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This radical new reading suggests that Wittgenstein is best understood as a covert Jewish thinker in times of lethal anti-Semitism. The argument first establishes that there was one Wittgenstein, not an "early" and a "later." By looking afresh at the role of the Bible, God, Augustine, Otto Weininger, and science, among other things, in Wittgenstein's thought, Ranjit Chatterjee shows how well Wittgenstein matches with Jewish tradition because he had internalized talmudic and rabbinic modes of thought. An abundance of evidence is brought forward of Wittgenstein's Jewish self-identification from his writings and from remarks noted in conversations by his closest friends. Written in an engaging style, this powerful and unexpected understanding of Wittgenstein includes a chapter on his relation to postmodernism (Levinas and Derrida), a personal epilogue, an appendix on his descent, and a full bibliography. ... Read more

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Original and thought-provoking.
Wittgenstein was baptized and died as a Catholic, but three of his four grandparents were Jewish, and anti-Semitism in his native Austria and then in Hitler's Europe did not allow him to forget it. In this beautifully written and stimulating book Dr Chatterjee finds all kinds of hitherto unexplored connections between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Judaism.He finds his clues mainly in Wittgenstein's correspondence, in remarks collected in the posthumous (1980) Culture and Value and in a volume of diaries published only in 1997.In these sources Wittgenstein unequivocally defines himself as a Jew and identifies himself with a Jewish intellectual tradition.That this is not obvious in either the Tractatus or in Philosophical Investigations Chatterjee attributes to the Concealment which forms part of the subtitle of this book.In part, Chatterjee suggests, the concealment was due to the fact that Wittgenstein thought his message was universal and could only suffer if it were burdened with a sectarian interpretation;but, more importantly, because the cryptic way in which Wittgenstein wrote is "reminiscent of ancient rabbinic scholarship" (p.58):the Written Law which stood in need of oral interpretation.Wittgenstein had written to Bertrand Russell that he could not write a commentary on his lapidary sentences, but could explicate only orally what he had written (p.116)In conversation with a friend, Wittgenstein, rejecting Greek philosophy, described his thoughts as "100% Hebraic" (p.103).

It is not possible in this brief review to adduce the very many thought-provoking parallels which Chatterjee sees between what he sees as the Jewish intellectual tradition and Wittgenstein's major works, the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigation.Some readers might think that many of these may be coincidental rather than the result of the conscious or even unconscious influences on Wittgenstein of the Jewish intellectual tradition (which in itself would, if deliberate, be narrowly defined both by Wittgenstein and Chatterjee as the rabbinic tradition).The connections, suggestive though they are, may be speculative - and in fact for the most part Chatterjee flags them up with appropriately cautious formulations. In any case, what can be more exciting than the juxtaposition of similarities which, whether intentional or coincidental, have previously been overlooked.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein is universally recognized as one of the most original and influential philosophers of his age and as a personality of great magnetism and power. Not all who recognize his importance admire him or approve of it; his life and work are both surrounded by controversy. In this welcome reissue of his classic biographical study, complete with a brand-new Preface, Brian McGuinness traces the early years of this fascinating figure and examines the formative influences which shaped his extraordinary life. ... Read more

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A Welcome Look into the Life and Times of a Great Thinker
A good book on the early Wittgenstein (covering the period through the writing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a useful analytical exposition of that work), this book is heavy on personal detail and, unfortunately, rather ponderously written. Nevertheless, for those who are fascinated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his oft-forgotten and frequently misunderstood early philosophy, this is a valuable work.

McGuinness, a scholarly philosopher himself, and acknowledged expert on the Tractatus, traces the young Ludwig's progress from birth to home schooling and, later, to his school days beyond the home (after his father, Karl, had concluded that the two younger Wittgenstein sons, Paul and Ludwig, had not benefitted sufficiently from in-house tutors).

In fact, we learn from this work that the young Ludwig actually was a school mate in Linz, Austria, of the boy, Adolf Hitler, and that the two may have known each other. (Elsewhere it's been suggested, albeit with little supporting evidence, that Hitler may have had Wittgenstein in mind when he wrote about a Jewish boy, years later, who was the source of his anti-Semitism. Wittgenstein, of course, was actually raised Catholic but his family was two thirds Jewish, hailing originally from Germany before settling in Austria.)

