Word: wittgenstein
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...room, among others, is a lucky recipient of this 24-hour programming. Even I, a self-avowed philosopher more interested in the Scandinavian excursions of Wittgenstein than the continuing saga of inebriated strangers, find such eavesdropping hard to avoid. My desk and bed are away from the window and my shade is drawn. I've tried playing music, but not at 3 a.m.--as has been said, the walls and windows are thin...
Everett knows his answer is a writerly evasion of an old question: Can timeless truths be conveyed through something as time-ridden as language? Shouldn't, he wonders, great minds have brought us all a little closer to an answer? What about Einstein, say, or Wittgenstein...
Sure enough, these people, or rather Everett's fictional versions of them, begin speaking on his pages. Here is Einstein: "I must try to understand certain irreducible laws of the universe as a transcendent behavior. In these laws, God, the Old One, will be manifest." Here is Wittgenstein: "I have argued that the truths of silence, when spoken, are no longer true...
...believed the opposite), except a generalized homage to revolutionary thought. Art's elimination of semblances to the physical world corresponded vaguely with Einstein's way of seeing time and space, but it really sprung from an atmosphere of change, in which Einstein was yoked with Freud, Marx, Picasso, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Kafka, Duchamp, Kandinsky and anyone else with original and disruptive ideas and an aggressive sense of the new. By that tenuous connection did the discoverer of relativity become a major figure of a world consisting of individuals interpreting the world individually. He was similarly associated with the pluralism...
...intellectual high school senior probably self-selects away from Harvard and toward schools like Swarthmore. Imagine what you would think of a student who showed up as a pre-frosh and asked when the last time you were up late struggling with Wittgenstein's theories of games or Weber's predictions for the future of civilization--not just writing a response paper after skimming half the book, but really considering the challenges posed by these thinkers. Imagine if they asked if the triumphs and catastrophes, big and small, we face every day, even if we rush by and pretend...