THE ALIEN WITTGENSTEIN
A REVIEW OF JAMES C. KLAGGE'S
WITTGENSTEIN IN EXILE
Accepted June 19, 2012
KEYWORDS
Wittgenstein, philosophy of science, neuroscience, mind
INTRODUCTION
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is the author of at least two classics of philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (1953)1, yet there is still debate over what Wittgenstein means in these books and in his other writings. One difficulty in understanding Wittgenstein is his original thinking on the foundations of logic, the limits of language, the nature of representations about the world, the relationship between language and human patterns of life, the philosophy of psychology, and so on. These are weighty subjects. But Wittgenstein is difficult to understand for other reasons, such as his writing style. He did not cite other works, seldom referred to other authors, and did not offer sustained arguments or counterarguments. Further, he wrote in a distinct manner — poetically concise remarks — that were presented in a numbered format in which themes could change abruptly and reappear in later passages. This writing style, imbued with Wittgenstein's forceful prose and ingenious analogies, can read like a poem, play, or dialogue. It can also lead to multiple interpretations, which is why Wittgenstein's work has been used to support a variety of positions, whether philosophical or otherwise.
Another hindrance to understanding Wittgenstein is the fragmentary publication of his writings. The Tractatus was the only philosophy book published in his lifetime; the Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The Tractatus and the Investigations are very different books in style, content, and philosophical method. Because they were published 30 years apart, the critical literature often referred to the author of the Tractatus as the early Wittgenstein and the author of the Investigations as the later Wittgenstein. During the decades after Wittgenstein's death, however, his literary trustees published, in piecemeal fashion, several books from Wittgenstein's voluminous writings, referred to as his Nachlass, which consisted of 20,000 pages. Some of this work became known as the middle Wittgenstein. It should be noted that the content of these posthumously published books reflected decisions made by his trustees and editors (Stern 1996), and not by Wittgenstein himself.
Wittgenstein thus wrote in a unique way; the vast majority of his writings were published or made available selectively in the decades after his death; and his philosophical methods and positions were radically original. One can understand, then, why the Wittgenstein scholar David Stern wrote in 2004 that there is almost no agreement on even the most basic questions about how to understand Wittgenstein's contributions to philosophy (Stern 2004, p. 2).
The reader of Wittgenstein can benefit immensely from biographical (Malcolm 1958; McGuinness 1988; Monk 1990) and philosophical (e.g., Anscombe 1971; Pears 1986; Fogelin 1987) books about him. Some of the most informative writers about Wittgenstein have the following attributes. They are trained in philosophy; well-versed in Wittgenstein's published and unpublished writings; knowledgeable about the drafts of Wittgenstein's works, the editorial decisions made in assembling his books, and the subtleties (and occasional errors) in translation; familiar with Wittgenstein's letters and notebooks, as well as biographies and memoirs about him, and autobiographies that refer to him; and informed on the literature about Wittgenstein. These scholars can integrate information from all of these sources to explicate selected topics or passages in Wittgenstein's writings (e.g., von Wright 1982; Schulte 1992; Stern 1995, 2004; Sluga 2011).
James C. Klagge has these attributes.2 Klagge's recent book, Wittgenstein in Exile, attempts to answer two questions: why is it so difficult to understand Wittgenstein's work, and what ongoing value does Wittgenstein's work have for philosophy (p. 2)?3 Klagge proposes that it helps to answer these questions to see Wittgenstein as an exile, an alien (p. 3). Klagge argues that Wittgenstein was an exile in time, place, and culture — essentially, that Wittgenstein had a fundamentally different sensibility than those around him. Once we appreciate Wittgenstein as an exile, Klagge maintains, we will understand the sensibility behind his work. This perspective will help us to understand, in effect, why Wittgenstein is so difficult to understand, even if we do not comprehend certain of his philosophical positions. Furthermore, by appreciating Wittgenstein as an exile, we will be situated to consider Wittgenstein's ideas in relation to current philosophical interests, including science, psychology, and neuroscience.
