Wittgenstein In 90 Minutes, by Paul Strathern

I have to admit that this book took me far less than 90 minutes to read, but I am a far faster reader than most people are, so that is perhaps not too surprising.  It is intriguing how there is such a market for books like this one that seek to make Wittgenstein’s work simpler and easier for readers to understand.  While I must admit that I am not necessarily the sort of person who finds a lot to approve of with the life and thinking of Wittgenstein, I am always game for reading about philosophers and so this book ended up being enjoyable to me.  It is not as if this book is aimed at a large reading audience, as one has to be at least somewhat familiar with the philosophy of the 20th century and the Vienna Circle that was involved in part of these developments to be a target part of the audience.  I am simply stunned that there were enough people to make this book worth publishing on a larger scale than simply self-publishing, but I suppose that there are a great many philosophy students who are interested in a book like this one.

This particular book is a very short one at less than 100 pages and it can be read quickly by someone who has a general interest and basic knowledge of philosophy.  The book begins with an introduction that explains the purpose of such a brief guide and then moves on to a discussion of Wittgenstein’s life and works, which takes up more than half of the contents of the book and provides the context of the philosopher’s background, his relationship with Bertrand Russell, and some critical discussion on how he dealt with language and logic in his writings.  After that there is an afterword on his legacy and how it somewhat impoverished philosophical studies as a whole, as well as a selection of writings from Wittgenstein and a chronology of significant philosophical dates as well as from the life and era of the philosopher.  The book then ends with suggestions for further reading, which include no books by the philosopher himself but happen to include five books about him, one of which I am in the process of reading now (review forthcoming), as well as an index.

One of the key matters that one has to address in writing about Wittgenstein is the fact that his own disordered personal life and his own rigorously logical attempts at philosophy were frequently so disparate.  And then there is the matter that there were only two books written by the philosopher and published during his lifetime, both of which are highly contradictory in nature, which adds yet more tension and contradiction to the philosopher’s own body of work that someone has to become familiar with if they are to understand what he is saying and whether or not they follow or agree with his logic and his rigorous and high demands for the philosopher.  This book does a good job at providing a little taste of these matters, without covering some of the aspects of Wittgenstein’s life that are perhaps of particular interest, such as the story of his use of a poker with rival Austrian Jewish thinker Karl Popper.  But that is a story that other books have dealt with in much more detail, and so it is perhaps for the best that this book passes over such matters in silence as they are not really a main part of Wittgenstein’s life and work as a whole but are more relevant to that of Popper’s.