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
A smart collection of articles and interviews on stupidity.
Are people getting dumber, or does it just look that way?
That question underlies this collection of essays by and interviews with psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, and other well-credentialed intellectuals. A handful of contributors have ties to North American universities—Dan Ariely, Alison Gopnik, and Daniel Kahneman among them—but most live in France, and their views have a Gallic flavor: blunt, opinionated, and tolerant of terms in disfavor in the U.S., including, as translated from the French by Schillinger, moron, idiot, and imbecile. Marmion, a France-based psychologist, sets the tone by rebutting the idea that we live in a “golden age of idiocy”: “As far back as the written record extends, the greatest minds of their ages believed this to be the case.” Nonetheless, today’s follies differ in two ways from those of the past. One is that the stakes are higher: “The novelty of the contemporary era is that it would take only one idiot with a red button to eradicate all stupidity, and the whole world with it. An idiot elected by sheep who were only too proud to choose their slaughterer.” The other is that—owing partly to social media—human follies are more visible, whether they involve UFO sightings or “some jerk pressing the elevator button like a maniac when it’s already been pressed.” Social psychologist Ewa Drozda-Senkowska distinguishes between ignorance and stupidity, noting that “stupidity, true stupidity, is the hallmark of a frightening intellectual complacency that leaves absolutely no room for doubt.” Other experts consider whether stupidity has an evolutionary basis, how it erodes morale, and the “very particular kind of adult stupidity” exemplified by Donald Trump. Although not a self-help guide, this book suggests that it rarely pays to argue with blockheads. Unfortunately, notes neuropsychologist Sebastian Dieguez, the “imbecile…doesn’t have the mental resources that would permit him to perceive his own imbecility.”
A smart collection of articles and interviews on stupidity.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313499-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A powerful personal remembrance about the search for God amid communist intolerance.
A debut memoir recounts a lawyer’s courageous stand for religious freedom in Romania.
As a little girl, Prodan, now an international human rights attorney, always felt painfully set apart; her red hair and freckles distinguished her from the remainder of her family, and her mother, Elena, treated her cruelly. She was raised in Techirghiol, a small town ravaged by poverty, like so much of Romania suffering under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She found a reprieve from the bleakness of her environs by devouring literature and later decided, as a partisan of justice and truth, to become an attorney. The author traveled to Bucharest to take her law school admissions exams and stayed with her affectionate Aunt Cassandra, who bore such a striking resemblance to her that Cassandra was often mistaken for her mother. At the time, Prodan considered the possibility that Cassandra was, in fact, her mother, although it remained unclear why Elena assumed the role, however coldly. Eventually, Prodan became a practicing attorney, married her first boyfriend from law school, and gave birth to two daughters. After years of feeling lost amid relatives, she finally found a home among a family of her own creation. But she discovered a deeper sense of peace in religion and started defending clients whose constitutional rights to religious expression were systematically denied by the government. The author’s efforts to catch the attention of the U.S. government, under the tutelage of President Ronald Reagan, caused the Ceaușescu administration to intensify its efforts to stymie her activism. Prodan was forced to risk her life, and the lives of her family, to maintain her religious and political convictions. The author paints a vividly disturbing tableau of the brutality of Romanian Communism and the chilling manner in which Ceaușescu feigned political liberality to the world while practicing totalitarianism at home. While it’s a memoir written in the first person, the book reads like a suspenseful thriller that also thoughtfully reflects on the moral value of freedom. At times, Prodan’s prose flirts with melodrama, and there are few moments of lightheartedness to leaven the book’s gloomy tone, but this remains a potent indictment of autocracy and a searing testament to human courage.
A powerful personal remembrance about the search for God amid communist intolerance.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4964-1183-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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