Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) [Paperback]

Hans-Johann Glock (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0631194371 | ISBN-13: 978-0631194378 | Edition: 1

This volume provides a wide-ranging collection of newly-commissioned essays on Wittgenstein by internationally established philosophers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fifty years after the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is clear that his contribution to philosophy will be as important in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth. In this volume Hans-Johann Glock has assembled a number of critical essays by distinguished scholars which will make a weighty contribution to the as yet incomplete reception of Wittgenstein. Writing from a variety of standpoints, the authors offer interpretations of the Wittgensteinian canon which range between the traditional and the innovative, but always invite serious consideration, and which offer a re-evaluation of contemporary trends in philosophy in the light of Wittgenstein's insights."
Anthony Kenny, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Oxford University

Book Description

A comprehensive new collection, in which internationally established scholars comment on the oeuvre of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of this centuries most influential analytic philosophers.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Blackwell Publishers; 1 edition (August 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631194371
• ISBN-13: 978-0631194378
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,004,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Lukewarm Collection, October 5, 2002

By 

Flounder (Substitution Instance) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) (Paperback)

This text is a companion volume to the Wittgenstein Reader anthology (Blackwell). It is a lukewarm, hit and miss collection of articles that topically corresponds to areas covered in the reader. I would recommend Crary's The New W. (Routledge) or David Pears or David Stern prior to this. The Cambridge Companion (Sluga/Stern) is also an excellent collection of articles.

The articles that stand out here are: Ishiguro, "The So-Called Picture Theory...," Rundle, "Meaning and Understanding," Arrington, "Following a Rule," Schroeder, "PL and Private Experience," Mulhall, "Seeing Aspects," Schwyzer, "Autonomy," Grayling, "W. on Skepticism and Certainty," and Hacker, "Philosophy."

On rule-following I would recommend McDowell's articles (in Mind Value...Harvard UP) Gibbs, Rule-Following; and on math necessity I would recommend the articles by Dummett (Truth...Harvard UP), Stroud (Mind Meaning.../Oxford UP), and Putnam.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent review of our greatest psychologist, January 30, 2008

By 

Michael Starks "Featherless Biped" (Milky Way) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) (Paperback)

The aim of the 17 original papers here is to summarize and analyze Wittgenstein's thought.

At the time these were being written, the Oxford/Intelex CDROM ($2040 on Amazon but available thru interlibrary loan and steeply discounted on the net) with 20,000 some pages of W's nachlass was not yet available, and only those fluent in German and willing to find and slog thru the incomplete Cornell microfilm were able to examine it. To this day it much of it remains untranslated from the German typescripts and handwritten manuscripts. I note this at the outset as W's untranslated or unpublished writings often shed crucial light on his thought and few to this day (2008) have made substantial use of them. In addition there are huge problems with translation of his early 20th century Viennese German into modern English. One must be a master of English, German, and Wittgenstein in order to do this and very few are up to it. Several of the current authors note unfortunate translation errors in the only available English editions and I have seen similar comments countless times.

As is well known, W's thought changed dramatically between the publication of the Tractatus (TLP) in 1922 and the Philosophical Investigations(1953). The continuity or lack thereof between his early and late work is the subject of a vast literature and is taken up here by several authors. Ishiguro on the picture theory and Mounce on the logical system in TLP are good, but for me the endless discussions of exactly how he was mistaken in his early work is of as little interest as the mistakes in most previous philosophy.

Ammereller on Intentionality is a good, if prosaic, summary of (mostly) the early and middle W on belief and interpretation which, like virtually everyone, totally fails to give an adequate overview of W's pioneering work. In giving the general outline of our innate evolutionary psychology (ie, roughly our personality) and showing how this describes behavior, W represents a major milestone in human thought. There are unmistakeable indications of this even in his early writings (eg, see p 40, 49-58 here) and it has been documented by Hacker (eg, see his paper in The New Wittgenstein) and others but without any comprehensive account to date.

Rundle's contribution on meaning and understanding, which W classed as dispositions or inclinations and are now commonly called propositional attitudes, is mostly pedestrian and completely misses W's major point that, like most of our psychology, these are public phenomena and not private mental states. Of course he can be forgiven since hardly anyone interested in behavior (which can be taken to include everyone) has realized this, nor noted that W was the first to discuss it some 75 years ago.

Arrington gives an adequate, if standard, account of W on rule following and Hanfling an exceptional summary of W on thinking. He makes it very clear that W showed dispositions are activities (or potential activities in some uses of the words) which are necessarily public, shared acts--a crucial basic fact rarely understood even by the brightest and the best (see eg, Chomsky's insistence--- in his more recent writings-- on the internal nature of language). Candlish follows with the best concise account I have seen of W's thoughts on willing.

Schroeder provides a good article on another of W's major advances in understanding how the mind works--the impossibility of private language and private experience--ie, just what Chomsky and millions of others have missed. However, he falters in midarticle by failing to get the difference between dispositions (thoughts, beliefs, meanings etc) which cannot be true or false and carry no information, and judgements of empirical facts which do, and thus fails to fully grasp the private language argument. There is no test for beliefs, thoughts, desires, intentions etc, even for oneself, until they are acted out in the public arena. Anything which is truly private is of no consequence in our social life or our language(thought).

Ter Hark, who has written a book on W's philosophy of psychology (though all of philosophy is psychology) contributes an adequate survey on "The Inner and The Outer" but is not really clear about how our psychology rests on innate, unquestionable axioms and how this is related to the axioms of mathematics.

Bakhurst's review of W on personal identity is barely adequate and shows little grasp of W's overall contributions to psychology. Likewise with Mulhall's "Seeing Aspects."

Frascolla, who has written a rather good book on W's Philosophy of Mathematics provides a good but hurried article that will be of little use to those not versed in this topic already.

I found Schwyzer's article on Autonomy to be entirely useless--an amazing but common achievement when writing about the greatest contributor to our most fascinating subject--how the mind works.

Grayling does a careful dissection of W's last great work On Certainty but misses the fact (as W noted many, many times) that all the skeptical views of knowing and certainty are incoherent, depending, as they must, on our innate axiomatic psychology to even state them.

The world's leading W scholar, PMS Hacker gives a good summary of W's views on the nature of philosophy, but even he seems to have no clear grasp of the fact that W's "grammar" refers to our inherited intentional psychology.

The late DZ Phillips contributes one his many articles on faith and ethics in W and I found this one as dull as the rest. Like most who write on W, he passes up a gold mine by failing to consider the relevance of W's many penetrating comments on machines, animals and alien tribes.

Overall an exceptional book for introducing W to a general philosophical audience. Those wishing further comments on W please consult my other reviews, including that of "I am a Strange Loop".