Wittgenstein

Die beste Wittgenstein-Biographie: überarbeitet und neu aufgelegt Aus der minutiösen Recherche, aus vielen Korrespondenzen und Tagebüchern entsteht das Leben des Philosophen, wie man es so nicht kannte – keine Kultfigur, sondern ein Mensch, der sich einer permanenten Selbstprüfung unterwarf. Durch einzigartiges erzählerisches Geschick fesselt Ray Monk von der ersten bis zur letzten Seite. Er schuf damit die beste Wittgenstein- Biographie überhaupt – nun gibt es sie in einer überarbeiteten Neuausgabe. »Die Biografie versteht zu faszinieren wie der Meister selbst.« Matthias Frings, SFB2 »Nur selten hat man wie bei Monk das Gefühl, dass es einem Biographen gelungen ist, den Motor gefunden zu haben, der das Leben und Schaffen einer Person in Gang hielt.« Michael Hampe, Frankfurter Rundschau »Monk lichtet etwas vom fabulösen Nebel um eine der faszinierendsten Gestalten dieses Jahrhunderts.« Matthias Kross, Der Tagesspiegel

What Hacker News says

racktashDec 2022

My favourite nonfiction read of the year was a biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk called The Duty of Genius. Absolutely enthralling read about a really fascinating person. I find Wittgenstein's own writings almost impenetrable, but I feel I got to know and love the man, and his way of thinking, in this work.

For fiction, I read almost all Chaim Potok's novels this year and he has become my favourite author. If anybody has a deep interest in religion, and how it interacts with the secular world, and how one is to reconcile the two, I heartily recommend Potok.

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bcbrownJul 2022

> Where are the nice people who are also influential?

I wouldn't recommend taking this article, and specifically this quote, as a suitable basis for saying Wittgenstein wasn't a good or nice person. He was a tremendously complicated person. The biography by Ray Monk paints a much fuller, more nuanced portrait.

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yesenadamSep 2021

This short article is by Ray Monk, who in 1990 published a biography of Wittgenstein, which I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the guy's life and thought. Monk also wrote an excellent 2-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This article seems to contain nothing not in his 1990 book. I found it a little depressing for him that the New Statesman is apparently paying him for an article that's a very condensed summary of part of what he wrote 30+ years ago..

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keiferskiJan 2021

All of Ray Monk's biographies are supposedly excellent. I have only read the Wittgenstein one, but he also wrote some books on Bertrand Russell (philosopher/mathematician) and Oppenheimer (scientist.)

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frereubuJul 2020

This lecture was by Ray Monk, who wrote a fantastic and very accessible biography of Wittgenstein: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12079.Ludwig_Wittgenstei...

Wittgenstein's work can be pretty difficult to wrap your head around, but Monk does a great job of getting its main thrust while covering his life too.

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tokyosebJul 2019

If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.

I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.

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