On Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein has interested me for quite awhile. He's interested me enough to download his Tractatus to my Kindle for 99 cents, which, of course, makes me an intellectual heavyweight, though I've read scarcely any of it and haven't understood what I have read.

In any event, this recent piece at Philosophy Now is pretty good: Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism. This passage from the beginning is exceptionally interesting:

In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: [of] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as 'the one with the Gospels'. Tolstoy's book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ's life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy's synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.”

Tolstoy's Gospel has interested me enough to download it to my Kindle. Not interested me enough to read it, of course, but downloaded it I have.