Solipsism

Ian Hacking

  • The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Vol. I by David Pears
    Oxford, 202 pp, £19.50, September 1987, ISBN 0 19 824771 0
  • Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
    Quartet, 120 pp, £8.95, February 1987, ISBN 0 7043 2611 6

This is the first half of a survey of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The division into two quite slim volumes does not mean that Professor Pears accepts a received view: that the man had two philosophies. The split is practical. University courses are commonly about either Philosophical Investigations or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1953 and 1921 respectively. Pears’s own lecture courses at Oxford and UCLA (from which this book is drawn) may have followed this pattern, but he encourages continuity. He is not one to say, with Mr Bryan Magee in his recent BBC series The Great Philosophers,[*] that ‘since Wittgenstein repudiated his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later philosophy that is much the more influential, I don’t think we ought to devote too much of our time to the early work.’

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[*] The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, interviews by Bryan Magee. BBC, 352 pp. £14.95, 10 September 1987, 0 563 20583 0.

[†] The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 7. Allen and Unwin, 1984.