelly and Seymour Sarason drew heavily on Dewey's work and Sarason has remained an important champion. No mention is made that Dewey's great friend, James McKeen Catell (a recurring, but little described figure in the book), was diametrically opposed to Dewey on many important issues in psychology including the roles of inheritance and environment in the development of intelligence and the conception of intelligence, itself. Dewey's ability to remain close to people whose ideas he vigorously opposed was but one of the inspiring aspects of Dewey's character. The shortcomings of this book made me more aware than ever that a full scale biography of Dewey, the psychologist, is needed rather than another biography of Dewey the philosopher, especially a tepid, uneven one like this.
   
   Martin, a humanities professor and a practicing psychonanalyst with an eclectic background occasionally deals with psychiatric disorder in Dewey's life (and the lives of his family members) and trots out some watered down neo-Freudian interpretations of his family life. Yet much of the time, Dewey, the man, remains elusive. Martin makes a number of preposterous claims about Dewey: he tells us that Dewey was "impoverished" for most of his professional life, although his salary was far in excess of that of an ordinary wage earner of his time and his home had servants. We also are told that Dewey was unique among 20th century leftists in his rejection of Marxism and Communism. In fact, Dewey was one of many American leftists who were opposed to Marx and Communism. American socialism probably owes more to the social gospel and non-Marxist political economists like Veblen than to Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Martin also ignores the vigorous and polemical support Dewey gave to World War I and the strains it caused between Dewey and friends like Jane Addams. Instead, we are told that Dewey was a consistent pacifist driven by a concern that war would undermine democratic values. Remarks like these demonstrate Martin's ignorance of Dewey's life, as well as an ignorance of the social and political environment in which Dewey lived. Much of the discussion of Dewey, the philosopher, is laden with academic philosophy that is insufficiently explained for the educated layperson. Many well-educated people are not familiar with Hegel or the Vienna Circle or only dimly recall these from an introductory course. Many are drawn to Dewey because of his educational ideas or his importance in 20th century demoratic socialism, hence, it is probably not reasonable to expect that readers will automatically be drawn to the various debates within academic philosophy.
   
   This book is an easier read than the dense, often turgid works of Robert Westbrook or Steven Rockefeller. On the other hand, the book lacks the breezy, often humorous, tone of Alan Ryan's biography. Ryan's book is a much better introduction to Dewey---witty and scholarly, yet extremely readable. Although Ryan also focuses on Dewey the philosopher, he is more knowledgable about many aspects of Dewey's life and environment than Martin. He recognizes, for example, the importance and the the deeply flawed character of G. Stanley Hall, who provided Dewey with an introduction to operationism and to developmental psychology. Ryan also points out the limitations of Dewey's sometimes wooly writing. One of the problems with reading Dewey is that Dewey, the philosopher, often requires an understanding of Dewey, the psychologist, or Dewey, the political activist, to understand many of the basic concepts that guided Dewey decades into his effort to develop a coherent worldview of pragmatism. The same problem occurs when one looks at him as psychologist, as a pedagogue or, as a political commentator/activist. He was all of these things in all his professional identities, to some extent. Despite the recent run of Dewey biographies and the renewed interest in pragmatism, there's still more to learn about Dewey. Unfortunately, only well-read afficionados will get much from Martin's book and many may be distracted by it's shortcomings.



4. Jay Martin has accomplished a monumental task in his efforts to uncover the true natures of John Dewey and his colorful life. My interest is in educational psychology and pedagogy. I admit a bit of disappointment in that Dewey's theories - - philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical - - were not explored as much as I had hoped. Nonetheless, I feel that Martin's book is a good primer for anyone who is interested in not only Dewey but, also, names such as Parker, and Tyler. The biography's deep historical basis allows readers of this and closely related materials to have a better contextual grasp how U.S. philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical theories were formulated in the late 18th and early 20th Centuries.

5 comments about Genuine Reality: A Life of William James.

1. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. However, there are a few reasons why I didn't give it five stars:
   
   1) The writing is decent, but not nearly so good that I actually enjoyed the writing itself as distinct from the content.
   