KLAGGE'S THESES
UNDERSTANDING WITTGENSTEIN
In Chapters 1 through 3, Klagge presents three perspectives on understanding Wittgenstein. Chapter 1 details Wittgenstein's long-held belief that he and his work would not be understood. Chapter 2 considers why readers may not understand Wittgenstein. And Chapter 3 argues that to understand Wittgenstein is to put his method to use, which requires an appreciation of the sensibility from which his ideas emerged. Chapter 1 begins as follows:
"Wittgenstein predicted, over and over, throughout his life, that people would not understand him or his work. Yet those who study Wittgenstein regularly fail to note or heed his warnings. This is a most striking fact about Wittgenstein and about scholarship concerning his work (p. 6)."
This is an important observation. The scholarly literature on Wittgenstein is rife with interpretations and re-interpretations (Hacker 2007), and a strength of Klagge's book is that it examines why Wittgenstein is so difficult to understand. Klagge cites a number of examples in which Wittgenstein, or those close to him, expressed the belief that he would not be understood. Here are a few:
Tractatus (preface), 1918: "Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it — or at least similar thoughts (p. 6)."
Letter to Bertrand Russell, 1919: "I also sent my MS to Frege. He wrote to me a week ago and I gather that he doesn't understand a word of it at all (p. 7)."
Wittgenstein is said to have concluded the oral exam for his Ph.D. in 1929 by telling his examiners, Bertrand Russell and GE Moore: "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it (p. 7)."
Letter to Rodolf Koder, concerning Wittgenstein's impending lecture on ethics, 1929: "I am sure that almost no one will understand me (p. 13)."
Comment by Con Drury, who knew Wittgenstein from 1929 until his death: "Throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make himself understood (p. 14)."
The following passage, in which Russell describes his interaction with Wittgenstein in a letter from 1912, is especially revealing:
"I told him he ought not to simply state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said the arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if dirtying a flower with muddy hands. He does appeal to me — the artist in intellect is so rare... I am seriously afraid that no one will see the point of anything he writes, because he won't recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view (p. 6)."
Wittgenstein, the artist in intellect, thought about philosophical problems with great seriousness and originality. Philosophy, for him, was a process in which his thoughts were constantly being revised, and discussions were essential in the development and expression of those thoughts. It was extremely difficult for him to convey the fruits of these labors — indeed, the labors themselves — in writing to anonymous readers, and even to those with whom he had discussions.
Why did Wittgenstein believe that he would not be understood? In Chapter 2, Klagge suggests that the vast majority of Wittgenstein's readers were products of the cultural sensibility of the day, which was very much opposed to Wittgenstein's own sensibility. Wittgenstein believed that he belonged to the culture of the early nineteenth century, the Romantic era of Goethe and Schumann. Throughout his adult life, Wittgenstein lamented and criticized the intellectual culture of his time; in the preface to the Investigations (1953, p. vi), for example, he writes:
"It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another — but, of course, it is not likely."
Klagge describes how Wittgenstein's sense of history and his place in it was influenced by Oswald Spengler's book, The Decline of the West. Although Wittgenstein was skeptical about the details of Spengler's book, he was influenced by Spengler's discussion of culture vs. civilization. Culture, for Spengler, is marked by artistic and intellectual development during the early spiritual stages of an era; whereas civilization refers to the aftermath, or product of the culture once its spirit and creativity have been supplanted by technical and intellectual concerns. One scholar describes culture, as used by Spengler, as follows:
"(A) culture that has disappeared is predominantly of an artistic tradition which merged with a way of life to form a high culture. It is an idea of a community which devoted itself to expressing the human spirit in a grand and lofty manner by carefully cultivating and developing both its aesthetic tradition in the arts and the various details of its way of life (Lurie 1989)."
