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Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
4.9/5 (30676 ratings)
Description:Wittgenstein never did much to encourage the fossicking of amateurs, and in particular loathed phrase-making dilettantes. Yet people of a literary turn with no training in or indeed capacity for rigorous philosophy (let me hasten to include myself among them) will probably go on finding him of high interest. He said that we shouldn’t be seduced by language—an admonition which will continue being useful to those whose business it is to be seduced by language every day of the week. Wittgenstein is The Cure. He is a rhetorician’s way of going on the wagon. This new volume of letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore is a companion piece for the slim collection of letters to Ogden and Ramsay. Those, being mainly technical, were stiff going for the non-professional. These—especially the substantial sheaf of letters to Russell—are of much more various interest. The reader will find himself drawn to speculate about all aspects of Wittgenstein’s strange life. The problem of his personality is, I am sure, eventually insoluble, but that doesn’t mean people are going to stop trying. Most of the letters to Russell stem from the years 1912-21—i.e., from the first Cambridge period up until the publication of the Tractatus. In 1922 came a break in their relationship, of the same kind that severed Wittgenstein from G. B. Moore in Norway in 1914. (Apparently he also quarrelled with Russell in 1914, but Russell’s part of that exchange is not available.) All the intensity of Wittgenstein’s focussed intellect is there from the first ‘There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the true problems of Philosophy.’ Engelmann was quite right in saying that thinking was Wittgenstein’s poetry. ‘I feel like mad.’ He accuses himself of having ‘half a talent’ for thought. Fearing that he will die before being able to publish his ideas, he begs Russell to meet him so that he can explain. But explanation is difficult (it is always encouraging for those of us puzzled by the Tractatus to find that Russell found it hard reading as well) and he has the poet’s reluctance to ‘It bores me BEYOND WORDS to explain. . . it is INTOLERABLE for me to repeat a written explanation which even the first time I gave only with the utmost repugnance.’ A letter from Norway evokes the identikit Wittgenstein whose components everybody knows from Norman Malcolm’s excellent memoir. ‘My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.’ Angst is a continuing theme, screwed to fever pitch by the suspicion that his fellow thinkers don’t find him ‘Dass Moore meine Ideen Dir nicht hat erklären können, ist mir unbegreiflich’—‘I find it inconceivable that Moore wasn’t able to explain my ideas to you.’ (Letters written in German are given in the original as well as in translation, and like all Wittgenstein’s German writings are so transparent they flatter the reader into believing he knows that language quite well.) In December 1919 Russell met Wittgenstein in The Hague and discussed the Tractatus with him for a week. There is a useful quotation from a hitherto unedited letter to Ottoline ‘I told him I could not refute it, and that I was sure it was either all right or all wrong.’ It was difficult to get the book published—a frustration treated more fully in the letters to Engelmann than here. An introduction by Russell was meant to smooth the book’s path to publication, but Wittgenstein did not like what Russell wrote and characteristically did not forbear to say so. He said that once the elegance of Russell’s style had been lost in translation, only ‘superficiality and misunderstanding’ were left. Wittgenstein was incapable of diplomatic flattery, as of any form of give and he was, to that extent, anti-social. It is useful, on this point, to look up the letters to Ogden and see how Wittgenstein found himself unable to say the merest of kind words about The Meaning of Meaning, even after Ogden had knocked himself out translating the Tractatus. Friendship with Wittgenstein was almost impossibly difficult, the demands were so heavy. (‘What a maniac you are!’ wrote Keynes) But he could be generous with his mental treasure, as long as you submitted. He was one of those mentors a pupil has to knuckle under to and eventually break free from. But even the proudest could temporarily forgo their liberty if it meant gaining access to a mind like his. There are many reminders here of a great truth about Wittgenstein which has taken a long time to emerge. His spiritual life was extraordinarily rich. When he said you had to be silent about what you couldn’t speak of he didn’t mean that it wasn’t important—only that it wasn’t philosophical. He himself made the point very clearly in one of his Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker (Salzburg, 1969), when he said that his work (i.e., the book that was later to be the Tractatus) fell into two parts, what was there and what was not—and that the second part was the important one. In English, Wittgenstein devoured pul...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977.. To get started finding Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977., you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
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Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