   2) Simon seems very sure of herself when discussing the motivations of Henry James Sr., especially. I got the sense that Henry Sr., at least, could have been treated with a bit more nuance and charity. For comparison, I've only read Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club", so I can't speak with any authority, but it just seemed that Simon didn't like Henry Sr., whereas she did like William, so Henry Sr. didn't get the benefit of any doubt, whereas William did. (Henry Sr. figures largely in the beginning of the book)
   
   3) I wish Simon had done a bit more to actually present James' philosophical views. I got a good picture of James as a person, but only a very vague one of him as a thinker. Genuine Reality is a biography, of course, and not a philosophical or psychological text, but given James' identity as a philosopher/psychologist, even a very large amount of philosophical explication would have been warranted.



2. Very nicely done biography, Simon seems to be a meticulous, sympathetic critic of her subjects. While I enjoyed reading about this legendary figure in American philosophy and psychology, I ended up being less impressed by him than before. Such disenchantment is probably the hallmark of reading a good biography, as it necessarily brings the mighty down to fallible human dimensions. I had always wondered what it was about the James household that produced such a noteworthy novelist and such a thoughtful philosopher--it turns out that inept dysfunction is the source of this family genius. Their father, at least through Simons's interpretation, seems a very unlikable figure--a passive-aggressive tyrant who would constantly move his family from place to place rather than have them come to develop roots and mentors beyond his control. Sadly, this tactic generated in his family a doubt of self that could lead to such insights as those his two most prominent boys seemed to understand in all its nuances. While we may appreciate their hard-won insights, it doesn't seem any fun to have suffered through them as each of his children did for all their lives. The book provides a complex look at a figure who for all his knowledge remained an embattled, unsatisfied self-critic--like all the best thinkers, I suppose.



3. The truly great men in early American history, in my humble opinion, are as follows:

   Thomas Jefferson
   Ralph Waldo Emerson
   Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
   William James

   Because of their intense individualism, idealistic views, and unique personalities, their writings, thoughts and ideas continue to affect western civilzation into the 21st century. Let me just say at the start - I'm not proposing a forum for argument, debating the worth and influence of one historical figure against another - these are men who have shaped my life in lasting ways - particularly the psychologist, philosopher and teacher, William James.

   If you are interested in the works and life of this noble individual, ~Genuine Reality~ is a good place to begin. Linda Simon is an adept biographer and this book reflects her skill, understanding and love for the subject. It was refreshing to read a biography without the once fashionable 'psychoanalytical method' of interpreting history: inserting the Oedipus complex or hints of homoeroticism into the work. This method gets tedious and more reveals the biographer's mind than the subject. It is obvious that Simon wanted to approach James from a pragmatic perspective and she succeeded in showing James' life, warts and all, more specifically, however, his inspiring personality, compulsive curiosity and genuine love of life.

   Similar to most people of genius, James' life was indeed a contradiction, at times almost enigmatic. He realized early on, that to rivet one's thought or perspective to a single dogma, to close one's mind to the infinite possibilities of existence, was to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide. Thus his thoughts are mercurial, bouncing from one possible view to another, always searching, investigating with an incessant vigour of a child. Following the works of Heraclitus, Henri Bergson, and aspects of Fredric Nietzche, James' 'Pluralism' is a philosophy of affirmation, transformation and becoming. Rallying against the Platonic and Aristotelian belief that fixity has more worth than change, he proposed that life or existence is not fixed at all but involved in an on-going state of flux: the operating word is change. And his life certainly reflects this perspective, as Simon writes:

   "He was a scientist with a disposition of a philosopher and a philosopher with the perspective of an artist. He was convinced of his own essential complexity: certain that his public personality contradicted a hidden, more authentic self. He championed the new, he hungered for astonishment."

   At the core of James' view of life is to maintain a continual openness to our existence: attempt to create a kind of vital joy to life's infinite possibilities. In other terms, do not sit back and merely observe, but get your hands dirty, engage, and life will give back to you many fold.

   ~Genuine Reality~ is an important contribution to American history. Linda Simon is a genuine biographer with transparent humility, more concerned with presenting her subject as it is, rather than trying to show off her knowledge, wit and writing skills. All too often, biographer's egos get in the way: they become so involved in revealing their intellectual capacity, the subject of the biography falls by the wayside. Not so with this text.