Wittgenstein believed that he was living in a civilization phase, which valued science, technology, and explanation, at the expense of art, nature, and wisdom. Indeed, in his middle and later writings, Wittgenstein often tries to get the reader, who is prone to fuzzy thinking and misuse of language in such a civilization, to see matters from an entirely different perspective. Klagge presents an interesting list of how Wittgenstein, in the Investigations, describes philosophical problems arising, or persisting, in such a civilization (p. 25). Here is Klagge's list of how Wittgenstein frames his remarks and how often he does so:
- What forces itself on us, holds us captive, demands an answer, must be, leads us, we can't help, or no one would say (14 times);
- What we are tempted, seduced, bewitched, or dazzled by (19 times);
- What suggests itself, strikes us, occurs to us, or impressions we are under (7 times);
- How things look to us (2 times);
- What we find surprising, convincing, senseless, ludicrous, sensible, or matter-of-course (8 times);
- Our compulsions, needs, urges, wants, tendencies, inclinations, expectations, or prejudicies (28 times);
- What we notice, can get ourselves to think, can be satisfied with, only think of, overlook, don't realize, fail to see, or forget (14 times);
- What we would like (6 times);
- What we are committed to, choose, decide, allow, or refuse (6 times);
- How we look at or represent things (5 times).
Note that Wittgenstein tries to get the reader to think differently, and to grasp the preconceptions under which ideas are framed and expressed, rather than to change the reader's mind on a given topic. Wittgenstein writes:
"What makes a subject hard to understand — if it's something significant and important — is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than the intellect (1980, p. 17)."
What most people want to see, Klagge notes, reflects the temperament of the times.
In Chapter 3, Klagge again emphasizes that understanding Wittgenstein is not merely a matter of agreeing with him on a philosophical position, but the ability to put his philosophy to use; and this ability requires a temperament that is similar to, or at least receptive to, Wittgenstein's temperament. In this regard, Klagge quotes from Wittgenstein's letters to his friend, the economist Piero Sraffa. This example is particularly interesting because Sraffa had an enormous influence on Wittgenstein's philosophy after 1929. In the preface to the Investigations (1953, p. vi), Wittgenstein writes,
"I am indebted to that (criticism) which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practiced on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book."
Yet Wittgenstein writes the following to Sraffa, as quoted by Klagge:
"I have very slowly in my life come to the conviction that some people cannot make themselves understood to each other, or at least only in a very narrowly circumscribed field (p. 43)."
"In order to understand why it's impossible, or almost impossible, for certain people to understand each other, one has to think not of the few occasions on which they meet, but of the differences of their whole lives; and there can be nothing more different than your interests and mine, and your movements of thought and mine. Only by a real tour de force was it possible for us to talk to each other years ago when we were younger (p. 43)."
"The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are (p. 43)."
These thoughts recall Wittgenstein's comments about the readers he had in mind for his work:
"If I say that my book is meant for only a small circle of people (if it can be called a circle), I do not mean that I believe this circle to be the elite of mankind; but it does comprise those to whom I turn (not because they are better or worse than others but) because they form my cultural milieu, my fellow citizens as it were, in contrast to the rest who are foreign to me (1980, p. 10)."
In Chapters 1 through 3, then, Klagge demonstrates that Wittgenstein believed that his work would not be understood, and he shows that Wittgenstein's unique sensibility is deeply opposed to the culture of his time, which is a main reason that readers do not understand him. My quibble with Klagge on the latter point is that Wittgenstein is difficult to understand for other reasons, referred to above, namely, his complex subject matter, his attempt to get the reader to think differently, and his writing style that traded explication for beauty of expression. Despite this caveat, Klagge makes a strong case that understanding Wittgenstein requires an appreciation of his unique sensibility, which is that of an exile.