After an extensive and insightful look inside the wealthy Wittgenstein home and lifestyle, we follow the biography's principal on to England and his early exposure to philosophy as a young areonautical engineering student seeking to find his own way. After studying engineering in Manchester, he finally seeks out one of the premier philosophers in England of his day, Bertrand Russell, a logician working on the logical underpinnings of mathematics and on refining logic itself in hopes of providing a more scientifically oriented language in which to formulate and cast our knowledge claims. Russell is in correspondence with Gottlob Frege, a German logician pursuing a similar project, and it may have been Frege, McGuinness suggests, who directed Wittgenstein to the English don.

Russell, after some initial misgivings takes on his young "German" (based on the written record, it seems to have been a while before he realized Wittgenstein was, in fact, Austrian, not German) and is soon grooming him to carry on his work. But Wittgenstein, young and aggressively opinionated is also a very high strung personality and the two have a rocky time of it.

Under Russell's tutelage, Wittgenstein undertakes to complete the effort begun by Russell as McGuinness amply documents through Russell's written comments to his lover at the time, Lady Ottoline, and through Rusell's later autobiographical writings. Following Russell and Frege, the young Wittgenstein is obsessed with finding a way to understand everything within a logical framework, including what he comes to conclude must be grasped but which necessarily lies beyond the possibilities of logical expression. To reach that point, Wittgenstein sees it as his project to sketch out the boundaries of what can be said in any sensible way (the extent to which logic can be invoked) and so sets out to explore and define the limits of logic itself.

McGuinness is especially good at finding and recounting a multiplicity of early recollections of Wittgenstein from his famous and not so famous contemporaries including Cambridge scholar and philosopher G. E. Moore, economist John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and others. The accounts sometimes include interesting, if rather snitty, references to the youngish disciple of Russell, as when Strachey alternately refers to him as the "witter-gitter man" or "herr sinckel-winckle," revealing, through such references, his sense of his own self-importance. Nevertheless, Strachey and his colleagues were apparently more than eager to induct Wittgenstein into their elite circle, the so-called Apostles, though Russell advises them against it because of Wittgenstein's temperament. (Russell is ultimately proved right when Wittgenstein seeks to withdraw almost immediately after being accepted and a compromise must be worked out to spare the Apostles the indignity of being rejected by him.)

The death of Wittgenstein's industrialist father and World War I intervene with Wittgenstein back in Vienna for a visit. The young man promptly decides to volunteer to fight for his country but rapidly discovers that he is ill at ease among common soldiers who, he finds, too coarse to be endured. And yet he learns to endure them and gradually comes to be recognized by his superiors, if not his fellows, for his education and talents, rising to become a low level officer in the Austrian army shortly before the war ends (he had entered as an enlisted man) and being decorated several times for valor before finally falling into the hands of the Italian army as a prisoner of war -- as the war winds down.

During the war years, he continued to keep careful notes and to do philosophy by thinking through the various logical problems he had discovered through Russell and Frege and some time between the later fighting and his period as a prisoner of war, he completed his small book laying out his logic-based vision of how what we could say must fit with what there is, that is, how language fits with the world. In the process he determined that there were things we could say (propositions about the world that could be either true or false) and things we could only show, logical statements which reveal in their form something about what we can say but which, themselves, say nothing. Sending his manuscript around in post-war Austria he struggled to get it published but with little success.

It took his old friend and mentor, Russell, to arrange for translation and publication into English (though a less satisfactory German edition was published in Germany to Wittgenstein's dismay). McGuinness' book ends with a summary reading of the points to be found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (a book which got its rather cumbersome name from one of Wittggenstein's old colleagues, G. E. Moore, at Cambridge), with McGuinness' promise of another volume to come dealing with Wittgenstein's subsequent development.

As those with a familiarity with Wittgenstein will know, the young man who wrote the Tractatus (his only book published in his lifetime) believed that, with its completion, he had answered all possible philosophical questions and so went on to what he seems to have expected would be a modest life, earning his living as an elementary school teacher. But his experiences in the non-intellectual world he found in a number of small Austrian villages and, later, through a series of encounters with a group of Viennese philosophers dubbed the logical positivists of the so-called Vienna Circle, who came to consider his Tractatus a seminal work, he was drawn back to philosophy.

