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Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyb

by mjn 14y ago

Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups). He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lac...) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-...). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations". An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?

brudgers 14y ago
he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations. Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.
zachalexander 14y ago
Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.
- ExpiredLink 14y ago
  Heidegger and Wittgenstein may have more in common than the year of birth.
neilk 14y ago
According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued. I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt. Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.
- xenophanes 14y ago
  Wittgenstein is the guy who got fired as a schoolteacher for violence against his students, and threatened a philosopher with violence when he was losing an argument. To be thought of merely as an eccentric is lucky for him, given his history. He was a thug.
  - neilk 14y ago
    Oh, I would not want Wittgenstein teaching any child of mine. He is one of the people who deserves to be called an Asperger's sufferer. He could be roused to fury if something wasn't up to his exacting intellectual standards. When he was an architect he once had workmen raise a ceiling by 30 mm (a little more than an inch) so the dimensions of the room could be perfect. There's something about his life, which I think many on this board could identify with -- he was at once extremely proud of his mind, but also aware that he was a victim of his own relentless obsessions. This is why it's almost heroic how, through rigorous, dedicated adherence to philosophizing, he was able to show that philosophizing was not everything.
    - jasomill 14y ago
      "A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense." (LW, 1944)
- nqureshi 14y ago
  This. Exactly this. I couldn't have said it better.
dulse 14y ago
I'd be interested to see a list of the best philosophy books for non-philosophers. I'm not a philosopher or close to the field, but I always thought Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions was a big hitter. Not so much for an individual essay but the combination of essays - What Is it Like to be a Bat? and The Absurd are both classics in my mind. Basically every essay in that short book is great, completely understandable to the lay-person, has the potential to be deeply influential to one's everyday beliefs, and is philosophically rigorous. Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  If you enjoyed Nagel, pick up 'The Mind's I', an anthology edited by Douglas Hofstadter, which includes a few of Nagel's essays and many others of value. If you're interested in things like crime and punishment, Leo Katz has written several highly accessible books on moral philosophy and law, though his arguments sometimes trike me as glib. Reading Plato, especially the dialogs of Socrates, can be a little indigestible at first, because he takes a long time to get to the point. but there's a reason that Whitehead said most philosophy consists of 'footnotes to Plato'; once you get used to the style you'll find the weighty matters leavened with a surprising amount of dry humor.
  - gnosis 14y ago
    Since you mention Hofstadter, I simply have to bring up Godel, Escher, Bach. Especially for anyone who's interested in computers and artificial intelligence, this is a must read. It is brimming over with philosophical issues, and is very accessible even to someone without any previous exposure to philosophy. I'd also recommend "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. It's an anthology of hilarious science fiction stories, many of which deal with deep philosophical themes. Also, along those lines is Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, which is also hilarious and very philosophical. These aren't exactly the first books most people think of when asked for intro to philosophy books, but I think books like these are quite perfect as very easy, gentle, funny and fun intros to many philosophical themes. Their humor and wit also put the vast majority of "real" philosophy books to shame.
nemo 14y ago
The article's description is way off. "Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." As you say, he is among the most influential 20th century philosophers. Besides that, his praise of Wittgenstein's method is hyperbolic.

by mjn 14y ago

brudgers 14y ago

he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well The joke is, Wittgenstein is the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century - first for the logical positivist movement inspired by Tractatus Logico Philisophicus, and secondly for the natural language analysis inspired by Philosphical Investigations. Relative position within philosophy education is another matter. It's hard for any "new" philosopher to compete with two millennia of classics when those classics are still relevant to the state of the art - i.e. it's hard to displace Plato given that the pertinent aspects of the human condition haven't changed since he wrote about them.

zachalexander 14y ago

Agreed. I wondered who on earth he's been talking to. At my alma mater, a little liberal arts school with a continentally-inclined philosophy department, somewhere amid all the Heidegger and Derrida I still was taught that Wittgenstein was a BFD.

ExpiredLink 14y ago
Heidegger and Wittgenstein may have more in common than the year of birth.

neilk 14y ago

According to the OP's metric, Wittgenstein could be very influential and yet still be undervalued. I kind of agree with OP here. Most people know of Wittgenstein as this impenetrable weirdo who stressed the importance of language to defining philosophical concepts, and then they move on from that. But if people really got what Wittgenstein was saying, it would bring a lot of philosophical debates to a screeching halt. Sometimes I think of Wittgenstein as the guy who beat philosophy's final bosses.

xenophanes 14y ago
Wittgenstein is the guy who got fired as a schoolteacher for violence against his students, and threatened a philosopher with violence when he was losing an argument. To be thought of merely as an eccentric is lucky for him, given his history. He was a thug.
- neilk 14y ago
  Oh, I would not want Wittgenstein teaching any child of mine. He is one of the people who deserves to be called an Asperger's sufferer. He could be roused to fury if something wasn't up to his exacting intellectual standards. When he was an architect he once had workmen raise a ceiling by 30 mm (a little more than an inch) so the dimensions of the room could be perfect. There's something about his life, which I think many on this board could identify with -- he was at once extremely proud of his mind, but also aware that he was a victim of his own relentless obsessions. This is why it's almost heroic how, through rigorous, dedicated adherence to philosophizing, he was able to show that philosophizing was not everything.
  - jasomill 14y ago
    "A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense." (LW, 1944)
nqureshi 14y ago
This. Exactly this. I couldn't have said it better.

dulse 14y ago

I'd be interested to see a list of the best philosophy books for non-philosophers. I'm not a philosopher or close to the field, but I always thought Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions was a big hitter. Not so much for an individual essay but the combination of essays - What Is it Like to be a Bat? and The Absurd are both classics in my mind. Basically every essay in that short book is great, completely understandable to the lay-person, has the potential to be deeply influential to one's everyday beliefs, and is philosophically rigorous. Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.

anigbrowl 14y ago
If you enjoyed Nagel, pick up 'The Mind's I', an anthology edited by Douglas Hofstadter, which includes a few of Nagel's essays and many others of value. If you're interested in things like crime and punishment, Leo Katz has written several highly accessible books on moral philosophy and law, though his arguments sometimes trike me as glib. Reading Plato, especially the dialogs of Socrates, can be a little indigestible at first, because he takes a long time to get to the point. but there's a reason that Whitehead said most philosophy consists of 'footnotes to Plato'; once you get used to the style you'll find the weighty matters leavened with a surprising amount of dry humor.
- gnosis 14y ago
  Since you mention Hofstadter, I simply have to bring up Godel, Escher, Bach. Especially for anyone who's interested in computers and artificial intelligence, this is a must read. It is brimming over with philosophical issues, and is very accessible even to someone without any previous exposure to philosophy. I'd also recommend "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. It's an anthology of hilarious science fiction stories, many of which deal with deep philosophical themes. Also, along those lines is Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, which is also hilarious and very philosophical. These aren't exactly the first books most people think of when asked for intro to philosophy books, but I think books like these are quite perfect as very easy, gentle, funny and fun intros to many philosophical themes. Their humor and wit also put the vast majority of "real" philosophy books to shame.

nemo 14y ago

The article's description is way off. "Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them." As you say, he is among the most influential 20th century philosophers. Besides that, his praise of Wittgenstein's method is hyperbolic.