WITTGENSTEIN AS AN EXILE
In Chapters 4 through 6, Klagge tries to convince us that Wittgenstein was an exile, and that viewing him as such will help us to understand the motivation behind his philosophy. But what does Klagge mean by exile? Klagge describes key events in Wittgenstein's life: he was born into a very wealthy and cultured family in Vienna; studied aeronautics at Manchester University in England; moved to Cambridge to study the philosophy of mathematics with Russell; left academia to live in a hut in Norway; served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I; became a school teacher in small communities in Austria; worked as a gardener in Vienna; became a lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge; moved again to Norway; returned to teach at Cambridge; lived in Ireland; and so on. By definition, then, Wittgenstein was an exile in that he was seldom home, often unsettled, and moved around a lot. But Klagge suggests that Wittgenstein was an exile in a composite sense of being away from home, displaced in time, and alienated from the culture that he considered his own. Indeed, Wittgenstein repeatedly referred to himself as an exile, alien, or stranger, as Klagge amply documents from Wittgenstein's diary, notebooks, and letters.
I think most readers familiar with Wittgenstein's biography will agree that he was an exile in this composite sense. There are, however, passages in these chapters in which Klagge becomes a bit pedantic in his explication of exile. He embarks, for example, on a historical-literary survey of the concept of exile that includes discussions of Adam and Eve, various characters and events in the Bible, Webster's Dictionary, Marxism and Christianity, and opinions of literary and intellectual figures such as William H. Gass, Julio Cortazar, and Edward Said. I suspect that Wittgenstein himself would have found the author to be unnecessarily learned in such passages.
That being said, Klagge makes several interesting observations that follow from viewing Wittgenstein as an exile. For example, being an exile was excellent preparation for Wittgenstein to become a philosopher, in that his purview was that of an outsider. On this point, Klagge quotes Wittgenstein: The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher (p. 75). A related observation is that Wittgenstein, from about 1930 onwards, used an anthropological method in which he sometimes described different practices of life, e.g., by tribes, that challenged the reader or discussants to think differently about topics. Moreover, Wittgenstein's analogies and thought experiments often had a spatial or geographical element in which he tried to get the audience or students to think from a different perspective. Such geographical imagery, and the concept of Wittgenstein as a guide, is consistent with the theme of exile. Examples are given below, some cited by Klagge (2011) and others by me:
"I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 56)."
"The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions (Wittgenstein 1953, p. v)."
"I am trying to conduct you on tours in a certain country. I will try to show that the philosophical difficulties which arise in mathematics as elsewhere arise because we find ourselves in a strange town and do not know our way. So we must learn the topography by going from one place in the town to another, and from there by going from one place in the town to another, and from there to another, and so on. And one must do this so often that one knows one's way, either immediately or pretty soon after looking around a bit, wherever one may be set down (Wittgenstein 1976, p. 44)."
"The difficulty of philosophy is to find one's way about. The real difficulty in philosophy is a matter of memory — memory of a peculiar sort. –A good guide will take one down each road a hundred times. And just as a guide will show one new streets every day, so I will show you new words (Wittgenstein 1976, p. 44)."
Overall, Klagge shows that Wittgenstein was an exile in that he was rootless and detached from the culture of his time. Wittgenstein's sensibility and several tenets of his philosophy were in constant friction with one dominant force of that culture, namely science.
WITTGENSTEIN ON SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM
Wittgenstein was well-educated in the sciences, having studied engineering and aeronautics, and yet he had a cynical and pessimistic view of science. Klagge writes:
"Part of Wittgenstein's alienation from the modern world was embodied in his attitude toward science — his determination that science should not be a predominant or pervasive mode of understanding (p. 83)."
At least three factors caused tension between Wittgenstein and science. First, his way of doing philosophy, especially its later versions, aimed for a perspicuous view of language and its use in the practices of life. This approach ran counter to any prominent approach to philosophy that had either a strong allegiance to science (e.g., that of the Vienna Circle) or a fawning appreciation of science (e.g., that of Bertrand Russell). Second, Wittgenstein thought that the sciences suffered from conceptual confusions (e.g., psychology). And third, Wittgenstein was especially hostile to scientism. Manifestations of scientism included a preoccupation with the scientific method, the appeal to the sciences to solve problems that are beyond their reach, and the misuse of scientific terminology. At the cultural level, Wittgenstein believed that science contributed to the intellectualization and artistic stagnation of his era, with the byproducts being slavery to technology, a phony belief in progress, the debasement of art and nature, and the disappearance of patterns of life that created traditions in society.
