Many readers will agree that we are currently living in “demented times,” and Sigmund adeptly lays out a history that has...
The course of Western philosophy was profoundly altered by the work of a small band of Vienna intellectuals a century ago. Sigmund (Emeritus, Mathematics/Univ. of Vienna; Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, 2017, etc.) tells their story.
The turn of the 20th century begat a significant rethinking in philosophy, away from a “muddled metaphysics” and toward a logical foundation for all of science and mathematics. David Hilbert posed unsolved problems in math, Einstein published his special relativity theory, and physicists Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann famously debated whether atoms existed. The author, one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory, traces these ideas through the members of the Vienna Circle, from informal pre–World War I gatherings through the group’s formal inception in 1924 to its dissolution following Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The group held weekly lectures at the university followed by discussions at the local coffeehouses. Principal members were philosophers Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, mathematicians Hans Hahn and Karl Menger, and the left-wing social reformer Otto Neurath, but there were many visiting luminaries, including Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and later, Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper. Sigmund does not dwell on the abstruse word and language issues strenuously debated by the circle so much as sketch the colorful lives and loves of the members and their friends against the demented backdrop of interwar Vienna. The high unemployment and hyperinflation of post-1918 Vienna proved fertile ground for extreme ideologies and fanaticism, with the growth of national socialist parties as well as a deepening of a long-existent anti-Semitism. Schlick was assassinated, and once the Third Reich was in place, circle members and their friends fled. Fortunately, many found academic posts in England or America, in this way spreading the seeds of positivism in the West.
Many readers will agree that we are currently living in “demented times,” and Sigmund adeptly lays out a history that has great relevance for today.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09695-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
