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Wittgenstein's Vienna

by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin

Ed Antoine gave me this book for my birthday last year. I've held off reading it with the trepidation that I generally feel towards works of nonfiction; also I was scared that it would not help me understand Wittgenstein, which is something I really want to do. After a week of reading it I think the trepidation was totally unjustified; it's absorbing, interesting reading. Whether it will help with my understanding of LW remains an open question -- although I like the opening premise, that Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is best understood as an ethical work rather than strictly concerned with logic, I have not yet gotten to the part of the book where that premise is to be elucidated upon.

A funny quote about Richard Strauss, which my brother pointed out reads equally well if you imagine the author was talking about Louis Armstrong.