Wittgenstein was also adamant about the division between philosophy and science. Klagge refers to this view as Wittgenstein's insulation thesis: science is not relevant to the resolution of philosophical problems (p. 85). Wittgenstein writes:
"Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is purely descriptive (1958, p. 18)."
Despite Wittgenstein's insistence on a split between philosophy and science, he seemed to allow for cases in which science contributes to the conceptual resolution of philosophical problems. Klagge (p. 93) summarizes this issue as follows:
"There seem, on analogy, to be three conceivable ways of resolving a philosophical problem: A philosophical resolution of a philosophical problem is a resolution brought about by a proper synoptic view of the language. (This is what Wittgenstein mainly expounds.) A scientific resolution of a philosophical problem is a resolution brought about by the discovery of new facts. A conceptual resolution of a philosophical problem is a resolution brought about by a change in the criteria of concepts or the replacement of concepts.
In propounding the insulation thesis Wittgenstein seems mainly to be opposing the possibility of scientific resolutions of philosophical problems."
The notion of a conceptual resolution is interesting in that science therefore can (and often does) change our way of thinking about phenomena. On the issue of mind and brain, however, Klagge argues that Wittgenstein seems to doubt that neuroscience could tell us anything about the mental (p. 95). The reasons for this view, Klagge writes, are interesting, complicated, and controversial, and he addresses them in Chapters 8 and 9.
WITTGENSTEIN AND NEUROSCIENCE
In discussing Wittgenstein and neuroscience, Klagge refers to passages from Wittgenstein, such as the following:
"No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes. I mean this: if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the following… certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produce… but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes from it; so that it is impossible to infer the properties or structure of the plant from those of the seed that comes out of i… this can only be done from the history of the seed. So an organism might come into being even out of something quite amorphous, as it were causelessly; and there is no reason why this should not really hold for our thoughts, and hence for our talking and writing (1967, remark 608)."
"It is thus perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them (1967, remark 609)."
"I saw this man years ago; now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored-up there in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality, then it is high time they were upset (1967, remark 610)."
In these passages, Wittgenstein seems to deny a meaningful correlation between psychological phenomena and brain processes. To use Klagge's terminology, the insulation thesis applies to mental phenomena: neuroscience is not relevant to the solution of philosophical problems. Klagge writes that what exactly Wittgenstein means by this sort of 'correlation' will require further investigation (p. 100). The nature of this correlation is, of course, a core issue in the philosophy of mind. Klagge argues that Wittgenstein held a radical view that challenged a mediative, or mechanistic, causal relationship between mental phenomena and brain processes. Klagge again quotes Wittgenstein:
"Nothing is more important in explanations of thought and brain processes than throwing away all the old prejudices about causality. This seems to me by far the most important step (p. 103)."
Klagge holds that this radical view is consistent with Wittgenstein's sensibility as an exile, which leads Wittgenstein to see our ordinary beliefs as soaked with implicit philosophical requirements that he will not accept (Klagge, footnote 16, p. 196). Such ordinary beliefs and prejudices are typical of the culture of his era. Wittgenstein, in the Investigations (remark 308), appears to support such a view.
