Ludwig Wittgenstein

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1. RodericDayMay 2017
   I recommend Ray Monk's biography of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Duty of Genius".

   I think you may like it.

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2. wandaJan 2014
   I don't know about 'life-changing' but the best books I ever read were:

   Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

     (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
   
   

   Being and Time

     (Martin Heidegger)
   
   

   Of Grammatology

     (Jacques Derrida)
   
   

   Writing and Difference

     (Jacques Derrida)
   
   

   Martian Timeslip

     (Philip K. Dick)
   
   

   Ringworld

     (Larry Niven)
   
   

   The Forever War

     (Joe Haldeman)
   
   

   The Metamorphosis

     (Franz Kafka)
   
   

   Finally, the Greek tragedies and Goethe's poetry are basically perfect.
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3. wfnFeb 2013
   I do actually think there's some merit to the idea of just "plunging in" - going ahead and attempting to read it! Sure, it will be a wtf experience in the beginning, but if you persist for a few hours, you'll start to build up a conceptual vocabulary used/established by W. of sorts (that's what happened to me anyway). But for many matters philosophy/intro-to-philosophy-X-related, I often find SEP to be an invaluable resource: http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=wittgenst... - the articles there are quality stuff. Good luck with your rabbit hole :)

   edit oh, and I had the pleasure of reading (only bits) from Ray Monk's bio of W. (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.ht...), which is frequently referred to in SEP's article on W. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/) - it might make for a very nice introductory exposition, if you're up for actually reading a (not-too-thin) book about him.

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4. yesenadamJan 2019
   Yeah, it's a weird kind of philosophy clickbait or something. An only slightly less valid alternate subheading might be "Football is the basis of all modern NLP"[1]

   For Wittgenstein - in philosophy, one always refers to the early or later Wittgenstein; they're totally different, and saying 'for Wittgenstein' without specifying which one doesn't make a lot of sense. The early (Tractatus) one had a picture theory of language.[0]

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_theory_of_language

   [1] "One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a ‘language-game’, apparently had its genesis in this incident." - Norman Malcom, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

   I can't resist a more entertaining extract from that book:

   "My wife once gave him some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he would more or less insist on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it was always the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed 'Hot Ziggety!' - a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim 'Hot Ziggety!' when my wife put the bread and cheese before him. ...

   One of Wittgenstein's favourite phrases was the exclamation, 'Leave the bloody thing alone!' He delivered this with a most emphatic intonation and mock solemnity of expression. It had roughly the signification that the thing in question was adequate and one should not try to improve it. He used it on a variety of occasions: one time meaning that the location of his bed was satisfactory and it should not be moved; another time, that the mending that my wife had done on a jacket of his was sufficient and that she should not try to make it better."

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5. mabub24Jul 2017
   Economics as a discipline is ultimately a form of humanistic understanding. The ideal of scientific rigor is certainly laudable, but it is nonetheless an ideal for the discipline in general. One of the two forms of understanding, humanistic and scientific, is not better than the other. But they require different questions and, as a result, often lead to different answers through different methods, one of which is interpretation, or, understanding the use and uses of something within a constellation of rules and history. Economics, in general, works, but we must be sure of the particular ways it works.

   The discipline raises the questions of philosophy of mathematics and logic (and thus we should say language). How do mathematical models relate to the world? Is it the Tractatus, or Philosophical Investigations?

   I wonder if economics students are ever assigned readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The latter part of Ray Monk's biography on him touches on many hilarious debates between him and his students, including Alan Turing, around these questions.

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