4.4/5 (1290744 ratings)
Description: Wittgenstein never did much to encourage the fossicking of amateurs, and in particular loathed phrase-making dilettantes. Yet people of a literary turn with no training in or indeed capacity for rigorous philosophy (let me hasten to include myself among them) will probably go on finding him of high interest. He said that we shouldn’t be seduced by language—an admonition which will continue being useful to those whose business it is to be seduced by language every day of the week. Wittgenstein is The Cure. He is a rhetorician’s way of going on the wagon. This new volume of letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore is a companion piece for the slim collection of letters to Ogden and Ramsay. Those, being mainly technical, were stiff going for the non-professional. These—especially the substantial sheaf of letters to Russell—are of much more various interest. The reader will find himself drawn to speculate about all aspects of Wittgenstein’s strange life. The problem of his personality is, I am sure, eventually insoluble, but that doesn’t mean people are going to stop trying. Most of the letters to Russell stem from the years 1912-21—i.e., from the first Cambridge period up until the publication of the Tractatus. In 1922 came a break in their relationship, of the same kind that severed Wittgenstein from G. B. Moore in Norway in 1914. (Apparently he also quarrelled with Russell in 1914, but Russell’s part of that exchange is not available.) All the intensity of Wittgenstein’s focussed intellect is there from the first ‘There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the true problems of Philosophy.’ Engelmann was quite right in saying that thinking was Wittgenstein’s poetry. ‘I feel like mad.’ He accuses himself of having ‘half a talent’ for thought. Fearing that he will die before being able to publish his ideas, he begs Russell to meet him so that he can explain. But explanation is difficult (it is always encouraging for those of us puzzled by the Tractatus to find that Russell found it hard reading as well) and he has the poet’s reluctance to ‘It bores me BEYOND WORDS to explain. . . it is INTOLERABLE for me to repeat a written explanation which even the first time I gave only with the utmost repugnance.’ A letter from Norway evokes the identikit Wittgenstein whose components everybody knows from Norman Malcolm’s excellent memoir. ‘My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.’ Angst is a continuing theme, screwed to fever pitch by the suspicion that his fellow thinkers don’t find him ‘Dass Moore meine Ideen Dir nicht hat erklären können, ist mir unbegreiflich’—‘I find it inconceivable that Moore wasn’t able to explain my ideas to you.’ (Letters written in German are given in the original as well as in translation, and like all Wittgenstein’s German writings are so transparent they flatter the reader into believing he knows that language quite well.) In December 1919 Russell met Wittgenstein in The Hague and discussed the Tractatus with him for a week. There is a useful quotation from a hitherto unedited letter to Ottoline ‘I told him I could not refute it, and that I was sure it was either all right or all wrong.’ It was difficult to get the book published—a frustration treated more fully in the letters to Engelmann than here. An introduction by Russell was meant to smooth the book’s path to publication, but Wittgenstein did not like what Russell wrote and characteristically did not forbear to say so. He said that once the elegance of Russell’s style had been lost in translation, only ‘superficiality and misunderstanding’ were left. Wittgenstein was incapable of diplomatic flattery, as of any form of give and he was, to that extent, anti-social. It is useful, on this point, to look up the letters to Ogden and see how Wittgenstein found himself unable to say the merest of kind words about The Meaning of Meaning, even after Ogden had knocked himself out translating the Tractatus. Friendship with Wittgenstein was almost impossibly difficult, the demands were so heavy. (‘What a maniac you are!’ wrote Keynes) But he could be generous with his mental treasure, as long as you submitted. He was one of those mentors a pupil has to knuckle under to and eventually break free from. But even the proudest could temporarily forgo their liberty if it meant gaining access to a mind like his. There are many reminders here of a great truth about Wittgenstein which has taken a long time to emerge. His spiritual life was extraordinarily rich. When he said you had to be silent about what you couldn’t speak of he didn’t mean that it wasn’t important—only that it wasn’t philosophical. He himself made the point very clearly in one of his Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker (Salzburg, 1969), when he said that his work (i.e., the book that was later to be the Tractatus) fell into two parts, what was there and what was not—and that the second part was the important one. In English, Wittgenstein devoured pul...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977.. To get started finding Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright, assisted by B.F. McGuinness. Cornell Univ. Press. 1977., you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.
Pages
Format
PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition
Publisher
Release
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