"How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviorism arise? — The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometimes perhaps we shall know more about them — we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)"
We find it natural to understand phenomena by probing further into their causes — indeed, this is what science does. But when we are driven to search for hidden causes of mental phenomena in the brain, Wittgenstein's recommendation is simple: we should stop looking because they cannot be found. Klagge draws a parallel here to Wittgenstein's opposition to the Socratic method of asking for the essence of a concept. Socrates would ask for the meaning of a concept, such as knowledge, and his interlocutors would respond by giving examples of what it means to have knowledge. But Socrates would keep pressing for an understanding of the essence of knowledge, and not just examples of it. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, would argue that the Socratic method makes the mistake of probing too far, of going beyond the phenomena. There is no such essence of a concept, and the examples themselves are of most interest. It would be typical of Wittgenstein to show then that a particular mental process does not have an underlying essense either, and that it has a large number of uses in our language and in the practices of our lives, for which correlated brain states can scarcely be imagined. Even the I, or the self, is enmeshed within this matrix of language and the practices of life. Klagge quotes Wittgenstein: The basic concepts are interwoven so closely with what is most fundamental in our way of living that they are unassailable (p. 118). Klagge summarizes this position as follows:
"Neuroscience may come to understand us completely as objects, without being able to understand us as subjects or agents. The point is that it cannot encompass the parts of our conceptual scheme necessary for our being deliberative and evaluative agents (p. 118)."
This view is controversial, to put it mildly, especially to scientists. The reader can consult Klagge's book for background and arguments on what he believes to be Wittgenstein's radical approach to causation and the mind-body relation. To neuroscientists, a deeper empirical and conceptual understanding of the mind-brain relation provides what Wittgenstein sought — a more perspicuous view, in this case, of ourselves and others. When Wittgenstein tells us to stop looking in the brain for hidden causes of the mind, the Wittgenstein scholar Robert Fogelin responds:
"(W)e are continually denied explanation just where we want it — told that the story is over before it gets interesting. With respect to philosophical questions, this attitude is well grounded in the main tenets of his philosophy. With respect to empirical inquiries, it is simply out of place (Fogelin 1987, p. 210)."
In terms of empirical inquiries, neuroscientists can now determine, by analyzing patterns of brain activity, whether a person is seeing one specific object vs. another object in a brain scanner (Kay et al. 2008). This would appear to be a case where a particular mental process (e.g., seeing a photo of a house) correlates with, and is caused by, a particular brain process (in this case, patterns of activity in a part of the brain called the occipital cortex). One may argue that the mental process of seeing has been reduced in this example, and that the nature of the brain process itself is problematic. Here, a Wittgensteinian critique could be valuable. Nonetheless, neuroscience continues to encompass our mental lives, and it gives us new ways of thinking about fundamental issues, such as the neural basis of our personalities and our actions.
Whether such knowledge is beneficial or harmful, however, depends on how it is used, which is a cultural matter. Science may be interpreted and practiced within a humanistic spirit of understanding how the world works, including ourselves, or it may be used merely to explain and to improve on nature. This important issue is seldom discussed. Klagge even asks if we are better off having neuroscience knowledge, or whether such knowledge may be harmful to conceptions of ourselves as autonomous agents. Here, Klagge has stimulating things to say about the ways in which science may change or evolve in order to avoid a base reductionism. Such considerations are vital within our scientific civilization, regardless of one's sensibility.
CONCLUSIONS
Klagge's Wittgenstein in Exile is an important contribution to research on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Klagge shows that Wittgenstein's sensibility as an exile is a main reason that his work has not been understood, especially within cultures that are driven by science and technology. As a scholar of Wittgenstein's writing and biography, Klagge illuminates numerous themes and passages in Wittgenstein by consolidating information from a wide variety of sources. Overall, Klagge's book is provocative and stimulating, whether one accepts or rejects his premises and conclusions.
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ENDNOTES
- In a survey of teachers of philosophy in North America regarding the most important philosophy books of the 20th century,Philosophical Investigations was ranked first and the Tractatus fourth. See DP Lackey (1999) What are the modern classics? The Baruch poll of great philosophy in the twentieth century. Philosophical Forum 30:329-346.
- Klagge is the author of scholarly articles about Wittgenstein (Klagge 1989; 1999); editor of a collection of Wittgenstein's shorter works (Klagge and Nordmann 1993); editor of a collection of Wittgenstein's diaries, letters, and other material (Klagge and Nordmann 2003); and editor of a book on the biography and philosophy of Wittgenstein (Klagge 2001).
- Lone page numbers in parentheses, without an author or book listed, refer to page numbers in Klagge (2011).