Wittgenstein in Exile (Mit Press)

A new way of looking at Wittgenstein: as an exile from an earlier cultural era.Ludwig Wittgensteins Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgensteins work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgensteinas an exilethat helps make sense of this. Wittgensteins exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier eraOswald Spenglers culture of the early nineteenth century.Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgensteins published work, the complete Nachla, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgensteins work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgensteins exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work.