Returning to Cambridge to teach in 1929, he moved increasingly away from his earlier way of thinking and recast his whole understanding of language and how it fits with the world. (From a picture theory as presented in the Tractatus, he moved toward a view of language that saw it as embedded in the world and we, its speakers, embedded in it, introducing a slew of new and important and influential new philosophical concepts including "language games", "forms of life", "private language," meaning as use, etc. At the same time he became seminal in an entirely new way of doing philosophy, the method that came to be called linguistic analysis or ordinary language philosophy.)

The new thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein found expression in various unpublished volumes, sometimes reflecting the notes taken by his students (e.g., The Blue and Brown Books) and, finally, in the Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition which he prepared for publication but had not completed at the time of his death. After he died, other material he had written was discovered and published (On Certainty, Remarks on Colour, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, and Culture and Value), leading to the recognition of a Wittgensteinian philosophy that was miles apart from the influential work he had done in his early days.

For an especially good biographical picture of Wittgenstein's full career, the interested reader should try Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

(Another rather interesting book on the man and his ideas can be found in Wittgenstein's Poker: The story of a Ten Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers which captures the one and only meeting between Wittgenstein, by now in his later years, and the upstart Austrian expatriate philosopher Karl Popper* who had spent the Second World War teaching in New Zealand and who ultimately found his way to England. Popper had made it his life's work to challenge and overcome the Vienna Circle's logical positivists, among whom he mistakenly counted Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein's Poker documents the sparks that flew when the two met that one time and clashed over their competing ideas about philosophy.)

Presented with great detail and erudition, Young Ludwig by Brian McGuinness is a substantial tome and a useful edition to the books on the life and thought of one of the twentieth century's most important philosophical thinkers.

SWM

* Mentor of George Soros, among other claims to fame.

New Edition of Prize-winning Biography
Professor McGuinness' Young Ludwig (1988) was the first thoroughly researched and in-depth life history of the philosopher. Over fifteen years passed and the text eventually went out of print. Oxford decided to launch a second edition, with a new preface by McGuinness, enabling the work to be read by a new generation of readers interested in the rich culture and family that contributed to Wittgenstein's thought and the creation of the Tractatus. In fact, the last chapter of the book is devoted entirely to the Tractatus, which to a large extent sheds new light on this often-misunderstood philosophical text.

McGuinness spent many years researching and composing this biography. He travelled throughout Europe, Israel and America, studying countless manuscripts and correspondence, interviewing family and individuals that knew the philosopher, many of whom, unfortunately, have passed on.

This is a detailed analysis of Wittgenstein, painting a rich cultural picture of pre-WW1 Vienna. Wittgenstein's father, Karl, was an extraordinary man in his own right, a capitalist of ingenious talent, creating an empire of extreme wealth and prestige. A creative and forceful personality, similar to his youngest son, along with his wife, was at the centre of the thriving music and art scene in Vienna, where Brahms, Mahler, and Klimt were frequent guests at the house for musical evenings and group discussions on literature, culture and politics. Karl Wittgenstein wrote many economic articles for major publications in Vienna and Germany that continue to be read by historians today.

The family, however, experienced tragedy, with three of Karl's oldest sons committing suicide. Ludwig often considered ending his own life, but experienced a spiritual transformation after WW1, (As many young men who survived experienced after the war) was awarded medals for bravery and ended up a prisoner of war in an Italian camp. It is in this camp that Wittgenstein wrote the finishing touches, from the copious notebooks written during the war, of his only published philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The biography describes the philosopher's war experiences, his time as a prisoner of war and his eventual return to Vienna, where he gave away his massive inheritance, attempted to publish his book, attended teachers college to instruct elementary school and became a gardener for a Catholic monastery.

Unfortunately, the biography ends in 1921, a year before the first publication of the English translation of the Tractutas. I believe in the "philosophical biography" as it can present the family and cultural influences on the philosopher, revealing better insight into the particular ideas and thought processes of that philosopher.

