Approaches to Wittgenstein

Brian McGuiness was previously a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor at the University of Siena in Ital;y. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Graz, Austria. He has translated (with Davd Pears) Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961) and Prototractatus (1971), both published by Routledge. He is author of the acclaimed biography, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921.

Acknowledgments. Preface. I. The Man - 1. 'The lion speaks, and we don't understand.' Wittgenstein after 100 years. 2. Philosophy and Biography 3. Asceticism and Ornament 4. The Idea of Jewishness 5. 'It will be terrible afterwards, whoever wins' II. The Tractatus - 6. The Path to Tractatus 7. Pictures and Form 8. The So-called Realism of Tractatus 9. Language and Reality 10. The Grundgedanke of the Tractatus 11. Philosophy of Science 12. The Value of Science 13. Solipsism 14. Mysticism 15. The Unsayable: a Genetic Account III. Philosophy Revisited - 16. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle 17. Relations with and within the Circle 18. Probability 19. Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Mind 20. Freud and Wittgenstein 21. On Certainty: Comments on a paper by G.H. von Wright IV. Philologica 22. Bertrand Russell and the Notes on Logic 23. Some Pre-Tractatus Manuscripts 24. Manuscripts and Works in the 1930s.

Bringing together for the first time many of the finest published and unpublished papers by Ludwig Wittgenstein, this text illuminates his philosophy by placing it in its biographical, cultural and historical context.