   This book is an intimate portrayal of a great man's life: his interesting and unusual family, his work and relationships, and his sometimes-underrated contribution to philosophy. Out of all of James' writings, there is a line that showed me, in essence, the true character of the man:

   "Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and Not be found out. I will do two things I Don't want to do."

   This biography is recommended without reservation.




4. He was born before the Civil War, but Linda Simon's accurate yet occasionally grinding biography `Genuine Reality` depicts William James (1842-1910) as a decidedly contemporary thinker. A pioneering psychologist and unorthodox philosopher, he rejected rigid systems in favor of a flexible, relativist approach that stressed the fluid nature of identity and physical reality. His students at Harvard found this a gas, as did James himself. (He was always showing off to somebody his whole life, apparently greatly concerned that he be popular with this peers, whoever they happened to be.) One of the book's many virtues is Simon's sensitive analysis of how his ideas rescued him from years of spiritual confusion and the smothering embrace of a neurotic family. One of the books vices is her unnecessary GRE-like drills of vocabulary. Interestingly enough, these start appearing in the middle of the book, as if her editor said "cool it, so your readers won't drop the book due to your unnecessary pretentiousness." Anyway, this is still a very well researched bio. of W.J., giving particular attention to his family life.



5. I pride myself on being a William James buff and this biography by Linda Simon has proven to be the best, most accurate portrayal ever written. If you don't believe my review, take a look at the excellent review of the book by the New York Times. I hightly recommend this book to all those who have enjoyed Linda Simon's previous biographies, and to all those who agree William James is a man worth remembering.

2 comments about The Great Philosophers: The Lives and Ideas of History's Greatest Thinkers.

1. There are books which take a small part of a very large reality and represent it in a good and fair way. And there are other books like this one which take very complex realities and use a small sample of the reality in question to show how unfair such a method can be. I will take one example from this book. There is a chapter here on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt is most well known for her work on the origins of Totalitarianism. But her most comprehensive philosophical effort is her work 'The Human Condition'. What this book does take what is arguably Arendt's least philosophical work her coverage of the Eichmann trial and make that stand for her work as a whole. It is simply bad judgment.
   There are other problems with the work as a whole. The small biographical sketches appended are truly too small to really give a fair idea of the life of the philosopher involved.
   If one is looking for quick understandings of the work of great philosophers I believe one is essentially contradicting what the philosophical enterprise is all about.



2. I bought this book for a breif overview of philosophy, and it's good for that. A page or two on each. But the omission of Epicurus is simply unforgivable! I'm afaid I must grade F.

5 comments about Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.

1. Obviously anybody with a triple-didget I.Q.
   can see by even a casual read that Chomsky
   is a complicated man. Thus many of his books
   are at least somewhat complicated reads. I
   highly recommend this as a potential 'Best
   of...' book for Anti-Statist fans who also
   like other controversial jewish authors books
   like Murray N. Rothbard (my favorite of the
   genre!), Art Koestler (The Thirteenth Tribe),
   et, al. Also check out Art R. Butz 'Hoax of
   the Twentieth Century', and Walt Sanning's
   Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry...



2. This biography doesn't have much to offer for those who are more or less familiar with Chomsky's work. On a side note, there isn't much to say about Chomsky's life beyond his work, which is obviously all-consuming. As such, the biographer is reduced to an amateurish overview of Chomsky's career and influences which are all together pretty dry and unsatisfying. It's much better to get an understanding of Chomsky's work from his own words, I highly recommend "Understanding Power, and "Language and Politics," for instance. Perhaps the only thing that kept me reading is the author's overview of Chomsky's political development as an activist and scholar. There are some excellent selections going into the various political literatures that helped shape Chomsky's ideology as a young person. Unfortunately, the biographer takes it upon himself to subjectively defend Chomsky in some of his more controversial endeavors. I'm referring now to the Robert Faurrison affair. The author should have simply let Chomsky's defense of the matter speak for itself but instead he chooses to attack an author who was critical of Chomsky by explaining an encounter he had in which he heard the author speak give a lecture on the topic in which he didn't seem to have a handling of the material which the biographer decides is proof that he didn't actually read his book. This is a task for another text and shouldn't have been included. An average read on the whole, though it may be useful as an overview for those who are new to Chomsky.



