An invaluable contribution to the scholarship of Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein’s private notebooks provide welcome context to his first masterpiece.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), the only book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime, is among the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century. Famously, he wrote much of the book while fighting as a volunteer for the Austro-Hungarian Army against Russia in World War I. Throughout this period of his life, he kept a series of notebooks that contained a draft of the Tractatus on the recto pages and a private journal, written in code, on the verso pages. Incredibly, until now, the verso pages have never been published in English. Poetry scholar and critic Perloff noticed this oversight early in the pandemic when, turning to Wittgenstein for comfort, she reread his journals in German. In bringing this text to the English-reading world, Perloff has done a great service to scholars and students of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings give the impression of being unattached to their author. Consequently, to read him in an autobiographical mode—whether longing for his friends, complaining about his comrades, documenting his frequency of masturbation, or praying—as he is composing the Tractatus is to have that work humanized. More than anything, the notebooks describe his frustrations with the amount and quality of his work. Again and again, the crystalline insights he seeks remain on “the tip of my tongue.” In the last of three notebooks (the others are lost), Wittgenstein is moved to the front lines of the war. “Perhaps,” he writes, “the proximity to death will bring me the light of life!” Over the course of the narrative, his attitude toward life shifts from mystical indifference to the realization, achieved only after being fired at, that “I now have such a strong wish to live!” At the same time, his work broadens, “from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.”
An invaluable contribution to the scholarship of Wittgenstein.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-09080-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.
Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.
Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668057858
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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