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Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and
Philosophical Investigations (1953) are among the most influential philosophical
books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein
warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover,
Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done
today. In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at
Wittgenstein--as an exile--that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein's exile was
not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly
geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth
century. He was in exile from an earlier era--Oswald Spengler's culture of the early
nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including
Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlass, correspondence, lectures, and
conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory
of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from
an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism,
private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see
Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the
difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work.
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