©TélécHArGEr. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius PDF par Vintage

Ray Monk is the author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, for which he was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is also the author of Robert Oppenheimer and a two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton

Ray Monk's recently published book, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, fufils this task with admirable clarity. Highly praised by the critics, it has deservedly won a major literary award for young writers. The book is of interest not only because Wittgenstein has had a profound influence on almost all aspects of twentieth century thought, ranging from the philosophy of mathematics through to theology, but also because its author, Ray Monk, has combined his career as a writer with that

Wittgenstein was a recognised genius but he had a scandalously limited interest in reading other philosophers and he just walked into the subject at the deep end without too much preamble. This resulted in some very idiosyncratic ideas - indeed convictions - which Monk attributes to his early reading, which by any standard was at best suspect

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius By Ray Monk. The Free Press: New York, 1990, 646 pp., $29.95. Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books—and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being