I have been reading Wittgenstein since I was an undergraduate student in the mid-nineties. Later in life, I designed courses on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and taught them for almost two decades. I wrote numerous articles on Wittgenstein and became the treasurer, and later the secretary, of the British Wittgenstein Society. My book, Wittgenstein on Other Minds, was first published last year and is now out in paperback. I am currently writing a book titled Wittgenstein’s Lion for Bloomsbury.
I first read Peter Hacker’s Insight and Illusion in its second edition, when studying for my undergraduate degree.
One of the things I loved about it was that its author did not shy away from heavily criticizing his own past interpretation of Wittgenstein in the book’s first edition.
Insight and Illusion was the first single-authored book to cover all phases of Wittgenstein’s life and thought. There have been many excellent introductions to Wittgenstein since then, not least those by Severin Schroeder, Edward Kanterian, and Chon Tejedor, but I&I (as I like to call it) shall always remain my first love.
I was honoured to write the Foreword to its 3rd edition in 2021.
Insight and Illusion
By
Peter Hacker,
What is this book about?
Peter Hacker's Insight and Illusion is a thoroughly comprehensive examination of the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought from the Tractatus to his later 'mature' phase. This is a reprint of the revised and corrected 1989 edition, with a new foreword by Constantine Sandis. Hacker's book is now widely regarded as the best single volume study covering both the 'early' and the 'later' Wittgenstein. Until this third edition, the book had been out of print for 25 years.
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty was the first book to offer a serious systematic treatment of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published final notes On Certainty.
As well as giving rise to the notion of a ‘Third Wittgenstein’, whose thoughts have moved beyond both his first book (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and his second work (Philosophical Investigations), Moyal-Sharrock’s groundbreaking work paved the way for Hinge Epistemology.
Based on Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a hinge for those ungrounded underpinnings of knowledge (without which we could not even have any true or false beliefs), this school of thought has brought Wittgenstein back into mainstream philosophy with a vengeance.
Love, love, love!
Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty
By
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock,
What is this book about?
This book sheds unprecedented light on Wittgenstein's third masterpiece, On Certainty , clarifying his thoughts on basic beliefs and rebuttal of scepticism. As an introduction and commentary on Wittgenstein's final major philosophical work, Moyal-Sharrock's book will prove an indispensable guide to the student, scholar and general reader.
This is the Inspiring true story of a young girl surviving Mengele’s hell. This is an incisive, harrowing, and touching memoir of Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam, who are sent to Auschwitz only to be torn from their parents and given to Josef Mengele, "The Angel of…
One of the many reasons why I love Marie McGinn’s book is that she distinguishes ‘the real problem of others’ from the philosophical problem of 'other minds'.
McGinn’s discussion is informed both by Wittgenstein’s work and by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the various uncertainties that are rooted in the lived experience of our coexistence with others.
While Wittgenstein was pessimistic about our ability to understand one another, McGinn takes care to point out that he was "deeply opposed to the idea that our everyday doubts about others amount to a way of 'living scepticism'." Our doubts about others, no matter how justified, are no vindication of any form of scepticism.
Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism
By
Marie McGinn,
What is this book about?
Central to any interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is an understanding of his philosophical method and the nature of the turn which characterises the evolution from his early to his later work. In the essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism, Marie McGinn argues that this methodological shift has at its heart a highly distinctive form of naturalism, which has its roots in the works of Goethe. This form of naturalism emphasises achieving a clarified view of complex, natural phenomena in their natural setting, with a view to describing patterns and connections that are in plain view. Wittgenstein is seen as…
The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value
By
Chon Tejedor,
Why I love this book
I absolutely love this groundbreaking book because it offers a new interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which cuts across all of the major interpretations to date.
The uniqueness of Tejedor's position lies in her metaphysically neutral and ethically endowed understanding of conceptual elucidation as involving practical understanding and ability.
This is Wittgenstein scholarship at its very best: a reading that draws careful insight from that debate and then moves beyond it. Moreover, it reaches a highly positive conclusion on the ethical transformation that philosophy, done properly, can have.
The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value
By
Chon Tejedor,
What is this book about?
This book advances a reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus that moves beyond the main interpretative options of the New Wittgenstein debate. It covers Wittgenstein's approach to language and logic, as well as other areas unduly neglected in the literature, such as his treatment of metaphysics, the natural sciences and value. Tejedor re-contextualises Wittgenstein's thinking in these areas, plotting its evolution in his diaries, correspondence and pre-Tractatus texts, and developing a fuller picture of its intellectual background. This broadening of the angle of view is central to the interpretative strategy of her book: only by looking at the Tractatus in this richer…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
No top five list of books on Wittgenstein would be complete without Ray Monk’s magisterial biography Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.
This was the first biography to cover Wittgenstein’s entire life. It possesses the rare achievement of relating difficult philosophical ideas to the subject’s personality in a manner that remains highly readable without sacrificing depth.
I challenge anyone to read it and not want to then read Wittgenstein’s works!
Traditionally, the ‘problem of other minds’ is that of how one can ever know for certain what anybody else is thinking or feeling. Taken to its limits, it questions how one can even be certain that others have minds at all. In his later philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein maintained that such scepticism about other minds emerges as the result of philosophical confusion. It doesn’t follow from this, however, that other people cannot be an enigma to us. Indeed, in his personal writings, Wittgenstein obsesses over his failure to understand others and be understood by them.
My book, Wittgenstein on Other Minds, explores the connection between these two areas of Wittgenstein's thought, touching on topics as wide-ranging as friendship, intercultural understanding, animal thought, historical explanation, and AI-mediated communication.
Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The Twenty is a journey across a rugged island of stunning beauty, little known outside Europe.
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica —…
Ancient Evenings is a study of consciousness presented as a series of fictional philosophical dialogues set at the height of the Roman Empire. These dialogues—on good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death—are historical re-enactments of what persons representing the major Hellenistic schools of philosophy might actually have said…
