I’ve been a philosopher before I knew what philosophers were: asking questions to challenge the starting points for conversations. My biggest pet peeve has always been people who were sure they entirely understood something. While scientists conduct science to help learn about the world, philosophers of science like me study science to try to figure out how it works, why (and when) it’s successful, and how it relates to human concerns and society. Humans ultimately invent science, and I think it’s fascinating to consider how its features relate to our interests and foibles and how it’s so successful at producing knowledge and practical abilities.
The Vienna Circle was a group of polymaths—primarily scientists and philosophers—who held weekly meetings in Vienna between the World Wars. This book is by far the best retelling of their story, and it’s fascinating.
While their names aren’t well known, their work had tremendous influence. They prominently shaped the reception and understanding of Einstein’s new theories of relativity, began the use of simple images to communicate information without words, and introduced logical developments that eventually led to computers and other technology.
From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history
On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelboeck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelboeck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group…
I was a participant in the D.C. punk scene during the 1980s and helped start an organization known as Positive Force. I remember hearing about the group “Parents of Punkers,” the head of which compared punk to a violent cult. They would go on television and scare watchers about what their kids might be doing. I remember at the time that this missed the realities of my own experiences and made me want to protest this moral panic. But I knew this required some distance from the “punk rock world” I had inhabited. I kept thinking about writing this book and the timing was right.
From Martin’s expansive look at things, let’s move onto a more granular approach – Fournier’s Double Nickels. Fournier focuses on just one band and an album (albeit a double record album and one of the best to come out of punk in the 1980s). The Minutemen played a fast, discordant music that sounded like jazz as much as hardcore thrash music. Fournier’s examination turns up something few people consider, that punk wasn’t all about blistering music but rather sophisticated in its nature. Fournier documents how the bassist in the band, Mike Watt, had extended conversations with one of the most important artists associated with 1980s punk – Raymond Pettibon (who as of now has made his way into accomplished art museums and galleries). They talked about everything from Ludwig Wittgenstein to James Joyce. Band members supposedly got into heated debates about history and would stop at public libraries while…
In recent years, the Minutemen have enjoyed something of a revival, due to both a chapter in Michael Azerrad's book "Our Band Could Be Your Life", and a feature length documentary film, "We Jam Econo", showcasing the band's legacy. (And having a song serve as the theme for MTV's "Jackass" show doesn't hurt, either.) To date, though, the band's actual work hasn't been the subject of much attention - everything has focused on either the interpersonal relationships that made the Minutemen so distinctive or the sudden and tragic death of guitarist/singer D. Boon. This book shines a light on the…
I am a graduate in Philosophy with a Masters degree in Contemporary Culture so this theme is enormously interesting for me. My passion has been shifting from literature to contemporary society and culture in general. I love to find the connexions between the current state of affairs and the past. I honestly think that if we look at the lives and times of the great thinkers we can get hints about the state of contemporary society. Understanding what makes us behave and think the way we do it is my main motivation.
The figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein has always been quite enigmatic for me.
The enormous contradictions of his life and the intensity of it are difficult to understand in the abstract. Ray Monk's biography contextualizes the life and work of the Austrian philosopher who set out to solve all the problems of philosophy.
Monk's biography stands as a testament to Wittgenstein's enduring influence on our understanding of language, thought, and reality.
I am an honorary senior fellow at Keele University and have written books on philosophy, art history, and archaeology. In philosophy one of my main interests is the comparative analysis of a wide range of philosophical approaches to the question of the meaning of life.
The author explains the views of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, William James, Proust, Wittgenstein, and Camus.
He reminds us that: “What we find in these writers’ work is not abstract theories: we find actual people, breathing, vulnerable individuals who when they reflect on life and death also reflect on their own living and dying.”
The book ends not with a grand conclusion but with a joke which, given that life is sometimes viewed as an ‘awful joke’, may be quite appropriate.
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the joke is good or bad.
What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville,…
I am a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Ten years ago, I switched my research focus from solid-state physics to the history of that subject. This was fertile ground because professional historians of science had almost completely ignored solid-state physics. I began my new career by writing two journal articles about the physicist Walter Kohn and his discovery of what became the most accurate method known to calculate the properties of solids. This experience led me to broaden my perspective and ultimately produce a biography of the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. My next book will be a historical-sociological study of self-identity and disciplinary boundaries within the community of physicists.
The brilliant and enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer was the man who led the effort to create the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during World War II. I value this biography because author Ray Monk does full justice to his subject’s science—the science that put Oppenheimer’s Berkeley research group at the center of American theoretical physics in the 1930s. Best of all, Monk’s elegant writing makes even familiar episodes come alive. I felt I was watching a car crash in slow motion as I read how Oppenheimer’s complex personality and political naivete led him to underestimate his political enemies and wind up stripped of his security clearance and his influence as a government advisor.
