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Donald Peterson on Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Ray Bradley
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University

Extract

This book on the Tractatus is lauded, on the dust jacket, as “the first to make sense of the work as a whole.” Both new and veteran readers of Wittgenstein, we are told, “will benefit from Donald Peterson's exceptionally clear explication and commentary on this crucial work of the twentieth century.” Grand claims, these; and both of them arguably false. To be sure, Peterson writes well; and there are parts of the book—especially those dealing with Wittgenstein's Grundgedanke (chap. 4) and Notation (chap. 7)—from which all will benefit. But the clarity of his writing can beguile neophyte and incautious veteran alike into supposing that the ideas he explicates are Wittgenstein's rather than the author's own.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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References

* Peterson, Donald, Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy: Three Sides of the Mirror (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), v + 204 pp.Google Scholar