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Title: On Wittgenstein by Jaakko Hintikka ISBN: 0-534-57594-3 Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company Pub. Date: 27 December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: unusual angel, jargony and a bit mean
Comment: I found this book to have used jargon and brevity at the points when it critiques LW and to be mean-spirited when it mentions the works of others. The author also takes an approach to LW's worh through a questionable diagnosis that he was dyslexic. While this an interesting angle, it's not enough to hang an introduction on.
Finally, the book has numerous spelling and other editing errors.
Rating: 1
Summary: An utterly useless and ill-informed book
Comment: Hintikka has no sensibility whatsoever for understanding Wittgenstein's achievements in logic and the philosophy of psychology. He treats LW as a 'dyslexic' with personality issues due to his abandonment of great wealth. Rarely have I read a published work on LW which shows so little understanding of what he accomplished, especially in his post-TRACTATUS period of enormous intellectual fertility. LW's LATER work has been a source of inspiration in psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics to those who truly made the effort to understand what he was doing. Hintikka strikes me as utterly out of his depth here, perhaps because he is incapable of liberating himself from his irritating proclivity toward logicist regimentation. There is not a shred of insight in this meagre little book, but a whole load of self-flattery. Indeed, Hintikka regales the fine work of Peter Hacker as "less ambitious" - and that about a man who has spent his entire academic life producing several lengthy volumes of exegesis on the work of Wittgenstein, as well as several highly original Wittgensteinian analyses in book form. This was a paltry and often contemptuous little piece of work. Ignore it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Concise, helpful
Comment: I hesitated to review Hintikka's book, for having found it helpful marks me as one who isn't in a position to know if Hintikka isn't perhaps dead wrong in his interpretations. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to endorse this book. Many of us who have been introduced to W through his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (PI) have, at some point, attempted to make sense of the Tractatus (the only book W published in his lifetime) and of the continuities and breaks between W's early, middle, and later work. Hintikka outlines a striking and plausible story of development in W's thought. Hintikka does an especially nice job in explaining the elementary objects of the Tractatus and of interpreting them as tightly related to but crucially distinct from Russell's (phenomenological) objects of acquaintance. Next, Hintikka presents specific problems that W grappled with in his unpublished notebooks, problems that led W (in 1929) to give up aiming at phenomenological language and to treat of physical language. Hintikka follows with a discussion of problems that later led W to focus on language games. Hintikka distinguishes between "primary" and "secondary" language games and uses the distinction to mark central points in the PI. Hintikka also gives advice for reading W's works, taking into account their structural tendencies, tendencies that Hintikka believes were exacerbated by W's (purported) dyslexia. Be advised that a few sentences, located in various spots in Hintikka's book, got mangled somewhere along the production line. But the attentive reader should be able to translate what was intended. To conclude: even if Hintikka's interpretation were shown to be wrong, he has produced a concise introduction that enables its reader to follow up by actually reading the Tractatus (I did). This is no small feat!
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Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability by Peter Pesic ISBN: 0262162164 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Radiant Cool: A Novel of Theory of Consciousness by Dan Edward Lloyd, Dan Lloyd ISBN: 0262122596 Publisher: Bradford Book Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary Marcus ISBN: 0465044050 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 16 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN: 0300102291 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 10 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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