This is a prize winning biography giving the reader greater insight into a unique and extraordinary human being.

Glad to see this classic reissued
It's good to see Brian McGuinness's biography of the first half of Ludwig Wittgenstein's life back in print.There are other worthwhile books on Wittgenstein's life and thought, but none is a substitute for this book.

"Young Ludwig" is the result of years of McGuinness' own research.It draws on his personal discussions and correspondence with members of Wittgenstein's family and friends during which, he tells us in a new preface, he was "reconstructing Wittgenstein's life along with them."This biography shows that he also meticulously tracked down a wide variety of acquaintances and people who had crossed paths with Wittgenstein and Russell.He seems to have ferretted out an amazing variety of documents and other scattered scraps of evidence from unusual places as well as from the usual kinds of sources.The book is densely detailed; even people who know a lot about Wittgenstein from other sources will learn new things about him and his times from this book.(I know this because of the "Really -- I didn't know that!" reactions I often get when mentioning things I've learned from this book to fellow philosophers.)

The book also benefits from McGuinness' role as a philosopher.He has authored many papers on Wittgenstein's philosophy (some recently collected in Approaches to Wittgenstein (Routledge 2002)) and edited anthologies related to it.Young Ludwig exhibits McGuinness' intimate acquaintance with Wittgenstein's intellectual interests and philosophical endeavors during his early years.Along with another Oxford philosopher (David Pears), McGuinness produced a new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.In that related project, his philosophical work was accompanied by substantial historical research: he located, scrutinized, and tried to date and order such manuscripts as could be discovered of Wittgenstein's previous attempts at the work.He dug up and edited and/or translated many works related to Wittgenstein's life and work previously unavailable in English:essays on political economy by Karl Wittgenstein (Ludwig's father),popular scientific essays by Ludwig Boltzmann (whom Ludwig admired and wanted to study physics with), and many, many others.Thus, his work on Wittgenstein scholarship is monumental:writing about Wittgenstein involved establishing a whole collection of sources related to his life and work.

I also happen to like this book a lot.I personally prefer the kind of biography McGuinness has written. You read it slowly, lingering over the groupings of artifacts and remembrances he has brought together and leads you through as a patient guide.You begin to realize how vast the collection is, how much there is to be put together.He does not tell you what to make of everything --- although (as he put it in the preface to the first edition) he does attempt to present Wittgenstein's life "as something capable of being seen as a unity".He pauses at times to address the reader on the significance of a certain detail, on the ambiguities involved in the craft of biography and on more general conundrums involved in making sense of another human being.He tells us not only about his subject, but how he came to know his subject, generously sharing his finds with the reader.It is somehow extremely scholarly and humbly personal at the same time.I like his style because it allows the reader some mental freedom to develop his or her own picture of things from what is known.McGuinness tells us in the new preface that his interest "is not in causes but in effects, in seeing how Wittgenstein (the young Wittgenstein, in this volume) lived out the situation he was in."You will want to have this book for the sheer amount of information it contains (it has an index, too), regardless of your taste in biographical style.

When this book was out of print, I snapped up used copies to loan to students and colleagues. (I would not part with my own.) Now I can tell them what I would tell anyone interested in Wittgenstein's life or early analytic philosophy:we are very fortunate to have this labor of love available to us, and in an affordable edition, too --- how great that now anyone can go get a copy! ... Read more

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The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of recent times on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding - the human condition, philosophically speaking. Describing Ourselvesmines those extensive writings for a conception of the self that stands in striking contrast to its predecessors as well as its more recent alternatives. More specifically, the book offers a detailed discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language.

Garry L. Hagberg undertakes a ground-breaking philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings - among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves - as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls 'the inner picture', mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion, the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness, first-person expressive speech, reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection, the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase), self-defining memory, and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues.

