Wittgenstein

For his radical questioning, original thinking, and determination to reshape the philosophical landscape, Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely hailed as a giant in twentieth–century philosophy. Wittgenstein presents a concise, comprehensive, and systematic treatment of the Austrian–born philosopher′s thought from his early work Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus to the posthumous publication of On Certainty , notes written just prior to his death. Renowned Wittgenstein scholar Hans Sluga first recounts events in Wittgenstein′s life in order to illuminate the historical, political, and personal conditions from which his philosophical work emerged. After identifying some of the philosopher′s key concepts and ideas in subsequent chapters, Sluga then reveals how the cultural and political changes that Wittgenstein and his contemporaries lived through mirror many of the dramatic events now happening in the twenty–first century. Sluga′s original analysis goes on to illustrate vividly how Wittgenstein′s thought may help us to face the peculiar problems of our own contemporary social and political existence. Illuminating and thought provoking, Wittgenstein offers ground–breaking new insights into the mind of one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Introduction. Chapter 1: The Situated Thinker. Chapter 2: The World and Its Structure. Chapter 3: The Limits of Language. Chapter 4: The Prodigious Diversity of Language games. Chapter 5: Families and Resemblances. Chapter 6: Our Unsurveyable Grammar. Chapter 7: Visible Rails Invisibly Laid to Infinity. Chapter 8: What is the Use of Studying Philosophy? Index.

Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Gottlob Frege (1980) and Heidegger′s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (1993), and editor (with David Stern) of The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (1996).

“Sluga’s Wittgenstein would be an ideal textbook in a course on Wittgenstein and political philosophy and an excellent introduction for those interested in exploring that relation.”  ( Philosophy in Review , 1 December 2012) “Sluga’s encyclopedic knowledge of Wittgenstein, and of other philosophers such as Frege and Heidegger, attests that he is eminently well qualified to write this book.  Summing Up: Recommended.  Lower–and upper–level undergraduates and graduate students.”  ( Choice , 1 August 2012)