3. ...

   As for this biography, I suggest taking a copy out of a library and check it out before purchasing. It does cover some ground, and is an enjoyable read, if you're a fan.




4. For those who only know Chomsky for his revolutionary work in the field of linguistics and are not aware that he is also an untiring critic of media propaganda and government malfeasance this book is for you. In this enlightening biography of one of America's leading dissidents, Barsky beautifully illustrates Chomsky's dedication in his tireless fight against the forces of injustice and hate--at great personal risk to both his career and life. The ideal that Chomsky follows is not new, however, but based in the long tradition of social activism that finds its birth in the philosophy of Socrates, put to use by countless individuals from Thoreau, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, through their adherence to the fundamental idea of intellectual independence and a healthy skepticism of the dictates of power and authority.
   In a society so full of apologists for militarism, who substitute mindless justification for military operations in place of a critical, reasoned view of world events, Chomsky stands out for his courageous opposition to totalitarianism, wherever it is found. Apparently, this hiding place is alittle to close for some. Regardless of his critics, Chomsky is destined to go down in history as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century--an exemplary example of what an intellectual should be.



5. Barsky's achievement is respectable for at least one reason: he got some personal information out of Chomsky. I've been reading Chomsky for a while now and have always been impressed by his guarding of his personal life. David Barsamian, who has interviewed him probably more than anyone has - for sure more than anyone I know has - comes close once in a while. Usually it touches on how he feels about something; never anything to do with the stuff to keep biographers buzzing. As for the rest of Barsky's book I have to say that I was hardly moved by it. I appreciated the organization, and Barsky's quite obvious understanding of the issues that have arisen during Chomsky's "Life of Dissent". But I must refer to my disappointment at the immediate realization that this could hardly reflect the kind of life Chomsky has had. Hence, a 200 plus page book is not a biography. Maybe Barsky promised it was not a biography; I can't remember. To me, however, it doesn't matter. I'm always looking for good stuff by and about Chomsky. Sometimes I find really stimulating material; sometimes I find variations of views that I've seen already; sometimes I find worthless psychobabble. Barsky's book provided some new material (the strain the Faurisson affair on Chomsky was coming close to revelatory, as biographies do) but mostly it covered as much as it could about 40 plus years of intense public activity in the US (of all places) and public scrutiny in the same amount of space allotted for a court judge's decision on where domestic pets can and cannot defecate, and why. Barsky's book is excellent commentary on some significant events in Chomsky's life - in precis form - but comes up short of adequately depicting a life of dissent, especially Noam Chomsky's.

2 comments about Ludwig Wittgenstein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives).

1. 
   When thinking about Wittgenstein, I often recall the comment attributed to Cambridge Philosophy professor C.D. Broad (who did not understand nor like him). `Not offering the chair of philosophy to Wittgenstein would be like not offering the chair of physics to Einstein!" I think of him as the Einstein of intuitive psychology. Though born ten years later, he was likewise hatching ideas about the nature of reality at nearly the same time and in the same part of the world and like Einstein nearly died in WW1. Now suppose Einstein was a suicidal homosexual recluse with a difficult personality who published only one early version of his ideas that were confused and often mistaken, but became world famous; completely changed his ideas but for the next 30 years published nothing more, and knowledge of his new work in mostly garbled form diffused slowly from occasional lectures and students notes; that he died in 1951 leaving behind over 20,000 pages of mostly handwritten scribblings in German, composed of sentences or short paragraphs with, often, no clear relationship to sentences before or after; that these were cut and pasted from other notebooks written years earlier with notes in the margins, underlinings and crossed out words so that many sentences have multiple variants; that his literary executives cut this indigestible mass into pieces, leaving out what they wished and struggling with the monstrous task of capturing the correct meaning of sentences which were conveying utterly novel views of how the universe works and that they then published this material with agonizing slowness (not finished after half a century) with prefaces that contained no real explanation of what it was about; that he became as much notorious as famous due to many statements that all previous physics was a mistake and even nonsense and that virtually nobody understood his work, in spite of hundreds of books and tens of thousands of papers discussing it; that many physicists knew only his early work in which he had made a definitive summation of Newtonian physics stated in such extremely abstract and condensed form that it was impossible to decide what was being said; that he was then virtually forgotten and that most books and articles on the nature of the world and the diverse topics of modern physics had only passing and usually erroneous references to him and that many omitted him entirely; that to this day, half a century after his death, there were only a handful of people who really grasped the monumental consequences of what he had done. This, I claim, is precisely the situation with Wittgenstein.
   