The cast of characters interwoven throughout this rich discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Throughout, conceptual clarifications concerning mind and language are put to work in the investigation of issues relating to self-description and in novel philosophical readings of autobiographical texts. ... Read more

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Ludwig Wittgenstein refers to Heinrich Hertz as one of his major influences. However, up to now it was not clear from where he acquired his knowledge of mechanics and in which way it contributed to his philosophy. The aim of this book is to answer these questions. It shows that Wittgenstein came in contact with Hertz’s physical world view during his studies in Berlin. It had an effect on his view of the natural sciences in the Tractatus, and Hertz's conception of mass-particles led to its central notion of a simple object. It was especially Wittgenstein’s teacher in Berlin, Joseph Petzoldt, who played an important intermediary role. The manuscript of his 1907 course of lectures "Grundbegriffe der Mechanik" is published here for the first time. It is complemented by reprints of related texts on the topic by Neumann, Lange and Petzoldt.

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Wittgenstein's philosophical career began in 1911 when he went to Cambridge to work with Russell. He compiled the Notes on Logic two years later as a kind of summary of the work he had done so far. Russell thought that they were 'as good as anything that has ever been done in logic', but he had Wittgenstein himself to explain them to him. Without the benefit of Wittgenstein's explanations, most later scholars have preferred to treat the Notes solely as an interpretative aid in understanding the Tractatus (which draws on them for material), rather than as a philosophical work in their own right.

Michael Potter unequivocally demonstrates the philosophical and historical importance of the Notes for the first time. By teasing out the meaning of key passages, he shows how many of the most important insights in the Tractatus they contain. He discusses in detail how Wittgenstein arrived at these insights by thinking through ideas he obtained from Russell and Frege. And he uses a challenging blend of biography and philosophy to illuminate the methods Wittgenstein used in his work.

The book features the complete text of the Notes in a critical edition, with a detailed discussion of the circumstances in which they were compiled, leading to a new understanding of how they should be read. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Difficult but good insight
Probably the best commentary I have read on Wittgenstein.Strong focus on the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.This book is not easy reading.Wittgenstein can be tough going and this book will notchew your food for you.Kenny can at times be almost as difficult as hissubject, however this book will reward your efforts and expand yourunderstandings. ... Read more

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These essays, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy: Wittgenstein and feminist theory. The volume contains an introductory essay by Scheman, and 20 chapters grouped into sections. ... Read more

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Das sogenannte "Big Typescript" von 1932–33 ist, seit der Veröffentlichung der "Logisch-Philosophischen Abhandlung" 1922, Wittgensteins erster Versuch seine neueren Gedanken in einem Buch zusammenzufassen. Äußerlich erscheint es das Fertigste unter seinen Schriften: mit einem Inhaltsverzeichnis, unterteilt in 19 Kapitel mit 140 Sektionen. Doch ist es ein Fragment ohne Titel; die umfangreichen Über- und Umarbeitungen, die Wittgenstein noch während der Schreibarbeiten beginnt, zeigen, daß das Typoskript auf dem Weg zum angestrebten Buch eher einen status nascendi darstellt, als, wie oft argumentiert, "a coherent stage of Wittgenstein’s thought". Im Kontext der zugrundeliegenden Manuskriptbände I bis X (WA 1–5) und den nachfolgenden Über- und Umarbeitungen wird am "Big Typescript" deutlich, wovon Wittgenstein 1945 im Vorwort zu den "Philosophischen Untersuchungen" spricht: Der Widerspruch zwischen seinem Philosophieren und der typisch linearen Buchstruktur; das Eigentümliche seiner philosophischen Wege: "… daß meine Gedanken bald erlahmten, wenn ich versuchte, sie, gegen ihre natürliche Neigung, in einer Richtung weiterzuzwingen. – Und dies hing freilich mit der Natur der Untersuchung selbst zusammen. Sie nämlich zwingt uns, ein weites Gedankengebiet, kreuz und quer, nach allen Richtungen hin zu durchreisen." Die Veröffentlichung des "Big Typescript" wird von der Wittgenstein-Forschung seit dem Erscheinen der "Philosophischen Grammatik" im Jahre 1969 gefordert. Und auch wenn Wittgenstein seine Gedanken in der Form des "Big Typescript" deformiert sah, vermittelt der Text über die Klassifizierung in Kapitel und Sektionen, verhältnismäßig leicht einen Eindruck von Wittgensteins philosophischer Methode. Inwieweit diese Struktur dem Denken Wittgensteins entgegensteht zeigen dann die Über- und Umarbeitungen des "Big Typescript"; in diesem Kontrast zeigt sich das Eigentliche an Wittgensteins Philosophieren: "… daß die Gedanken in ihm in einem verwickelten Netz von Beziehungen stehen." ... Read more

