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This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de si cle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. "Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein's native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems....This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful."--New York Times Book Review.
One of the most powerful critiques of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture.
Every student of the twentieth century has heard both of the great Viennese economist Friedrich von Hayek and of the equally great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But what isn't well known is that the two were distant cousins and that, shortly after Wittgenstein's death in 1951, Hayek set out to write a biography of his cousin. The project was derailed by Wittgenstein family members, who felt it was to soon to publish such a work. But Hayek's draft acquired an underground readership, and Wittgenstein's biographers have used it extensively. Here finally, is the text of that work itself. Hayek's account has the great merit of being close to its subject; the draft, moreover sheds light, not only on Wittgenstein but on Hayek as well. Allan Janik's elegant afterword makes these links clear. Anyone interested in Wittgenstein or, for that matter, in the thought and culture of the earlier twentieth century, will want to read Christian Erbacher's excellent edition of Hayek's draft biography. - Marjorie Perloff.
"Wittgenstein in Vienna" documents Wittgenstein's life in the city: the places he, his family and those with whom he was in contact, lived, worked, entertained and socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgenstein's philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular the world of the coffee house and cabaret.
Astonishingly, Wittgenstein insisted that he was not an original thinker but one who passionately seized upon the thoughts of truly original thinkers with a view to developing a method of conceptual clarification. He compared his mind to fertile ground in which the seeds of the truly original: Ludwig Boltzmann, Heinrich Hertz, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, Oswald Spengler and Piero Sraffa, could blossom. Assembling Reminders is the first full length study to explore how these figures influenced Wittgenstein - but also how he could claim to have understood them better than they did themselves. It illuminates Wittgenstein's uniqueness in the history of 20th century thought at the same time that it clarifies his relationship to both analytical and Continental philosophy as well as to Viennese critical modernism. Allan Janik, (1941) is currently Research Fellow at the University of Innsbruck's Brenner Archives Reseach Institute. He is also Adjunct Professor for the Philosophy of Culture at the University of Vienna and at the Skill and technology Ph D. program at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology.
Otto Weininger (1880-1903) is the most controversial figure to emerge from fin de siècle Vienna. The son of a Jewish goldsmith, he studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna and spoke six languages by the time he was 21. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1902, he converted to Christianity and, in 1903, he published his book Sex and Character—a groundbreaking and highly provocative study that would come to influence Adolf Hitler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, among others. As troubled as he was brilliant, Weininger took his own life on October 3, 1903, leaving behind a small number of works, an array of challenging ideas, and many unanswered questions. In Hitler’s F...
"Wittgenstein in Viennaa documents Wittgensteina (TM)s life in the city: the places where he, his family and those with whom he was in contact lived, worked, entertained and were socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgensteina (TM)s philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular to the world of the coffee house and cabaret.
The human fascination with images, and the idolatry or idolization of images as the source of desire, passion and terror, is treated in this book. The first part enters more deeply into religious idolatry, past and present. It treats the biblical, the early-Jewish as well as the Christian views on monotheism and the prohibition against images, as source of authentic humanism or as source of intolerance and violence. In the second part, the focus shifts onto a number of contemporary, profane idols and gods: the nationalist fascination for one's own land and people, and the fear or hate towards foreigners; the rampant preoccupation with (genetic) health, in a context of body culture and aestheticization, of which the postmodern sport idols have become the great 'icons'; the current image- and screen-culture and all forms of audiovisual exorcisms; and last but not least the ongoing process of economization and globalization, with an expanding culture of 'branding' logos.