An unforgettable story of discovery and unimaginable destruction and a major biography of one of America’s most brilliant—and most divisive—scientists, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center vividly illuminates the man who would go down in history as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer’s talent and drive secured him a place in the pantheon of great physicists and carried him to the laboratories where the secrets of the universe revealed themselves. But they also led him to contribute to the development of the deadliest weapon on earth, a discovery he soon came to fear. His attempts to resist the…
At one point in my life, I took Ph.D. classes in the morning, taught philosophy in the afternoon, and tended bar at night. I was always working, and money was tight. Then, one day at a faculty meeting, my colleagues and I discussed developing an appealing new course. I suggested one on the philosophy of work and ended up teaching it and writing my dissertation on work and moral values. I loved teaching the class to the part-time students. They came to class straight from work and shared their experiences. Those students taught me more about work than any book in the library. Years later, I wrote The Working Life.
This is a wise and witty philosophical reflection on the meaning of games and life. Suits asks: If we didn’t ever have to work again, would we have to replace work with things like the housebuilding game or the lawyer game? If so, would the game about work satisfy the need to work?
In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," said the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a "shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of applied entomology," Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal…
I am a philosopher of language (and of art) and have been for 30+ years. Why philosophy of language? Well, it encourages a certain salutary kind of self-consciousness—which is extremely valuable to philosophy—and facilitates greater rigor. But it only got going some one hundred and twenty years ago. So it's modern(ish) as well as deep. And whereas it might seem a narrow slice of the philosophical pie, it isn't; it seems to provide fruitful ways of thinking for almost any philosophical subject. For example, rather than 'What is X?', we ask 'What do we mean by "X"?'; a subtle difference perhaps but the change in perspective might be a key.
I first read this book at age twenty-one and have never stopped returning to it. It gets better and deeper each time.
Ludwig teaches that language and reality are bound up in so many ways. It also contains some famous themes and head-scratchers, such as language games, family resemblance, private language, and rule-following, discussed, as always, in a non-technical way.
Incorporating significant editorial changes from earlier editions, the fourth edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is the definitive en face German-English version of the most important work of 20th-century philosophy The extensively revised English translation incorporates many hundreds of changes to Anscombe's original translation Footnoted remarks in the earlier editions have now been relocated in the text What was previously referred to as 'Part 2' is now republished as Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment , and all the remarks in it are numbered for ease of reference New detailed editorial endnotes explain decisions of translators and identify references and…
I’m a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University and have been working for years trying to understand the causes of and methods of resolving religious conflicts. I studied the Middle Ages thinking that I’d find a story about Catholic fundamentalists persecuting innovative thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, I found a story about religious leaders such as Pope Innocent III, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas borrowing ideas from the Greeks, Muslims, and Jews, revolutionizing Catholic thought, and opening the door to modern ideas about the power of reason and the need for compassion. What a trip!
Readers seriously interested in the continuing influence of Aristotle on Western and global thinking will find the short book of Sir Anthony Kenney’s essays both useful and enjoyable. The author, a well-known authority on the history of Western philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes with panache on a wide variety of topics relevant to Aristotelian thought and modern intellectual and social life.
During most of the Christian millennia Aristotle has been the most influential of all philosophers. This selection of essays by the eminent philosopher and Aristotle scholar Anthony Kenny traces this influence through the ages. Particular attention is given to Aristotle's ethics and philosophy of mind, showing how they provided the framework for much fruitful development in the Middle Ages and again in the present century. Also included are some contributions to the most recent form of Aristotelian scholarship, computer-assisted stylometry. All who work on Aristotle and his intellectual legacy will find much to interest them in these Essays on the…
A bookworm and word lover from the get-go, I always pushed back a bit on society’s expectations that we all act like extroverts. I studied philosophy at school, taught it for a few years, but quit academic life to become a freelance writer and then a marketing expert. When I took a personality test sometime around 2008 and realized I was an introvert – and a fairly extreme one at that – I began seeing more and more ways in which our culture misunderstands and disparages introverts. Now retired from marketing, I explore prejudices against introverts and introverts’ special talents in my weekly newsletter, Introvert UpThink.
In most introvert-theme fiction, not much “happens.” Instead, the author focuses on the texture of characters’ thoughts, experiences, and memories. I found this novel, by an Austrian writer not well known in the English-speaking world, fascinating for two reasons. First, it explores the life, work, and thinking process of an obsessive genius – someone introverted to the nth degree. And second, it does so in a book of just two paragraphs, going on and on in musical prose where the repetitive rhythms of the sentences have just as much impact as what they’re narrating. The architectural genius in Correction is partly based on Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which added interest for me since I find Wittgenstein a uniquely inspiring figure.
The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together—literally, from thousands of slips of papers and one troubling manuscript—the puzzle of Rotheimer’s breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.
I
finally managed to read this book en route from Cambridge to London – my usual
commute to the SOAS office, which has helped with reading the amount of books
indicated above, especially during train strikes.
Okay, the book is Eurocentric
like most Western philosophy, and yes, it should have had more exposure to other
‘magicians’ of thought.
But in entertaining and repeatedly hilarious prose,
Eilenberger teases out some extremely interesting anecdotes of some of the most prominent minds of human history: philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Martin
Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer who shaped almost everything
that we know. Their knowledge appears in places that you and I never expected.
AN ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth century
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of Europe's wealthiest families, signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with Husserl's phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama. Over the next decade…
