Books like Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty — picked by fans

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!

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.

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.

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.

This book was instrumental in introducing the English-speaking world to Modern Art. As criticism, it taught readers how to appreciate Neo-Impressionism. But it was also a seminal contribution to Anglo-American philosophy. By demanding an answer to the question “What is Art?” Bell set the agenda for subsequent philosophers who sought to develop a definition of art in response. Bell’s own answer is that something is art if and only if it possesses significant form which itself is the cause of aesthetic emotions. Bell’s emphasis on significant form earned him a reputation as one of the foremost Philosophical Formalists.

I love this book because it problematizes a popular assumption among contemporary Anglo-American authors who like to call themselves “analytic philosophers” and who only care to acknowledge the existence of a few past philosophers, e.g., Russell and Ryle. The assumption is that philosophers, such as the latter two, tackled in an apolitical “noble” fashion metaphysical matters.

Akehurst, by his turn, indicates how the likes of Russell and Ryle aligned themselves with a right-wing British policy whose “vulgar” propaganda is echoed throughout works published by British philosophers in the first half of the 20th century.

Also, I appreciate Akehurst’s way of showing that while contributing to the creation of the so-called “analytic-continental gap,” this attitude helped to naturalize the attribution of the shortness of logos to German philosophers like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. 

Mysticism and Logic is a significant work written by British philosopher Bertrand Russell. It has always been a favorite of mine as it engages two seemingly contradictory aspects of human thought: mysticism and logic.

He delves into the nature of mystical experiences and attempts to analyze them with the principles of logical reasoning. By exploring these contrasting perspectives, Russell invites readers to question and critically examine different ways of understanding the world and reality. While acknowledging the profound influence of mystical experiences on human thought and culture, he subjects mystical beliefs and experiences to logical scrutiny.

By applying principles of rationality, he challenges the coherence and evidential basis of mystical claims. This critical evaluation encourages us to approach mystical experiences with a balanced and critical mindset that I feel is at the heart of neurotheology.

Moore’s book seems exemplary to me because it offers a broad historical picture of alternatives in modern philosophy, based on the simple idea that metaphysics is ‘the most general attempt to make sense of things’. 

This connects philosophy to everyday experience, which relies precisely on how we make sense of things.

I like the fact that the book allows one to ask questions about the sense knowledge makes of the world, given that much of the sense we make actually comes through active participation in the world, for example in listening to or playing music, or, indeed, in doing philosophy in relation to a real world problem.

Far too many math books are written in a style so terse and ungenerous that all but the most mathematically gifted readers hardly have a fair chance of understanding.

On the other hand, the discursive style of much philosophy of mathematics gains readability at the expense of formal rigor. Button and Walsh strike the perfect balance in this exceptionally rich introduction to model theory from a distinctively philosophical perspective.

There’s no getting around the fact that the mathematics of model theory is hard going. But this book works through all the relevant proofs in clear and detailed terms (no lazy “we leave this as an exercise for the reader”), and the authors are always careful to motivate each section with well-chosen philosophical concerns right up front.

An Everest, but worth it.

Perhaps my favourite philosophy book of all time. Humans have the unique ability to take a detached view of our lives and actions. Call this an objective perspective. Thomas Nagel argues that many of our philosophical problems – such as the attempt to understand free will, or consciousness – stem from a clash between the subjective and objective standpoints. For example, we believe (subjectively), that we are free, that we have free will, that we can raise our right arm, or choose whether or not to go to shopping. But from an objective perspective we might reflect that, like everything else in the universe, we are governed by causal laws. A beautiful writer, Nagel can make the most complex issues seem simple. He will make you feel cleverer than you are! The View From Nowhere is my model for how philosophy books should be written.