   Over half a century after his death and after decades of relative neglect (considering he is viewed by some as the greatest natural psychologist of all time) Wittgenstein is again attracting considerable attention. Though there are hundreds of books dealing wholely or in large part with him, few have really grasped his remarkable advances in understanding behavior, so this fresh look is most welcome.
   
   Overall, it is first rate with accurate, sensitive and penetrating accounts of his life and thought in roughly chronological order, but, inevitably (ie, like everyone else) it fails, in my view, to place his work in proper context and gets some critical points wrong. It is not made clear that philosophy is armchair psychology and that W was a pioneer in what later became cognitive or evolutionary psychology. One would not surmise from this book that he laid out the foundations of the modern concept of intentionality (roughly, personality or higher order thought) which has been further advanced by many (most noteably in philosophy by John Searle in "The Construction of Social Reality" and "Rationality in Action").
   
   There is no clear explanation of how W defined the class of potential actions, which he called dispositions or inclinations, (now often called propositional attitudes), differentiating them from perceptions, memories and actions and showing how they lack truth value. He notes that W spent much of his time discussing the foundations of mathematics but fails to provide any explanation as to how this relates to his work on language and logic. In fact, as W came to realize, they are all names for groups of functions of our innate psychology with many differences and none are dependent on the others. It is not really made clear that all our behavior depends on the unquestionable axioms of our evolved psychology and thus differs totally from the testable empirical facts which they enable us to discover. It is not explained that W's frequent references to "grammar" and to "language games" refer to our innate psychology. All these failings are the norm in behavioral studies.
   
   Kanterian notes (p41) that in W's first talk on philosophy, given in 1912 at the age of 23, he is reported to have said that philosophy is the totality of all propositions that are taken as unprovable and basic in science. If one understands that "philosophy" is observational psychology, and that "propositions" are sentences which depend for intelligibility (truth) on the innate axioms of our psychology, it appears that W understood the basic problem of philosophy (behavior) and its answer right from the beginning--a feat few have accomplished to this day. He again made this crystal clear in a letter to Russell quoted by Kanterian (p86) in which he stated that the point of TLP :
   
   "is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions -ie. by language-(and which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt) which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy. "
   
   Note also W's identification of thought with language and his rejection of the idea that there is, between language and thought, another entity such as "the language of thought", a point which he discussed directly and indirectly for the next 30 years but which still bedevils behavioral literature nearly a century later--another sad consequence of the oblivion to one of our greatest teachers.
   
   Kanterian describes the famous distinction in W's Tractatus between what can be said and what can only be shown but does not explain that one can understand this in terms of W's later denotation of the difference between our axiomatic innate psychology, which submits to no test (eg, this is my hand, I am reading this page etc), and the factual or empirical applications of this evolved axiomatic system (ie, our intentionality). Perhaps one should not fault Kanterian, since, to my knowledge, nobody else has noticed what I regard as this basic and essential interpretation of W's TLP either--though a few have noticed it in his later work. It is essential to understand this distinction because any description (following W's frequent injunction that we cannot EXPLAIN but only DESCRIBE our psychology) of animal behavior must do so in terms of evolution for the same reasons we must describe the genetics, physiology, anatomy and function of the heart in evolutionary terms. The alternative "blank slate" view that heart functioning is a matter of one's environment is just as preposterous for the brain.
   
   He does a good job (eg, pg 170-171) of describing (as have others, notably Hacker) W's transition from the confusions of TLP to the clarity of his later work, but (again in my view following universal practice) does not really grasp that W's ideas of the "atomic facts" and "crystalline logic" that formed the foundations of his TLP world view evolved into the notions of an innate axiomatic psychology that he explicated for the last 20 years of his life.
   
