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
International intrigue, scholarly arrogance, and eccentric personalities populate this examination of what the Dead Sea Scrolls really tell us. Since their discovery by Bedouins in the 1940s, the scrolls have been variously used as a springboard for academic careers, patriotic propaganda for the modern state of Israel, and material for the spinning of ancient conspiracy theories. Silberman (A Prophet from Amongst You, 1993, etc.) presents both a stunning indictment of the small cadre of scholars who controlled access to the scrolls for decades and a marvelous revisionist reconstruction of the ancient community that produced the scrolls. He argues convincingly that the cloistered, middle-class scholars who transcribed the scrolls and exclusively published their contents at a glacial pace until a series of highly publicized recent actions were blind to what the scrolls revealed. Rather than the quietist religious community living in the desert before the first century ce that has been standard fare since the earliest publications of the scrolls, Silberman provides a commanding defense of the oft-maligned theory that the Qumran community lived and wrote as an underground anti-imperial revolutionary group during the same period that produced Christianity. Silberman's careful laying out of evidence should create a reasonable doubt in most readers' minds that the circumstances described in the scrolls make much more sense in a first century ce context than in the earlier period previously accepted. And his presentation of early Christians as a group from the same milieu, but who abandoned militancy and nationalism in favor of a message of love that was tolerable to the Roman colonizers, equally undermines what he sees as an unwarranted implication of the superiority of Christianity over Judaism in scrolls research. (For more on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. TK.) Silberman takes sides, but he comes across as fair and judicious. His depiction of the interplay between ancient history and its manipulation by nations, quacks, and petty academics is terrific.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13982-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Sometimes perceptive scenes from the life of a rabbi, as observed through the eyes of a Catholic journalist. Both uneasy hybrids, rabbi and book seek the spiritual but often bog down in the mundane. Wilkes, whose In Mysterious Ways (1990) profiled a parish priest who was stricken with cancer, here attaches himself to Jay Rosenbaum, the 42-year-old rabbi of a midsize Conservative synagogue in Worcester, Mass., who is himself the son of a pulpit rabbi. How does a rabbi stem the Jewish tide of assimilation and indifference in a society where his people have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams? Wilkes has remarkable access to Rosenbaum's long days—not all parts of which are so interesting for a man who is both the synagogue's spiritual leader and chief bottle washer- -and we are privy to the rabbi as he counsels noncongregants who want to raise their baby as a Jew even though the expectant mother has no desire to convert to Judaism; leads an acculturation class for Russian immigrants, where sometimes only one or two pupils show up; officiates at a ritual circumcision of the son of marginally observant Jews; visits a congregant who is dying of Alzheimer's; hustles to get congregants to join a trip to Israel that he's leading; tells a tale about a Hebrew-speaking parakeet to the Jewish day school's nursery school class; and haggles with the synagogue's board of directors over a new contract. Several congregants confide to Wilkes that the rabbi is unknowable; to the reader he appears under-appreciated, very caring and very frustrated, but also naive and presumptuous in his desire to make his congregants observant Jews. His wife, overweight and depressed, briefly confides her unhappiness with never seeing her husband; more from this insightful rebbitzen would have been welcome. Wilkes follows the rabbi on the congregational tour of Israel, but it's a choppy, pretty banal travelogue. Also annoying is his sometimes wide-eyed appreciation of his subject as evinced by his references to Rosenbaum as a Moses and as the person charged with the care of his congregants' souls. More respectful reportage than rigorous analysis, Wilkes's latest effort begs the question: If, as statistics proffered here suggest, two-thirds of American Jews today are not affiliated with a synagogue, who's going to buy a book on the nuts and bolts of a rabbi's world?
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-87113-561-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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