Customer Reviews

Wittgenstein

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This book started with some bio and then some basic logic (!), which I felt was condescending, but I quickly changed my mind when it became clear how important this was to understanding the Tractatus and W.'s later works. There are real insights in this book, i.e., it isn't just a basic introduction.
Furthermore, Kenny does an outstanding job of making it all clear in straightforward prose. He doesn't latch on to catch phrases or assume you are already a Wittgensteinian. He simply spells out the evolution of W.'s thought in a clear and precise way.
This is just good scholarship, whatever you may think of his interpretation at the end of reading it.

This is the best introduction to Wittgenstein, still (the revised edition has an illuminating new introduction). The first couple of chapters are hard going, but clear -- without an understanding of the impulse towards Frege and Russell, the later Wittgenstein makes little sense. Whenever I get stuck in W, which is a lot, I always head for this book first. Then Hacker and co. Kenny does note that more recent Wittgenstein scholarship has focussed on "On Certainty" and the late remarks on Colour.

Kenny is masterful. His other book on Descartes is also worth reading.

I don't know why anyone would think that this book is "clear" or good for beginners. I'm taking a class on Wittgenstein where we've had to read a couple of chapters of this, and every page is a struggle. Maybe I'm just dense, but Kenny chooses to focus on all the wrong things in setting up the background to Wittgenstein's thought in the work of Frege and Russell... he spends an unnecessary amount of time on how Frege tried to reduce arithmetic to logic (which is not really Wittgenstein's focus), but meanwhile spends only a paragraph or two on Russell's theory of types. For another example, the explanation of of the critical concept of the distinction between "saying" and "showing" in chapter 3 is incredibly difficult to understand in Kenny's account of it, when really, once one figures it out, it is straightforward in my opinion. But I had to consult a number of other sources to figure it out, because Kenny's explanation was so garbled.

If you need an introductory book on Wittgenstein, I recommend instead "Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction" by A.C. Grayling, which does a much better job of telling you in clear language the philosophical background you need to know to understand Wittgenstein.