   He also notes (p80) that by discovering the innateness of "depth grammar" (ie, our inherited psychology that makes language (thought) possible), W anticipated Chomsky and others by decades. I noticed this some 40 years ago but I have never seen anyone else point it out, so it's hats off to Kanterian!
   
   With his penetrating understanding of our psychology, W was also prescient about larger issues such as the desireability of progress.
   
   "It isn't absurd... to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately by known; that there is nothing good or desireable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this in not how things are." ) (Kanterian p114 from W's Culture and Value).
   
   Kanterian quotes, without I think fully understanding its implications (again like everyone else so far as I know), another very fundamental discovery by W--our natural tendency to subsume all uses of a word or sentence under a single meaning rather than recognizing that eg, "space" is a complex family of uses or concepts (language games as W liked to call them) with quite different applications (meanings) in our life (our intentional psychology).
   
   He notes that W described thinking and other dispositions or inclinations (W's terms)-- (ie, judging, feeling, remembering, believing etc)-- as behaviors and not as mental activities but I don't see that he really makes it clear that another pioneering discovery of W's was that dispositions describe public actions and cannot be mental phenomena for the same reason that he so famously rejected the possibility of a private language.
   
   The probable evolutionary explanation for a route to such usage of dispostion words seems to me to be that several hundred thousand years ago (give or take) when we evolved the ability to vocalize events, objects or actions (ie, when an animal as agent was involved), sentences first substituted for them (get spear, hunt deer) and only later became usable in a dispositional or displaced manner (I want you to get the spear, I think we will hunt deer soon). Again, to my knowledge, W was the first to point this out in any detail with such examples as how pain language functions (see p 182).
   
   Kanterian describes (p174) how W (so famously and notoriously ) felt he had put an end to philosophy as it was understood and how most philosophers reject this view (or more commonly simply ignore it if they are aware of it at all), but his comments that this narrows the range of what we can know by abstract thought and that metaphysical questions make no sense, seem to me to completely miss the point. I think W just called our attention to the fact that "knowing" is another set of games or psychological functions which we can only accept as they are. Much (we might say ALL) of W's work can be seen as describing how "knowing" works and his last writings published as "On Certainty" regarded as the crowning achievement of his life (and of 20th century philosophy/psychology). Metaphysical questions have no traction because questioning the axioms of our psychology lacks a use in our life (this is not "really" my hand, maybe 2+2=4 is not "really" true, perhaps you are not reading this page, etc). Abstract thought (games, music, math, literature, science) is limitless but entirely dependent on the axioms.
   
   Kanterian is one of the rare persons who gets it correct (p185) that W rejects a "language of thought" for the same reason he rejects private languages and dispositions such as thinking, believing etc as mental processes(p 180-183); namely that this would make it possible to make systematic mistakes in our "translations" of thoughts to actions (eg, thinking "I want that apple" to saying "I want that apple") which is absurd. A translation could always be wrong and what test could tell us? We lack the criteria for correctness. We would then need some test for showing what we really thought! I might say "I want the apple" or " I don't want the apple" and what connects that to my thought--even for me? The words are my thoughts (approximately) which are descriptions of acts.
   
   Kanterian also mentions that, in spite of the fact that a large percentage of W's writing concerned the philosophy (ie psychology) of mathematics, very little attention is paid to his work by most of those writing on the foundations of math over the last 50 years. Unfortunately he fails to tell us why. One reason is the nearly universal failure to understand what W has done as a result of his originality, style, failure to publish and premature death. Another is that it took so long to properly gather, translate and edit the 20,000 some pages of his nachlass that several generations have grown up without access to the full body of his work. Even to this day some of the German text remains untranslated and one of his most famous and largest works--The Big Typescript--was only translated and published in 2005. In addition, many who were regarded as experts on the subject of math and logic (eg Dummett, Kreisel, Chihara, Godel) totally failed to understand him and much of the writing by others on the foundations of math is not about its psychological foundations at all (of which they are generally oblivious) but about the details of how math is done. The few who have made progress in understanding his mathematical comments have been largely ignored (eg, Gefwert, Shanker) or have published so recently that their work has not had time to diffuse (eg, Rodych, Floyd). Those interested will find further comments and references in my other reviews. I claim that W's work on this is continuous with the rest of his corpus and overall, the most original and stimulating ever done.
   