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This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts. Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" is a hugely important piece of philosophical writing, one frequently encountered by students of philosophy. Yet, there is no escaping the extent of the challenge posed by Wittgenstein's work, in which complex ideas are often enigmatically expressed. In "Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations': A Reader's Guide", Arif Ahmed offers a clear and thorough account of this key philosophical work. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of the text as a whole, the book offers guidance on: philosophical and historical context; key themes; reading the text; reception and influence; and, further reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students. ... Read more

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The first strictly exegetical collection of papers on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The distinguished contributors highlight the differences of approach on how the Investigations should be read. ... Read more

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This book challenges conventional portraits of Ludwig Wittgenstein that narrowly depict him as a philosopher's philosopher. Rather, this study demonstrates Wittgenstein's engagement with social, ethical and cultural questions, including aspects of 'otherness'. The first two chapters center on autobiography as neglected other and highlight Wittgenstein's interest in it throughout his life; the next two address topics of femininity and Jewishness as cultural categories, and the fifth considers their implications for the artistic achievement of Gustav Mahler. The final two essays are about ethics and religion. As Wittgenstein works through these problems of 'otherness' he unearths deeply rooted biases and prejudices and urges his readers to work through them and be vigilant so we don't fall into them. The author's reading of these 'margins of philosophy' provides a multi-faceted view of Wittgenstein and shows him to be a figure of broad cultural significance - a philosopher for our time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Szabados reads Wittgenstein: a philosophical encounter
Béla Szabados:
`Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender and Cultural Identity
Philosophy as a Personal Endeavour'

Despite the modest precision of its title, Béla Szabados' book does far more than discuss a number of themes that are relatively neglected in mainstream scholarship on Wittgenstein. It uses these themes in order to show what a Wittgensteinian humanism, and the philosophical sensibility associated with it, may look like. And despite its subtitle, this humanism, while always relying on personal responsiveness and experience, turns out to be anything but a subjectivism. On the contrary, Szabados' careful analyses put paid to the claim of a culturally anti-modern and politically `quietist' Wittgenstein. Instead, they demonstrate convincingly a `non-judgementalism' whose implications for our attitudes to `otherness', for genuine tolerance (based on comprehension, rather than indifference), and for a plurality and `diversity' that would be more than window-dressing we have only begun to understand.
Such a project requires patient attention to detail, and a healthily suspicious attitude towards one's own claims and convictions. Szabados displays both to an impressive degree. He practices what he has found in Wittgenstein: a philosophical stance that never forsakes the complexity of the real, and the richness and ambivalences of those populating it, for the comfort of a clear position and simplistic judgments. As a result, Wittgenstein's remarks on women, Jewishness, Mahler and other musical composers, and on ethics and religion, often puzzling at first sight, lose much of their mind-boggling quality. In the reading of Szabados they become the expression of a thinker who knew that he stands no taller than his own decency would allow; someone who attempted to get his own culturally and historically conditioned limitations into clear view, and who's critical evaluations of others were almost always (and of himself were increasingly) based on a fundamental acceptance.
Thus, the seven chapters, woven into each other according to Wittgenstein's own form of methodical progression by family resemblance, provide a thread that is strong enough to hold together the tensions to be found in a deeply ethical thinker. After all the "new' and "third" Wittgensteins that recent years have seen, here is finally a book that takes the measure of the challenge Wittgenstein poses: to think beyond the opposition between the personal and the philosophical, as well as beyond the opposition between binary logic and relativism, always mindful of the possibilities of self-deception. Szabados walks on rough ground and charts his territory with the exactness that it affords. Reading his book is an antidote to prejudice; in its calm elegance, it says no more (but also no less) than it can vouch for. It should be compulsory reading for any student of Wittgenstein's, and it should move like a fresh breeze through Wittgenstein scholarship. It also opens a very accessible path into Wittgenstein's thought for the so-called `non-specialist'. - Highly recommendable.

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