   He repeatedly and correctly notes (eg, p176) that the core of W's work is the nature of language but (again the universal failing) does not make it clear that language is for humans (as opposed to animals) almost coextensive with thought (public behavior as W insisted) and thus with our evolved psychology. Like most people, philosophers or not, Kanterian has not followed W and taken the final step towards understanding and describing behavior from an evolutionary standpoint, the only viewpoint that makes sense of it, or indeed of anything.



2. Considering there has been two essential biographies written on Wittgenstein, that is Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk, and Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life, 1889-1921 (1988) by Brian McGuinness, both award winning texts, another biography of the famous philosopher seemed to me to be a redundant exercise. What new information has come to light regarding the great philosopher and what possibly could be added to what has already been expertly covered in the above said texts?
   
   Edward Kanterian has done something essential and quite extraordinary with this new biography, and that is he focuses on Wittgenstein's religious sensibilities, revealing the philosopher's strong convictions to keep his spiritual concerns separate from his philosophy. The author also spotlights Wittgenstein's four love relationships, their intenseness, their joy and the deep suffering the man experienced when they ended, two of which, tragically.
   
   The reader should also consider that Wittgenstein has become an industry for academics and journalists comprising to date over 10,000 secondary sources (including a feature film) on the man's work and his life. Kanterian also examines this phenomenon and proposes possible reasons for this plethora of interpretation and interest for Wittgenstein and his work.
   
   Wittgenstein's first true relationship and closest personal friend in the early years before WW1 was the young David Pinsent. Pinsent was a brilliant undergraduate in mathematics, (and a descendant of the famous 18th century philosopher, David Hume) who assisted Wittgenstein in certain experiments. He was also the philosopher's travel companion: very sensitive and a good listener, tragically the boy died in an aeroplane accident in 1918.
   
   Frances Skinner was more than likely the most important person in Wittgenstein's life. He was a mathematician of great potential, a student at Cambridge to become a Wittgenstein "disciple". Wittgenstein told the boy to drop mathematics' and academic life and work with his hands. He followed this advice against the wishes of his parents and other friends. Unfortunately after some years of working and living together, Wittgenstein required distance from the relationship however received word that his beloved Frances died of poliomyelitis in October 1941. Wittgenstein never truly recovered from this loss.
   
   The third important relationship was with an Austrian high society woman by the name of Marguerite Respinger. There is a diary entry included in this book that really expresses Wittgenstein's feeling for her. Of course they never married but remained good friends.
   
   Ben Richards was the fourth intense relationship and Wittgenstein's last. Richards was a strikingly handsome lad, studying medicine at Cambridge. He is described as kind, sensitive and considerate. Wittgenstein felt a selfless love for Richards and when the boy (40 years Wittgenstein's junior) moved on from the relationship, Wittgenstein's letters and diary entries reveal a man with a broken heart - all very moving.
   
   What these diary entries about his relationships reveal is a man capable of a deep kind of love, a joy and suffering simultaneously felt, as only a deep love can create. What I found extraordinary was that Wittgenstein was so cerebral, a master of logic, an accomplished engineer and architect, however was capable of such intense feeling in his relationships and music. I found Kanterian's book to reveal this aspect of the philosopher more so than the other biographies.
   
   To Kanterian's great credit, his expositions on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations are more than likely the most clearly explained interpretations I've ever encountered, making these notoriously difficult works, clear and comprehensible - a pure joy to read.
   
   Ludwig Wittgenstein by Edward Kanterian as part of the Critical Lives Series is a notable contribution to the life and works of the famous philosopher and a text useful for someone thinking about embarking on the Wittgenstein Quest.
   
   Highly recommended.

1 comments about Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena (Publications of the Archive of Scientific Philosophy Series).

1. This book is a collection of articles on Carnap. Interesting for specialists. You should consider the year of publication, the authors and the table of content, if you are interested in it.